Designing for Non-Native Users: Lessons from Multilingual Apps

When we built our own platform supporting English, German, and Hindi, we faced unexpected UX challenges. Text expansion between languages broke layouts. Date and number formats confused users. Cultural metaphors did not translate. This post covers our key learnings around text expansion allowances, RTL support readiness, cultural conventions in UI patterns, and the i18n tooling we chose for a Laravel + React stack.