
Why do Chinese websites look so busy? - cstuder
https://econsultancy.com/blog/67466-why-do-chinese-websites-look-so-busy
======
hunvreus
I doubt the author has a first hand experience with the Chinese market:

\- Typing Chinese with a keyboard isn't hard... at all. Pinyin input is about
as straightforward and fast as typing in English.

\- Internet in China isn't slow. That is as long as you're visiting sites that
are hosted in China, which most people in China do. I used to be surprised
actually at how good video streaming was when I first arrived in China (back
when any film or TV show ever created could be watched for free).

There are two main reasons for the look of Chinese websites:

1\. Chinese visitors have widely different expectations and a radically
different culture. You can't expect recent trends in Web development to just
spread in exactly the same way there. Even then, you can see simple UI and
attention to UX are becoming more and more common (e.g. Xiaomi).

2\. Search is hard to get right. Because of the way the Chinese language is
structured, it is surprisingly harder than with Western languages to get
right. A simple Porter stemmer gets you pretty far with English. It is an
order of magnitude harder to match this level with the Chinese language. This
forged behaviors among Internet users, who expect to browse and explore rather
than search.

~~~
fengwick3
Interesting points, but minor correction here. Typing Chinese efficiently has
to do with the input method. Using pinyin as you suggest is actually
hopelessly slow as you would have to first recall the precise pronunciation of
the word (the -n vs -ng for example), type the pinyin, then scroll through the
(normally) massive list of words. Of course, things like fuzzy pinyin and
context aware suggestions help, but adopting an input method based on the
character radical composition or handwriting recognition is much faster.

~~~
mikeash
I've never seen a Chinese person using handwriting input, even though it's
widely available on smartphones. They all use pinyin input because it's
easiest and fastest.

~~~
LiweiZ
Handwriting is widely used by 50+ yo people in China. The pinyin system was
not taught when they were young.

~~~
mkristian
I can confirm. My girlfriends father needed a new phone and he needed a phone
with character recognition.

I dont recall seeing any of my friends or colleagues here using this feature.

------
xiaoma
I lived in Taiwan for the largest portion of my adults life and also spent
some time in Beijing working at a tech start-up (as hire #5). It's absolutely
maddening seeing people who clearly have so little understanding of China or
Chinese get so much attention when they write something like this.

Chinese does have separators and it's _not_ difficult to use a keyboard, even
in places like like Taiwan that don't use Pinyin. Despite having grown up
speaking English, my typing speed using zhuyin input is not that different
from my typing speed in English. My typing speed in pinyin is kind of slow
(maybe 50-65% of my English typing speed) but only because it's not the system
I'm used to.

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masterkrang
This article misses the point completely, that these Chinese sites are simply
modeled after 90s and 2000s web sites. Go and look at way back machine and see
the resemblance. This is coming from a UX/UI designer and developer who has
lived in both countries and speaks both languages. To say that Chinese
characters are inherently conducive to cluttering the page is straight up just
a joke, it's actually the opposite. Chinese characters take up less space.

~~~
withdavidli
Most chinese news sites looks like versions of Yahoo to me. My thought is that
they replicate the western equivalent of their site (Yahoo, Google, Youtube)
and then move on. Not willing to put more resources in redesigning later.

------
wodenokoto
Doesn't anyone know a Chinese/Japanese webdesigner? This question gets asked a
lot and it is always answered by westerners who are second guessing.

Where are the design theories from the east? What is the "3 click" rule for
eastern websites? What are eastern design students told instead of "use plenty
of white space" and "keep it simple and focused"?

~~~
seanmcdirmid
My wife does some web design, much of it is just an overly Confucian culture
where some idiot with seniority but no experience or taste gets to make the
decisions and those who know better don't get to do input. It really is just a
dysfunctional working environment.

~~~
rangibaby
This all the way. Japanese are fond of minimal design, but everyone in the
chain of command needs to have an Opinion(tm), with the end result turning
into a safe, boring mess.

------
vanilla-almond
The last screenshot in that article is from a UK website called Lings Cars
(warning: audio plays automatically when you visit the website):
[http://www.lingscars.com/](http://www.lingscars.com/)

It's owned by Ling Valetine who made an appearance in a British reality TV
show called Dragon's Den where she pitched a business idea to investors (the
US equivalent is Shark Tank).

The website seems to break all the usability rules we're accustomed to in the
US and Europe, but that's definitely helped the site go viral:

[http://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/marketing/pr/pr-
opportunitie...](http://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/marketing/pr/pr-
opportunities/how-i-use-publicity-stunts-to-promote-my-online-car-leasing-
business)

------
VeejayRampay
Why are western websites so empty?

~~~
Animats
Good point. The current trend in web site design is You Will Begin Our
Onboarding Process Now Or Else. YC companies are notable for this, with sites
with little info and a huge "Sign up" box. (Often, this is because the
product/service isn't shipping yet, so they're just building a mailing list.)

~~~
userbinator
Even non-YC companies, those long-established and with actual product, are
following this trend, and I find it quite unpleasant too. When I come across a
sparse page with one or two huge images and almost no text, I think to myself
"where's all the content?" The whole "mobile first" movement is somewhat
responsible too, popularising HUGE buttons and text that would be OK on a
small smartphone or tablet screen but ridiculously awkward to use on a larger
display.

------
KennyCason
> "One is that it is difficult to type Chinese characters on an alphabet-based
> keyboard, so instead of using search they prefer to click links."

For what it's worth, Chinese typically do the type using the alphabet ->
character input methods (not the hand-drawn). These methods typically are
smart about knowing which characters to select, especially when you type long
strings of text and you usually only have to click the space button to convert
them. It really isn't a huge and I feel almost zero slowdown when typing in
Chinese. In fact, I feel like it's less typing than in English because of how
verbose it is.

------
nicolax
I grew up and lived in China until grad school, and now work as a designer in
the Valley. The trends this article identified are largely true, but the
speculations are not accurate or to the point, as other comments have pointed
out.

I've been wondering about this phenomenon too, and here are some hypotheses:
\- As someone who's fluent in both languages, I find Chinese text much more
skimmable than English. Chinese is a compact language, and you make sense of
it by recognizing the shape of characters, which is much easier than
recognizing long combinations of letters. It's not too bad to skim a wall of
Chinese text to find the information you want. Though this could be biased by
the fact that Chinese is my native language.

\- Cities in China, as well as Japan, are densely populated. If you walk on
the streets, all kinds of visual stimuli come at you: flashing ads, colorful
banners, a lot of people in various styles etc. It seems we grow up being used
to dense visuals, compared to say, Americans who grew up in the spread-out
suburbs.

\- Most people in China are not design-minded. The most popular post on Zhihu
(Chinese equivalent of Quora) in 2015 discusses the general design and
aesthetics level in China, why our streets are so ugly with all the poorly-
designed banners etc. We don’t have a tradition of recognizing the importance
of design, or developing a sense of good design. Japan, on the contrary, has a
much longer tradition on that. Therefore, people are much more likely to live
with poor web designs, and companies are not incentivized to redesign.

------
joeguilmette
I read a few years ago that Tripadvisor (IIRC) was launching in Japan. They
basically took the US version of the site and translated it. In testing,
Japanese users had a high bounce rate and distrusted the site because it
lacked information - too much white space.

They redesigned it to make it more dense and less 'clean and elegant' and
Japanese users trusted and used the site much more heavily. I looked, but
can't find the link to this article.

Perhaps Asian designers design sites like this because Asian users are turned
on to them the same as we are to simple and focused sites.

------
userbinator
One point that doesn't seem to have been brought up is that Asian cultures are
"high context" while Western ones are "low context"; see this article for a
detailed explanation:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-_and_low-
context_cultures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-_and_low-
context_cultures)

A rough summarisation could be that Asians are quite information-hungry,
whereas Westerners are more information-averse.

------
Rodeoclash
Japanese websites tend to suffer from "busyness" as well, that might rule out
the page speed section they talked about.

------
gozur88
I asked the same question of a Japanese web developer friend a decade ago,
since Japanese sites (at least, back then) were very similar. The answer he
gave made sense.

He said the reason Japanese websites were so busy was the greater percentage
of mobile-only customers, many of whom weren't using smartphones. You could go
to a website on your cheap "feature phone" and still comfortably navigate a
site that was mostly a sea of links, while the sort of site you see more
commonly in the West requires navigating too many pages.

Smart phone penetration in China is still around 50%, so I wouldn't be
surprised if the same logic applies.

EDIT: He also said in Japan programmers have about the same social status as
the guy on the loading dock, so many of the corporate sites were programmed by
fresh-out-of-college guys who would be passing that task off to someone else
as soon as possible. Not sure if the same applies in China.

~~~
shalmanese
Smartphone penetration is up to 73% by now:
[http://www.nielsen.com/cn/en/press-room/2015/Nielsen-
Chinese...](http://www.nielsen.com/cn/en/press-room/2015/Nielsen-Chinese-
Smartphone-Market-Now-Driven-by-Upgrading-EN.html) and is above 85% in urban
areas.

The article seems to take an American bias with this by looking only at
desktop websites. China primarily consumes the internet through mobile apps
and top tier mobile apps (Wechat, Baidu Maps, Didi Kuadi, Dianping, Ele.me)
appear to be designed no more or less busy than comparable Western ones.

~~~
gozur88
Odd. This one says 50.9%. That's quite a large difference.

[http://www.statista.com/statistics/257045/smartphone-user-
pe...](http://www.statista.com/statistics/257045/smartphone-user-penetration-
in-china/)

~~~
contingencies
My current estimate (living here, and not just in urban locations, for 15
years) is >95% of adults (10-45) in urban areas, >75% rural.

But the busy design thing far predates the smartphone, so that theory is moot
in my mind. I concur with krang's comment: "Chinese sites are simply modeled
after 90s and 2000s web sites". This does not imply it's not changing though
.. smart TV and mobile apps look the same as you'd expect in the west.

------
jpatokal
Some interesting parallels here to Japanese web design, which is also
traditionally notoriously dense and link-heavy:

[https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-
differe...](https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/)

------
LiweiZ
Many principles in visual design are not followed very well in China. There is
little room for those possibilities derived from the principles to be
discussed here. So so-called culture or related things are not excuses for
them.

One force that drives the differences between western way and current Chinese
way is the degree of diversity in the internet business world. In China, one-
stop-shop is the mainstream mind among participants. App style is not the
leading force there. This is only a hint.

Sorry to just mention some unclear points. I'm quite busy on other things atm.
Just my 2 cents.

[edit]: my terrible grammar

------
frozenport
Why is `Jeff Rajeck` an expert on this?

------
galago
I would love to see this type of analysis applied to other non-Latin writing
systems. Also interesting would be a Chinese/Japanese comparison given that
Japanese is a hybrid system.

~~~
Zakiazigazi
In my experience Japanese site are way more cluttered than Chinese sites. Even
with the large number of links and pictures Chinese sites look more organized
and designed where Japanese sites are just a plain mess. My theory is that
Japanese writing relies on the comparatively simple hiragana for "grammar"
(not to go too deep into the topic) in addition to the complex chinese
characters. As such it gives the text a kind of weird rhythm without which it
is pretty difficult for them to read text (only presenting hiragana loses the
meaning while only presenting kanji would be very hard to skim) As a result
even when somewhat deliberately designed, the end result seems like a jumbled
mess of characters with varying contrast randomly flowing together.
Additionally words that would for example appear in a menu are of either
writing system and as a result of varying length, thus difficult to align.

Combine this with the sofware industry here being absolutely driven by
incompetence ("as long as you shut up and work hard [= long hours] you are a
good employee") in most places you get no willingness to risk changing the
status quo that is stuck in the late 90's.

Compared to that Chinese sites look pretty refined to me, with the same sort
of characters of usually very similar length and while there is no whitespace
the contrast between characters is much less varied and looks much more
pleasant in my opinion. I can see contemporary patterns are also used a lot
more too which suggest China in general is more aware of and willing to
incorporate the latest trends. Taobao vs Rakuten might be a good example.
Yahoo US vs CN vs JP (the latter run completely by Yahoo Japan and has nothing
to do with actual Yahoo anymore) is another.

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marak830
Its the same i Japan print adverts/sites.

(In the case of japanese): they do use search, but less and less as so many of
the sites are image based.

I haveno idea how my wife reads the adverts, but after a few years in Japan im
finding it easier, my eyes just gravitate to the pictures.

As for rules for web design, pack as much in seems to be the rule. I have
emailed a mate over here who does web work, ill edit when he gets back to me.

------
rabboRubble
Take any book that is published in English and Japanese or Chinese and you
will note that the book is about 1/3rd the size of the English original. Those
languages are denser than English or any European language for that matter.

Native readers of those languages are accustomed to seeing more information in
a page space. So design follows their tolerance.

------
jiyinyiyong
I thought about a potential reason that maybe Chinese Online Community is
expanding too fast and the designer and user tastes are not catching up. We
have people leaving in small countries that is fast from the large cities on
the east. People like my parent are not catching up so fast.

------
freewizard
This seems to be one possible reason that Chinese users want larger iPhones I
suppose.

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dennyabraham
the vast difference between the chinese system of writing and alphabets i'm
used to brings to mind a question: is there a notion of linear ordering of
chinese characters? are all chinese characters enumerated (to the layperson, i
understand that they'd have to be numbered to be encoded)?

~~~
mook
There are a few possibilities; dictionaries usually go by (number of strokes
in the radical) + (number of strokes remaining). Because there are too many
characters, there's usually a phonetic-based system involved too (Pinyin,
Zhuyin, Kana, and Hangul); those have internal sorting, and that can be used
too.

This is all separate from, say, Unicode code point ordering.

