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.
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.
> "Using pinyin as you suggest is actually hopelessly slow"
Everyone I've encountered in China seems to do it just fine. It is only hopelessly slow if you type one character at a time.
> "adopting an input method based on the character radical composition or handwriting recognition is much faster"
What character radical input method are you talking about? I can't imagine any input method using radical composition being faster, it would be comparable to using Latin roots to type out English words; there are just too many to be practical. You can actually do this on Pleco, but it takes forever, even longer than typing one character at a time in pinyin.
Handwriting could work assuming you can handwrite Chinese quickly (I would be deathly slow as I can't read a typical handwritten cursive note, much less write one). I think handwriting recognition is already pretty good, people just use pinyin because it's the easiest.
The wubi input method (五笔字形) uses radical composition or something like it -- keys represent different (semi-arbitrary) character portions, and you "build" characters by choosing the portions, and adding other keys that indicate the overall shape of the character. You can get nearly any character out there in four keys, usually much less, and it also does phrase input. It's much harder to learn, obviously, but a practiced wubi typist is supposed to be able to go faster than pinyin.
Over the years I've tried to teach myself, and I can sort of do it, but I never got fast enough to really switch away from pinyin.
Pinyin is just fine (or zhuyin in my case), but the parent is right about one thing. Structure based inputs like Cangjie and Wubi are really fast. Fewer strokes per character and zero need to select from a list mean more speed.
From what I've seen, it is mostly Southerners (南方人) or Western people taught by Southerners who have trouble with distinguishing between endings such as -n and -ng.
Also, pinyin IMEs can be fairly fast even with only minimal practice as the matching is done at the word level (and possibly some IMEs look at preceeding characters) rather than at the character level. For example, when entering 南方人, my tying sequence was "nanfangren<space>", and the IME was already suggesting the correct answer at "r", so I could have actually typed "nanfangr<space>".
There are also a lot of phrases that can be typed with just the first letter from each word, eg typing "bth" gives "不太好", "zmy" gives "怎么样", and there are endless more combinations like this.
I can't remember seeing anybody using anything but pinyin input, foreigners and locals alike. You can compose entire sentences and let the software pick the correct hanzi in bulk.
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.
I write on my iPhone and use pinyin on my Linux, Mac and Windows computers. I'd like to write Cantonese and Japanese too, but I don't do that enough to bother finding the relevant input software. Using a hiragana table is much slower for me than writing the characters using my index finger.
It is useful when you are trying to type a character that you cannot quite pronounce/pronounce erroneously. It happens quite often even with Chinese people. With this input you can simply imitate the strokes.
> first recall the precise pronunciation of the word (the -n vs -ng for example)
I am a foreigner living in China and this was never an issue for me, so I doubt the native people here find that a problem.
I rarely see any Chinese people use the handwriting character recognition on their phones. I use it sometimes just for practice, but just writing pinyin is much faster.
I could imagine skip[0] being quite efficient. I doubt any native speaker would use it, though. I have used multiple radical lookup systems before, and they are not in any way efficient. I don't speak Chinese, but I do a fair bit of writing in Japanese and phonetic input is very, very quick (especially with context sensitive completion).
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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/
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:
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.)
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.
What really pisses me off is when they keep doing this after they have a real product and real users. Signing up is easy, but if you're already a user then screw you, find the little login link in the corner.
There's no weird 6 different media query breakpoints. (like Smashing Magazine site). It has one fixed width layout for desktop, chalk full of descriptive text links, and just the right amount of photos.
Their mobile site is wonderful. Images are all lazy loaded.
And you know what the best part is?
Do "View Source" in either version. Look how clean and flat their markups are even with ad affiliate javascript code. There's more content than markups.
Reuters and nytimes are decent, because they have a lot of text content on home page. But do "View Source" and their lack of code discipline and brevity shows compared to sankei. There's far more html code than actual content.
Nothing worse than a website that's a cluttered mess. I'm no designer but I think a minimalist design with negative (empty) space gives things a more modern, neat and clean look and makes the content easier to read/see (that's why I'm there in the 1st place).
The same reasons the article lays out - that the underlying aspects of the written language drives the difference. Which I thought was really interesting as I'd never really considered them.
The article does a poor job differentiating between different types of "clutter". For example, while a single continuous block of chinese text will look more dense than latin script for the reasons outlined, it does not explain why chinese websites seem to lay out their blocks differently.
Anecdotally, chinese webpages seems to be laid out far more like newspapers than latin script equivalents.
It seems much easier to line break CJK (pay a bit of attention near punctuation, otherwise breaking anywhere would do a decent job). Compared to Latin-based languages, where hyphenation would be involved, which means understanding the actual language.
Try forcing comments in this thread into 20em width, for example.
> "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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Japanese do have other "alphabets" they use along with Chinese characters, but overall the writing works basically the same way (no spaces, no capitals, etc.). Whether it's cultural or linguistic I don't know, but Japanese websites look very similar to the Chinese examples here.
(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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
- 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.