Chinese sites are so Chinese
Have you ever visited Chinese websites? If the owners did not take care of adapting to the Western “eye”, then most likely they will seem to you a heap of hieroglyphs, flashy pictures and bright banners. However, before joking about the web design of the 2000s, it’s worth understanding how the user’s behavior and the cultural characteristics of the country had an impact on the design of sites.
In this article, we’ll break down the most salient features of Chinese web design, touch on local approaches to UX, and even compare European and Chinese versions of various online resources.
Disclaimer. None of the following should be taken as a stone in the garden of Chinese design and its creators. Everything that will be discussed in the article is simply unusual for a European.
Cultural features of China, which are reflected in the design
Chinese culture, to put it mildly, is different from European. In this article, we are interested in two specific phenomena.
Collectivism
In China, the collectivist orientation of society dominates. This means that for the inhabitants of the country it is extremely important how they are perceived by others: friends, neighbors, the consignment.
In a collectivist culture, the key unit is not the individual, but the group. That is why Chinese users are so active in chats, leaving reviews and participating in online communities.
“The Chinese are so passionate about their online communities that a Westerner cannot even imagine it – until he sees it firsthand. Chinese culture… is more group oriented, while people in the West tend to be individualistic. For the typical member of the Chinese online community, it means more than just an online forum or chat room. It becomes part of his being.”
— Porter Erisman, Six Billion Shoppers
Traditions and superstitions
Ancient Chinese traditions are deeply woven into the modern culture of the country. For example, attention is still paid to the meanings of colors.
And in China they love games, even gambling, even if they are illegal since the middle of the last century. There is even a saying in Chinese: “If you don’t gamble, you don’t know how lucky you are.”
Differences of Chinese sites
Let’s see how Chinese and Western sites differ.
Free space
China ❯
It may seem that Chinese sites have certain … difficulties with white space. The Chinese pay a lot of attention to how they will be perceived by society, so on their websites they often trying to accommodate as much information as possible to immediately show the visitor your advantages, opportunities and values.
Here, for example, are a couple of carousel elements from the Chinese Toyota website:
“Western designers accept as a dogma the fact that the usability of a site is directly related to minimalism in design, which blocks noise and leads the user to a purchase. They are shocked that Chinese sites are so saturated with bright colors, catchy animations, that their design seems a little messy.
I think the whole point is that the daily life of a typical web user in Shanghai is so different from life, say, in Sweden, that it directly affects the construction of online interfaces. China is accustomed to brisk trade. And for a Swedish villager, it can take an hour of driving along a quiet country road before he gets to the store.»
— Porter Erisman, Six Billion Shoppers
West ❯
Free space is an independent element of the web design of Western resources. And not only in terms of aesthetics: it helps to set the right accents and direct the user along the right path.
Text
China ❯
It may seem that sites are literally overloaded with text. Like butter on a sandwich, it was smeared evenly across every web page. It’s all about the device of the Chinese language. There are no spaces between words, there is no division into lowercase and uppercase letters. Well, why the Chinese are trying to give the user a lot of information at once, you already know.
West ❯
The web design we are used to is focused on visual rather than textual content. The text remains where it is indispensable, the rest is served with the help of video and pictures.
Font
China ❯
Chinese has tens of thousands of characters. To create a professional font in Chinese, 20-30 thousand characters will have to be processed, taking into account Latin letters and punctuation marks. Can you imagine how much effort and time it takes to create even one font?
Do not forget about weight. Until recently, the @font-face rule for Chinese-language sites was de facto not applied: each time separately loading a font that weighs 3-7 megabytes, or even more is a problem. And extremely experimental technologies for rendering Chinese non-standard web fonts like Youziku and Justfont have appeared not so long ago.
That is why most sites use one font in one or two sizes, and the text is often typeset simply with pictures, as, for example, here:
West ❯
The font is an integral part of branding and corporate identity. Companies develop their own fonts and spend a lot of time trying to approve scripts and rules for their use. The size of the text directly indicates the role it plays on the page.
And thanks to the simplicity of tracing symbols, today we have a huge number of fonts for a wide variety of tasks and situations.
Colors
China ❯
Due to the amount of content and the lack of free space, website designers rely on bright color accents. They help direct users to important sections of the site or draw their attention to specific elements such as banners or buttons. At the same time, the choice of colors is often determined by their traditional meanings for China. For example, red symbolizes positive, happiness, devotion, fiery, sensuality. Yellow and orange are also popular.
West ❯
In the west, designers take a minimalist approach to using a color palette. If the site is corporate, it usually uses the corporate colors of the company. Often, light tones and shades predominate – they create a feeling of “air” and block visual noise.
What else in China is not like ours?
Gamification
Game mechanics and elements are found not only in Chinese social networks, but also on e-com sites. The Chinese love to play games. Especially on a smartphone. There are far more gamers who play simple mobile games than anyone else. And the Chinese promo games are very similar to the usual ones. Game mechanics do not repel, but rather attract buyers.
One of the most prominent examples is Alipay, an online payment platform. In August 2016, the company released Ant Forest, a mini-game in which you had to grow virtual trees right on the Alipay app.
By switching from car to public transportation or walking, buying e-tickets instead of paper tickets, and making payments through Alipay, users received “green energy” and used it to grow virtual trees, which then turned into real ones – they were planted in China’s arid regions. Ant Forest became UNEP champion in 2019 and 600 million users by 2021 “planted” about 326 million trees.
mobile first
Even though “mobile first” is a global trend in web design and e-com, there is only one truly mobile country in the world and that is China. As of the end of 2020, 99.7% of the total number of users (about 986 million) went out on the Internet using mobile phones.
In China, a mobile device is the main way to access the Internet and make purchases. According to China UnionPay’s 2021 report, residents of China’s largest cities make about 80% of their monthly purchases (that is, they spend approximately 5,000 yuan) using mobile payments.
superapps
Superapp is a multifunctional mobile application that provides access to many services and products at once. In general, Mark Lazaridis, the founder of Blackberry, is called the author of this term – this is how he called a closed ecosystem consisting of many applications. However, it became popular because of the Chinese WeChat.
With it, you can not only exchange messages, but also read the news, order a taxi or food delivery, buy movie tickets, pay for purchases and utilities, play games and much, much more. Although, superapps are already appearing with us – for example, VKontakte and Yandex Go.
Even in China, digital domains are common. Firstly, they are easier to perceive than alien Latin. And secondly, the Chinese use numbers to convey words. For example, the Alibaba website is located at 1688.com, and all because when read in Chinese, these numbers are consonant with the name of the site. They also love GIFs and animated banners (which, by the way, explains why Flash has been used in China for so long), but that’s a completely different story.
