Jin, you are spot on about Chinese and Western taste in web design. People I have spoken to in China and my experience of working on the web in Shanghai back in 2000 was that if pages didn’t have animated gifs, were busy and packed with information then they were not considered to do the job. My understanding is also that in the East people prefer to scroll rather than click which is not necessarily what people want to do in the West.

I think a good example of the differences in approaches can be seen in the differences between Yahoo! UK http://uk.yahoo.com/ and Yahoo! China http://cn.yahoo.com/.

Jin, I also can’t wait to read your artical. I’d love to link to it from WaSP so by all means ping me at henny at iheni dot com.

Another thing. Say I was a large company with a website that would have to be used in both China and Australia, I would try to avoid just having one website that is repurposed for language alone. At that scale, with the money available, two separate websites in my opinion would be far more effective. Content needs to be specific to the audience and culture, as does design. As you point out by the Chinese example, minimilism isn’t the Chinese expectation. I know if the company was Chinese and their website that I went to deal with was a translation only I’d not relate to it as well.

Look forward to reading your article Jin.

Being a Chinese native, I can reflect quite a bit on this topic.

Web design in general(technology, UI, Accessibility, Standards etc) are indeed different there. Technology Standard(IE6) aside, much of what you see is driven by cultural influence.

I’ve been working on an article draft on a similar topic. Here’s one of points I plan to touch up on: Western designers and audiences are becoming more appreciate for simple, elegant and clean designs. Chinese don’t think that way. To them, more is more. The reason behind it, is best described by Don Norman’s article last year titled “Simplicity is Highly Overrated”

http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly.html

His article was quite controversial at the time, but I think I was one of few who actually agreed with him. Culture plays a huge role in design. I believe designers will be more keen to it as the web bring us closer.

Apologies Henny, it probably says a lot for my natural attention span. I’ve fixed the Henry references in the post.

One of the frustrating things about the internationalisation / localisation issue that hits me (because this is one of my personal bugbears) is that everyone cops out in the first sentence of any conversation saying it either doesn’t relate to their audience or is too expensive to implement. But, regardless, we live in a globalised world now and the monoculture we match to this mental model doesn’t fit with what we see in the street anymore.

I’m particularly disappointed in government in this aspect. Here, at least, they only want to know about articulate western educated professionals and everything else falls right off the radar (just described their managers, no?).

So it’s kind of funny that we’re all sitting on these cultural (valuable) resources and our own monoculture mental mismodelling blinds us to it.

Many thanks for further pushing the article about China and spotlighting the issues in a wider context – or should I say a narrower one – namely our own.

What you say is absolutely right and we should be thinking about cultural differences within our own countries and working with people to better understand internationalization and localization.

+1 on everything you say. Small steps amount to big ones and it’s about time that localisation and cultural differences on the web had a bit more discussion attached it it.

Cheers, Henny

BTW It’s Henny with an ‘n’ and I’m not actually a bloke. Strange name I know