Why do Chinese websites look so busy?

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.

Exactly. I go to cnn.com and wonder, "where's all the content?"

I think dearth of content, and overuse of blank space has a lot to do with responsive web design run amok.

You can have great tailored desktop, and mobile experience without pandering to RWD.

My favorite example is Sankei.

Desktop http://www.sankei.com/

Mobile http://www.sankei.com/smp/

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.

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.

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", and the IME was already suggesting the correct answer at "r", so I could have actually typed "nanfangr".

You can still get basically every TV show and movie for free. bilibili.com. (no idea if this will work stateside).