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Why do Chinese websites look so busy?

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Re: Why do Chinese websites look so busy?

#51

Post by gozur88 »

shalmanese wrote: post #50
gozur88 wrote: post #31

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…

Smartphone penetration is up to 73% by now: http://www.nielsen.com/cn/en/press-room/2015/Nielsen-Chinese... 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 compara…

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

http://www.statista.com/statistics/257045/smartphone-user-pe...

Re: Why do Chinese websites look so busy?

#52

Post by yaowenjiaozi »

mikeash wrote: post #33
fengwick3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 adopt…

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.

Re: Why do Chinese websites look so busy?

#53

Post by xiaoma »

andrezsanchez wrote: post #36
fengwick3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 adopt…

> "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 bei…

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.

Re: Why do Chinese websites look so busy?

#54

Post by contingencies »

gozur88 wrote: post #51
shalmanese wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smartphone penetration is up to 73% by now: http://www.nielsen.com/cn/en/press-room/2015/Nielsen-Chinese... 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 compara…

Odd. This one says 50.9%. That's quite a large difference. http://www.statista.com/statistics/257045/smartphone-user-pe...

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.

Re: Why do Chinese websites look so busy?

#55

Post by 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.

Re: Why do Chinese websites look so busy?

#56

Post by harmonicon »

mikeash wrote: post #33
fengwick3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 adopt…

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.

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.

Re: Why do Chinese websites look so busy?

#57

Post by mikeash »

harmonicon wrote: post #56
mikeash wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

That's definitely true. But for average day-to-day text input, people seem to vastly prefer the "hopelessly slow" pinyin method.

Re: Why do Chinese websites look so busy?

#58

Post by 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.

Re: Why do Chinese websites look so busy?

#59

Post by shalmanese »

gozur88 wrote: post #51
shalmanese wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smartphone penetration is up to 73% by now: http://www.nielsen.com/cn/en/press-room/2015/Nielsen-Chinese... 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 compara…

Odd. This one says 50.9%. That's quite a large difference. http://www.statista.com/statistics/257045/smartphone-user-pe...

The site estimated growth would be just 5% over 2 years whereas it was really 33%.
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