International differences: What cultural differences can we see between Western and Asian websites?
TIP: International user testingRead about how we run international user testing.The majority of website usability guidelines are derived in Europe and North America. It leaves us with one question: are these guidelines still valid in the same way for websites in non-English speaking Asian countries such as China, Japan and Korea?
A lot of companies use globally standardised design templates for websites across different countries and translate them into local languages. However, this approach might not work in all cases as it is possible that the layout, colours, images and content work in one country but not in others.
This is an important yet complicated field because it involves many aspects such as cultural differences, sociology, demography, psychology and so on. There are a lot of discussions around this topic, but there are not many in-depth studies.
In this post, I have identified some obvious differences that we can see between Western and Asian websites especially in terms on how they look and function. To me, this is an important and fundamental issue that we should be aware of before we can study in more detail the rationale behind why one design is preferable than others in different countries, what works in the Western countries but not in Asia and the reasons behind all these differences.
“We are similar, yet different…”
1. Amount of information
One of the most obvious differences between Western and Asian websites is that the latter tends to fill the page with huge amounts of content – images, animated ads, videos and/or text.
This is can be seen from comparing two popular broadcasting videos websites in the western and Mandarin speaking countries: youtube.com and youku.com. Although both websites use the same two-column layout, the Youku homepage seems to have more content than YouTube, which includes ads, movies, videos, members recommendations, member profiles, charts, recommended websites and so on.
2. Page length
Asian websites tend to give the impression that they have a lot of content due the amount of information presented on their homepage. Their pages are often much longer than US/UK websites. Unlike in the UK or the USA where Google is the main search engine, Yahoo! is widely used in countries such as Japan. If we compare Yahoo! UK & Ireland with Yahoo! China, Japan or Korea (as below), we can see that the Asian versions of Yahoo! carry more content and have longer pages, especially Yahoo! China.
Yahoo’s International variations3. Categorizations of content
Content categorization seems to be a big thing in Asia. Examples of this can be seen in areas such as:
(1) The large number of navigation options. For instance, Youku.com shows 19 global navigation items and six additional categories (after clicking the arrow at the end of the navigation bar!). Moreover, horizontal navigation bars are more commonly used in Asian websites than vertical bars.
YouKu.com’s navigation options(2) Content is organised into many different categories. A quick comparison between YouTube and Youku again: the former divides its videos into 3 main sections on its homepage whilst the latter has 10 main categories.
YouTube content categories are:
- Videos being watched now
- Feature videos
- Most popular
Youku content categories are:
- Today’s hottest
- The best originals
- Movies and TVs
- Cars
- Fashion
- Travel, mums and babies (*please don’t ask me why they are in the same category)
- Games and technology
- Sport and music (*again, not sure why they are placed under the same category)
- Members recommendations
- Topical subjects
4. Flash and animated content
ccots.com’s animated page contentFlash and animated content is heavily used in most of the Asian websites. For instance, if we look at ccots.com.cn, a popular travel website in China, it has a long page with a lot of colourful images. Almost 1/3 of its homepage (highlighted in the image to the right) is flash, animated and moving content, including it’s logo, banners, text content, ads and content images!
5. Links and new windows
Asian websites consist of a huge number of links on one page and by clicking the link, it often opens a new window.
Sina.com (an online media and entertainment website that provides online entertainment and infotainment for global Chinese community) and mop.com (for live chat, news, games, business, entertainment and online radio station) are two of the most popular websites in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other Mandarin speaking countries. There are approximately 313 links which open new window on sina.com.tw homepage and 517 for mop.com homepage.
6. Colours, contextual images and icons
Generally, Asian websites appear to be more colourful and use a lot of colour combinations, images and icons. Cute icons and contextual images are also commonly used.
BBC China’s news navigationFor example, the Chinese version of BBC news website not only uses more darker and brighter colours on its section highlights, fonts and links than news.bbc.co.uk, each of the section headings have their own contextual image (even though you can hardly see the full picture of it).
7. Advertisements
Different types of ads can often be found in Asian websites, such as skyscraper ads and AdSense, and they are normally located in many places on the page.
For example, adverts on the article page of timesonline.co.uk are placed mostly on the right column of the page and sometimes at the very bottom of the page (e.g. Google AdSense). When we look at the article page of sinchew-i.com (one of the most widely circulated Chinese language online news portals in South East Asia), its adverts appear almost everywhere on the page – top, right and bottom of the page, and even within its content.
What do these differences tell us
These are only a taster of the differences, and the list can go on and on. Although we can see many apparent common characteristics among the Asian websites, there is no evidence to show if these features are liked and preferred by Asian online communities. More studies are needed to find out what is driving these differences so we can design websites that are liked, and match the needs of local users.
I am hoping some of these issues will become more apparent and clearer after my trip to China at the end of this month studying (hotel) websites usability with locals.
Talk to us because …
cxpartners have lots of international experience we can share with you, from the US and Europe to across Asia in China and Japan. Find out more about our international user testing or contact us on +44(0)117 946 3930, or via info@cxpartners.co.uk.
About the author
Chui Chui has done a lot of work with accessibility and written several papers on the subject. She is great at making really complex problems simple. Chui Chui loves food, and is very fond of sugared squid! Email Chui Chui, or call +44 (0)117 946 3930
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Good reading and agree more research needs to be done to understand why some sites are designed in this way. Is it:
* Because people like it?
* Designers are given direction from non designers?
* Because standards in China have emerged this way?
* More?
We have heard that users in China do not like lots of links and lean towards simplicity, but there is also some dependency on the type of site we are talking about i.e. would people be disappointed if a information rich entity did not reveal this through their web site? e.g. a University in China
rgds, Dan
Interesting topic. Never thought that there will be differences between the both. Keep us updated wth more interesting topics.
I’m from China and all of your findings are right. But that is because those websites don’t have good design decisions and we like to change this situation but it’s hard cause people are used to it now.