Key differences between designing for China and the West
What comes first to your mind when you think of China? The food? The population? The rising market? Although the first two things are quite interesting, the last one is probably the most compelling of all, especially from a business perspective. The potential of the Chinese market is rising and attracting everyone’s attention. In this article, you will learn about the differences in UX design between China and the West (and possible explanations).
Note that this article mainly focuses on consumer products and services rather than enterprise solutions. But in the end, the same people in China will experience both designs and hence respond rather similarly. Nevertheless, I encourage you to follow the human-centered design process to find out what each respective situation requires.
I remember my first day in Germany ten years ago and how amazed I was by the emptiness and quietness of the place. The streets are narrow but occupied by even fewer people:
Before, I studied at a university in Shanghai and was more used to this:
Later I realized that the difference between China and Germany goes way beyond the appearances of the streets. Take the Starbucks app as an example. Its German and Chinese interfaces look like this (left: German, right: Chinese):
In comparison to Starbucks Germany, Starbucks China looks more colorful and bold. It also has less white space and more visual details. It almost reminds me of the contrast between streets in China and Germany. Can we simply conclude that the Chinese are more attracted to bold and flashy design? Well, it is more complicated than that.
Logogrammatic vs. phonetic
Let’s start by analyzing the written language itself. Phonetic languages, like English and other Latin-based languages, use an alphabet. The letters of the alphabet are combined to form words. Therefore, varying in length. However, Chinese is logogrammatic. This means that it is based on written characters. Chinese characters are rectangular and consist of strokes, which originally resemble the appearance of the subject. The number of strokes can vary from one to more than one hundred, while the character remains the same size. In a word, the visual appearance of written Chinese is denser and appears more complex. An example: the Chinese character “搜”, meaning “search” with six letters in English, takes less space on the screen but contains 12 strokes (see below):
The characteristics of Chinese provide designers with more layout options but also some challenges. More cards and labels can be placed within a screen in Chinese without looking messy. English usually requires much more space to present the same amount of information. Meanwhile, users tend to prefer selecting directly from the homepage rather than navigating through a complex menu to find their goal. This results in the informative homepage of Starbucks China.
Typing and scanning chinese
Additionally, older people often find it difficult to type Chinese. There are two ways to type Chinese. The more popular and simpler way is according to its standard pronunciation. However, many older people speak a local dialect rather than Mandarin (standard Chinese), which makes it difficult for them to spell words correctly. Needless to say that one pronunciation usually equals more than tens of logogrammatic characters (see below). This all makes typing the correct character on a small screen challenging for the elderly. For apps targeting a broad market, it is important to cater to their needs as well. Meanwhile, due to the complexity of the language, it’s sometimes difficult for younger people to type error-free as well. This results in designs often listing all options and actions in the interfaces for users to choose from. They also often provide alternative input methods such as voice recognition.
As mentioned above, Chinese is based on characters in a rectangular shape. Think of them as little icons. This means people tend to perceive the language as a whole rather than its individual components. Like icons, characters are lacking variants, such as italic, capitalization, and letter spacing. Lacking variants challenges designers to think more creatively when they layout texts. It is also said that for Chinese native speakers, our brains are trained to scan through complex characters efficiently. An interface may appear chaotic and overcrowded to a non-native speaker, but different to a Chinese.
A different design history
It was also pointed out by some design historians that, unlike Europe, China did not go through the second industrial revolution and the Bauhaus period. There is also a shorter history of graphic design in China. It started as a secondary profession for many artists and was hence inspired by traditional Chinese arts. Decades after the industrial revolution took place, its influence arrived in China. This required advertising for many imported goods. Flyers from this period tend to combine traditional Chinese drawing techniques with Western photographic art (see below):
In general, people are more used to decorative design and appreciate the visual details. Many global companies change the looks of their products to a more lively and bold version because according to on-site tests, local people respond to them better. Only translating the labels and texts can result in a rather dull and less appealing product.
A different economy type
As an evolving country, China has very wealthy metropolises such as Shanghai, Shenzhen, Beijing, etc. But many areas in China are still under development. The street of Shanghai may appear overwhelming. They symbolize life, urbanity, and wealth, which are still rather new and upcoming in China.
It’s the same for the visual design of digital products as well. Compared to European countries, Chinese are more tolerant and able to navigate through the “bold and loud” layers of interfaces, as we already navigate through the streets in our offline daily lives. Tuning up a visual detail and making it an eye-catcher may increase the success rate of a design for the mainstream consumer market.
Cultural differences and technology leapfrog
Due to globalization and the rapid growth of the economy, people’s taste — especially of the younger generation — has become more international and aligned with design trends from the West, which are set by big companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. However, the technology leapfrog, fired by technology giants such as Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and ByteDance, makes technology cheap and available to the average consumers in China. Therefore, people in China have developed their own preferences and taste, from which the West has been more or less separated.
Japan also has a logogrammatic language and its culture has many similarities to its East Asian neighbor China. It is also at a rather equivalent stage. As said by Kenya Hara, author of “designing design”, “Japanese design is forever Japanese design. We are not keen to be a part of globalization, and over-simplistic popularization is something we must try to avoid.”
To illustrate the drastic difference in aesthetic preferences between China and the West, see the artwork by Yang Liu below. In this example, white instead of tanned skin is seen as beautiful in most East Asian eyes:
Different mindset towards simplicity
Besides aesthetic preferences, the Chinese mainstream population also still thinks “the more the merrier”. For many people in China, more correlates with value. An app full of features and buttons may even appear more valuable to them. By making the screen look fuller, the product has a higher chance of success in the market. Although, as mentioned in the essay “Simplicity Is Highly Overrated“ from Don Norman, it might be perceived similar even outside of China. For the East Asian market, more features show status and make the product look good. Meanwhile, marketing proved that customers generally prefer more features over simplicity as well as being in control over automation. When it comes to consumer products, we as designers shouldn’t mix our preferences with the users’, especially users from a different culture.
Business perspective
Taking a business perspective into account, there are of course other factors. An example: due to the large population, any feature developed can be useful for a large number of people (if it is useful for 0.01% of 1.4 billion people, this equals 140,000). Once a feature is proven profitable, management tends to keep it and make it prominent.
Needless to say, lucrative profits are brought by embedding advertisement and promotion. In the age of consumerism, these ad banners and flashy red dots seen in the Starbucks China app, are simply reflecting society. Seeing the success of benchmarks, other service providers follow the trend of massive and powerful all-rounder apps.
Internet infrastructure
With the spread of reliable internet infrastructure, some also argue that the internet is introduced to millions of newbie users in China every year. The mobile Internet speed in China is 113.35mbps, making it the second-fastest in the world, (after South Korea with 121.0mbps). To attract and keep newbie users, homepages are often designed to provide an enormous amount of features to attract as many users as possible. This is also one of the reasons why Chinese digital products tend to become more of a platform rather than simply offering one function. A great example is the app WeChat, which is originally a chat tool. It has now become the mega-app, in which you can find an app store, digital payment, social networking feed, ordering takeout, and much more. Numerous additional features have been introduced to the app since its birth and all have proven themselves profitable. The latest statistics show that WeChat has 1.12 billion monthly active users. Rather than installing one app for one individual purpose, users would simply use WeChat, where the same function is also offered.
All in all, there are certainly a lot of differences between Chinese and Western designs. This article does not want to discuss which is better, after all the context and conventions are so wildly different: The simple and lean design may also be interpreted as dull and raw by a different group of users even within one ethnicity.
But thanks to globalization, people’s tastes have become more unified than ever. People in China are more open to simple and elegant products and services. It is unfortunately impossible to come up with golden principles and patterns that can be applied everywhere. Otherwise, many global companies such as AirBnB, might not have failed so hard when they began to enter the Chinese market.
After all, we are talking about 1.4 billion people. To design better in Chinese definitely requires a deep understanding of the culture, language, and customs, and, most importantly, your users.
