5 About.com Insights about the Chinese?
I’ll be honest, it is far easier being a critic than an advocate. It is easier to rip apart something than to build something up. It is easier destroying than creating.
In science, we call it “peer-review.”
And it’s a good concept, fully embraced by all those warm-fuzzy notions of democracy and freedom of speech.
So I’m going to keep on doing it.
About.com recently made a stab at that huge (but often elusive) China market pie by launching a Chinese version of their basic preimse named Abang.com. In doing so, they ostensibly figured out a few things that would improve their chances of success. I’ll repost them below with my comments:
1- Chinese don’t trust professional-looking sites
While US-users tend to trust a professionally put-together site, Chinese users have the opposite reaction and are highly skeptical. Chinese users presume that a professional-looking site was put together to promote a product or service. “Chinese have suffered from propaganda and soft content for so long that they are very savvy,” Roberts said. “Instead of believing what a professional site says, users in China prefer to ask a bulletin board to hear what anonymous users post in reply.”
I’m going to disagree with this and mostly due to the use of adjectives. What is “professional” anyway? What we’re really talking about here is subjective aesthetics and, yes, different cultures with different backgraounds often have different tastes. Can we say that the “Chinese have suffered from propaganda and soft content for so long” and that’s why they like one type of “design” over another? Yes, but that’s not really capturing the full picture.
I used to (still do, actually) say the Chinese prefer “cluttered” websites, with such a “jungle” of text and links on each page that I don’t even know where to begin looking before being overwhelmed by the “Where’s Waldo” of it all. Like most Westerners, I don’t mind having a lot of content on a single page as long as it is all organized in a logically digestible fashion. The problem is, what is “organized” and what is “logical” to me may not be the same things for Chinese users.
Furthermore, don’t most people place a certain emphasis and trust on the advice of their peers (personal recommendation) over a sales pitch (advertisement) direct from the seller? That Chinese people do that is nothing new nor should it be surprisingly different to About.com–much less humanity–overall. There are “professional-looking” bulletin-board/forum websites too! They are not mutually exclusive.
Maybe we’re missing the context in which General Manager Matt Roberts was uttering these sentences above but I still find them alarmingly shallow for a man of his position and responsibility. I don’t think the premise he offers for his conclusion is accurate and I do think he’s confusing aesthetics with professionalism. The vast majority of popular websites in China have these similar design characteristics that Westerners mistake as being “unprofessional.” Are we going to say all of these websites were designed by amatuers and not professionals? Or should we say these websites were designed by the Chinese for Chinese tastes? (…like capitalism with Chinese characteristics?)
I’ve often asked Chinese internet users why they prefer “their” website design (blocks of text) and given them examples of what I consider to be “well-designed” and “clean” websites. One response I get is that they feel a website that isn’t choking with text and information appears to be “unfinished.” At first, it may be hard for Westerners to wrap their heads around this sort of thinking but is it really that hard to understand?
I can’t say for certain becaue I haven’t done any scientifically rigorous research on this but I’ll propose just two alternative explanation that would definitely be as reasonable as–if not more than–”Chinese suffered from propaganda:”
Newspapers. Ever notice that a Chinese website “with a ton of text filling up the entire page” looks remarkably like a newspaper with a “ton of text filling up the entire page?” The latter has links instead of requiring you to flip to a page. Remember, China is a developing country and a developing society. In many ways, we can say the populace here and their tastes are not as “sophisticated” as those in the West. The past 50 years have not been kind to its people as far when it comes to all things media-related, print or otherwise. It isn’t just government control of or propaganda, it’s about the simple production, design, and dissemination of literary content.
Compare the evolution of printed media between China and the West. Magazines are a great place to start seeing form overtaking function when it comes to the arrangement and organization of textual information, especially in conjunction with images and non-textual design. Magazines is where you start seeing people say “filling up this page with text is not necessarily the best idea for presenting my information.” Newspapers were bound by a certain functional efficiency that encouraged maximizing the information available on a page; it saved money on paper and by extension later provided more space for advertising income.
Portal websites. It wasn’t that many years ago that the front page for a website like Yahoo was also a nice jumble of text and links. The tendency for Chinese websites to have a similar design and feel when it comes to presentation of content may simply be indicative of the overal maturity of Chinese internet users. Like Westerners even ten years ago and despite having much more sophisticated internet technologies available to them today, the Chinese are still relatively new to the internet and its potential power of revolutionizing how humans are exposed to and can digest information. Presenting information in a format akin to the ubiquitous and time-tested newspaper shouldn’t be that strange. It is familiar.
I do believe Chinese websites will continue to evolve and there’s a likelihood that it’ll follow paths similar to Western website design so that, one day, they too will finally be “professional” in the eyes of Mr. Roberts. That said, I do reckon there will still remain certain differences largely determined by the fact that Chinese ideographic characters are a different size and shape than words formed with the Roman alphabet (see next).
2- Chinese like titles to be of the same length
While US website users don’t mind titles of different lengths on a page, Chinese users find it annoying to have a list of titles that do not run the same length. As a result, About.com requires all the titles to be the same length within a character or two. The major news portals face the same issue and as a result rewrite titles of news stories to fit the standard length of their homepage.
This has a bit to do with linguistics and a bit to do with design. For the former, let’s remind ourselves that the Chinese often like 4 character idioms (or 8 characters when you put two compatible ones together). Many slogans (including propagandic ones issued by the government) are of this format. As I mentioned above, when the basic format of each word in Chinese is an ideogram constrained to a standard box frame, it lends to the tendency to constrain many things to a certain size or length. This is a logical by-product of the language, not the whims of a certain people.
For the latter, what web designer or developer hasn’t occassionally reworded something so that it looks better within the context of their design?
3- Chinese love images
While the US version of About.com limits images to one per page, Chinese very much like pictures. As a result, the Chinese version currently allows two images and may allow up to three. Anything over three photos and the site is designed to insert a page break. The fear is that too many images will slow down the page on China’s slow Internet connections.
Wait…who doesn’t like pictures? This is ridiculous.
4- Chinese love nutritional information on recipes
While the US version divides About.com recipes in to separate courses (Appetizer, main, dessert, etc), the Chinese version divides foods into the eight major regional cuisines of China. Reacting to consumer demand, About.com also introduced two sections unique to China: One on cooking pointers (Max temperature for certain oils, etc) and another for describing nutritional facts. Guides sometimes even divide the nutritional information into what Chinese medicine says the food offers and what western medicine says about the dishes’ ingredients.
Okay…the regional cuisine thing is pretty obvious. I’m not really sure why they bothered mentioning it. As for nutritional information on recipes, there’s definitely the whole Chinese medicine aspect of it and I reckon it is similar to why so many food products in China advertise their health benefits in hopes of appealing to caring mothers and wives or sons and daughters with healthy filial piety.
5- Chinese like to comment after each article
While the US version of About.com has a separate section for comments, the Chinese version allows comments after every article. This could help About.com emphasize a bulletin board-like service, since bulletin boards are where Chinese users tend to interact most with each other in the Internet.
What? Okay, so they designed Abang.com to have comments because you think Chinese users like to comment after each article. Where’s the part where they explain how it is an insight that Chinese people like to comment, or that they somehow comment more than other nationalities? Having a comment section after the articles and hoping your users generate content for you through it is a play on Yahoo! Answers or Baidu Zhidao. It is not a revolutionary feature you tacked on due to any particular “insight” specific to the Chinese market. If there is, I don’t see it.
And in other news: Today is the 50th anniversary of Legos! Damn, I love Legos.
Tags: abang.com, about.com, aesthetics, bulletin-board, chinese characters, comments, forum, language, legos, matt roberts, newspapers, nutritional information, pictures, portal websites, professional, website design