5 About.com Insights about the Chinese?
Monday, January 28th, 2008I’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.
