Why does the design differ in different countries?

Most of the guidelines on Web usability are from Europe and North America. This begs the question: are these principles still valid in non-English-speaking countries in Asia (such as China, Japan and South Korea)?

Many companies use global standard design templates in different countries to structure websites and then localize them in local languages. However, this approach does not necessarily work well in all situations, because users from different countries have different understandings of the layout, color, picture style, and content architecture of the site.

This is a very important but also very complex area, because it contains many factors, cultural, social, demographic and psychological and so on. Therefore, there is a lot of discussion on this topic, but there is not much in-depth research.

In this article, the Web teaching network lists several notable differences, and by studying these differences, we can see differences in appearance and function between East and West websites. For me, this is also an important and fundamental issue. After this issue, we can study more details, why a design in different countries effect difference? What kind of design is popular in western countries but not Asian users? And the reasons behind these differences.

"We're a little bit alike, but it's different."

1. The amount of information conveyed

One of the most striking differences between a Western and an oriental Web site is that the latter is always trying to fill a page with huge amounts of content (images, animated ads, videos, and text).

This significant difference can be seen from the youtube.com and youku.com of two popular video sharing sites in east and west. Although both pages use two-column layouts, Youku's homepage appears to contain more content than YouTube, including ads, movies, videos, user referrals, user profiles, rankings and referral sites, and more.

2. Page length

The home page of an Asian site often gives users a rich impression of their content by conveying a lot of information. Their web pages are usually longer than those in Britain and the United States. Unlike in the UK and US, where users typically use Google as their default search engine, Japanese users usually have more Yahoo!. If you compare Yahoo! UK Ireland and Yahoo! China, Yahoo! Japan, Yahoo! Korea (see below), we find the Asian version of the Yahoo! Provide more content and include longer pages, especially Yahoo! China.

3. Content classification

Content classification seems to be a central part of the Asian web site. Please see the following example:

(1) A large number of navigation options. For example: youku.com lists 19 Global navigation items and 6 hidden items (click the arrow at the end of the navigation bar). Furthermore, horizontal navigation bars are more common in Asian sites than vertical navigation.

(2) The content is subdivided into many directories. again, we quickly compare YouTube and Youku: The former divides all its videos into 3 main sections on the home page, which is divided into 10 categories.

content directory for YouTube:

• Videos being watched now
• Feature Videos
• Most Popular

content directory for Youku:

• Popular Today
• Best Original
• Movies and TV dramas
• Car
• Fashion
• Travel and Maternity (* Please don't ask me why they are in a directory)
• Games and Technology
• Sports and Music (* again, it's not clear why they're in a directory
• Member recommendation
• Current topics

4.Flash and dynamic contentFlash and dynamic content are heavily used in Asian sites. If we open ccots.com.cn, a popular tourist website in China, full of pictures of various colors. Home about One-third are covered by flash and dynamic mobile content (highlighted in the image below), including logos, banners, text content, advertising and pictures! 5. Links and pages open in new windowEach page of an Asian site is made up of a huge amount of links, and clicking on a link usually opens the page in a new window. Sina(one of China's largest portal sites) and Mop(online chat, news, gaming, entertainment and online radio) is one of the two most popular websites in mainland China and Hong Kong and Macao. They have about 313 and 517 links on the home page respectively. 6. Color, picture (connection context) and website icon (icons)Asian websites are usually colourful. Cute website icons and contextual pictures are also common. For example BBC News Chinese versionIn contrast to its English version, which uses more or less color in the title, font, and links of the article, each section has its own contextual picture of the title (even though some of the photos may not see the whole picture). 7. AdvertisingAsian websites often use different forms of advertising, such as vertical giant ads (skyscraper ads) and Pay-per-click Ads (AdSense), which are often in every corner of the site. For example, the United Kingdom Thames OnlinePut ads on the right column or bottom of the page (Google AdSense). and sinchew-i.comAdvertisements for the most influential Chinese online news sites in Southeast Asia appear almost everywhere in the site's pages, even within the content. What these differences tell usThere are different taste factors here. While we see many of the obvious features of the Asian web site, we have no evidence that these features are what Asian users like. So we need more research to find out what makes these differences so that we can design sites that meet the needs of local users.