Why I wouldn't like to design an Asian Website

Actually I wouldn't like to design any kind of website, that is not where my strengths lie. I would be particularly careful of making any design decisions on a website that was aimed at a culture I didn't fully appreciate though.

Taking Chinese as an example, a number of times I have directed Chinese users to an Internet site I like and then been surprised when they are completely underwhelmed by it. One reason has been that they feel there is not enough content. This screen shot above is from web-page of the Chinese television station CCTV, it is typical of many I have seen and to my eyes appears very text dense with lots and lots (too many links). It wasn't until a Chinese web friend told me that many Chinese Internet users had yet to get used to using search functionality that the penny dropped, navigating through and discovering new content via links felt most natural to them.

Also consider that a Chinese designer can typically choose a lot of two character words for links (or three / four character words/phrases) this makes it an awful lot easier to layout blocks of links that can be scanned much better than if they were written in English.

I am not advocating the CCTV site as a good example of any kind of web design, simply attempting to highlight the kind of issues that may need to be taken into account when looking at websites from different cultures. It has to be said that in my experience many Asian websites do a better job of catering for Western users (with language options and search support) than their Western counterparts.

Naturally nothing is that clear, many young Chinese will be familiar and used to Western style websites, many of them have gone through the language/culture mind-hack.

This post will be a small part of the background to my Bathcamp presentation Bathcamp presentation Twine(in progress).

Is Learning Chinese a Mind-Hack?

Mind Hack image from psd.

It has been said that learning a language is a type of mind hack, it is good for the brain and gives you a different perspective on many things. Written Chinese however has a peculiar feature compared to English and that is simply that it takes rather less characters to write something. Many Chinese words are just one or two characters and there is no space between words. Some of the space gain is lost because each Chinese character takes the same space and English fonts can take advantage of proportional spacing but on the whole a block of Chinese text takes up less space. On Twitter and other micro-blogging sites you are typically given 140 characters, a fairly short message in English but a Chinese writer can potentially pack in a lot more information. As a couple of examples (美女) and (帅哥) map to (beautiful women) and (handsome guy). I also believe from my own early experience and observation that the Chinese reader can read noticeably faster than English readers (could be useful if you have a lot of information to scan).

Sometimes it is unfortunate that so much emphasis is given to ease of use and quick learning/understanding, often the thing that is initially easiest to learn, understand and use falls short in the long run when compared to something that initially takes more effort. Douglas Engelbert is credited with developing the computer mouse which was widely adopted, he also developed a special one hand keypad that in conjunction with the mouse was proven to significantly improve typing speed. This keypad was not adopted though simply because the learning curve was considered too high (taking into account all the typing I do though it makes me wonder).

I feel that an often overlooked mind expanding element of language learning occurs when you are prepared to open your mind to a new culture however. It is possible and sometimes illuminating to see something from two points of view simultaneously. A recent Newscientist article How to keep your head in scary situations (unfortunately you have to be a subscriber to view full text) stated "find a knowledgeable person who shares your general cultural but who disagrees with you. You are likely to give this person's arguments a sympathetic hearing, which will help offset the natural disposition we all have to dismiss as unreliable and biased the arguments of persons whose basic outlooks are different from our own." The cultural element is important because you are not likely to believe or entertain an argument coming from a culture that differs from your own. I found that being prepared to start adsorbing another culture suddenly hugely expands the number of people that you can learn from. As Steve Kaufmann puts it History is a good example. Students should be obliged to read history books from different countries, in order to see how different these perspectives can be.

A final thought, many people who have learned English as an additional language (and or adsorbed Western culture) have undergone a mind-hack of some sort, doesn't this leave many mono-lingual English speakers at a disadvantage?

This post will be a small part of the background to my Bathcamp presentation Bathcamp presentation Twine(in progress).