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).

The Experiance Stack (presentation experiance)

Matt Webb presented on the Experience Stack at Dconstruct07. This presentation was packed full of interesting ideas and slides, perhaps too packed full. Particularly as it was still too close to lunch time beverages for most of us to be at our brightest.

Luckily Matt has already analyzed his own presentation, restated part of it and put up slides and transcripts. Picking through this material I realize there is going to quite a lot of food for thought.

There is a very significant change noticeable for old timers like me. The presentation doesn't finish it continues after the event. Increasingly we can re-listen, watch slides, transcripts, comment, digest etc. Sometimes now I also see good presentations that were made within companies, released on the web. Probably correctly they realize that in these cases what they lose from releasing some good ideas into the wild is handsomely offset by building image and reputation (in these cases the presentations are inevitably branded).

Maybe presentations can be richer if we have more time and resources to digest them. Maybe in the future the ideal presentation will be layered, something to take away immediately and something to pick through later (a kind of presentation doggy bag). The experiance of those being presented to is certainly changing overtime.

Edit: just looked up the book Mind Hacks that Matt co-authored, O'Reilly tells me I can select and buy a chapter Yaayy, just the sort of approach I like. I fill out a whole bunch of crufty information over several screens before I discover I cannot pay with debit card or Paypal etc. Bad O'Reilly experiance.