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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Chinese websites have a penchant for a very busy design that's really odd. I don't get why this sort of setup is desirable:

A large insurance company in China: http://pingan.com/

Similar, a large bank: https://www.dahsing.com/html/tc/index.html

China Postal Office: http://www.chinapost.com.cn/

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It's not just China. A lot of websites, event signage, ads, etc. in much of eastern Asia look to my Western eyes like something someone's kid put together for a school project. The script may be part of it--it doesn't lend itself to the sort of clean sparse design that's in vogue in a lot of the West. But, as you say, there's also just a lot of clutter and generally cheesy art work, stock photos, etc.

I found this (and the corresponding article) to be a good read on why Asian websites are that way (the lower comment threads seem to be more relevant to the topic): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067

Significant cultural difference makes for really interesting design differences in apps and websites! Americans (maybe Westerners more broadly) tend to prefer simple designs with plenty of white space, where Chinese users find a simple design to be annoying and difficult to use. They want the content all in one place - whitespace is wasted space.

I've read once that this might have something to do with slow internet in China, which leads to users wanting to reach content in as few clicks/page loads as possible, but I'm not sure how accurate that is.

Odd thought: does their alphabet contribute to that feeling too? On average, each character looks considerably busier with more lines and curves than letters of the Latin alphabet.

I don't think it's that. Just the raw count of "clickable things" is much higher. Try some of the menus. Or "translate this page"...it doesn't look better. I suspect it's just a cultural thing about information density.

There have been articles on HN in the past about the stark difference of "good design" for Asian sites. I remember some reference to the busy crowded streets and their signage.

From that article I found lingscars.com which is now my most favorite commercial website.

Make sure to read the copy and check out the source code

I read recently that written Chinese has something like a 10x information density over written English, so you might be onto something there.

May be cultural differences due to different writing systems.

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