Too many Chinese characters: Busy web interface
Have you ever noticed how most Chinese websites are choke full of text? When I come to a Chinese website for the first time, I never know what I am supposed to do because there is so much content that I have a difficulty finding the part that brought me there in the first place.
Here is, for example, a section from the website Taobao.com, the Chinese equivalent of eBay. (The real eBay never made it in China, apparently the Chinese preferred their own way of doing online garage sales.) If you click on this image to see the larger version, you can see that it is packed with text. Now I guess a Chinese person will just intuitively ignore the parts he does not need but I need to start reading to see what I need.
A section from the Chinese online auction site Taobao.com.
Or here is another example from one of the top Chinese search engines, Sohu.com. Sohu.com is extremely popular in China and you can do pretty much everything on it, starting from searching the Net and playing online games to trading stocks and buying property.
Characters flooding the page on Sohu.com's main page
Now my question is whether this is completely normal for Chinese users or they would also prefer a much less crowded interface? After all, why would you always want to have on your screen hundreds of words you never look at? I don't need to see "pet food" as a category on my auction site every single time I go there. I really don't because I do not own a pet. Neither am I interested in kitchen utensils, I never ever look at them.
So, going back to my original question, is this tolerable for others? Does it bother anyone else or is it just me?
Here is, for example, a section from the website Taobao.com, the Chinese equivalent of eBay. (The real eBay never made it in China, apparently the Chinese preferred their own way of doing online garage sales.) If you click on this image to see the larger version, you can see that it is packed with text. Now I guess a Chinese person will just intuitively ignore the parts he does not need but I need to start reading to see what I need.
A section from the Chinese online auction site Taobao.com.
Or here is another example from one of the top Chinese search engines, Sohu.com. Sohu.com is extremely popular in China and you can do pretty much everything on it, starting from searching the Net and playing online games to trading stocks and buying property.
Characters flooding the page on Sohu.com's main page
Now my question is whether this is completely normal for Chinese users or they would also prefer a much less crowded interface? After all, why would you always want to have on your screen hundreds of words you never look at? I don't need to see "pet food" as a category on my auction site every single time I go there. I really don't because I do not own a pet. Neither am I interested in kitchen utensils, I never ever look at them.
So, going back to my original question, is this tolerable for others? Does it bother anyone else or is it just me?
Labels: Chinese characters and the Internet, Chinese design, Japanese design
5 Comments:
Don't you think some of these sites look like Chinese books? Maybe we (in the West) have become more used to having our printed information set out in easy-to-digest form (in textbooks, magazines etc). Whereas the Chinese web page seems little different to a medieval Chinese book
It's totally intolerable to us now, but think back to the (English-language) Web back around 1997 or so. Text flashed, stuff spun around and floated off the screen... at the time we thought, "Wow, you can do everything in this medium!" Then we got sick of the flash (no pun intended) and just wanted fast access to information. Remember how amazing Google's front page was when we had been using Yahoo and stuff like that?
I think maybe Chinese web design will mature, though probably in a different way.
(Or maybe I am just a snob. MySpace is one of the biggest sites out there but the average MySpace page makes me want to gouge my eyes out.)
Yes, there was a time when an average English web page was quite flashy, too. But I think that there is something inherent in the Chinese sense of design that makes the artist/designer/creator keep adding ornamentation until he fills the available space. This might seem like a lot of unnecessary noise to us but maybe it is just an outsider's viewpoint.
And I don't think that this is limited to the web, there are plenty of examples for similar things in the actual world. For example, there are those cups which have a hundred variants of the character "shou" for longevity.
I am Chinese. I came to the States about 11 years ago. I've always wondered about the same thing. I gave up reading Chinese sites because I got confused sometimes.
A friend of mine set up a small site for a deceased Chinese writer. http://www.jiyong.net/. He intentionally reduced the clutter on the landing page. But he soon got emails from readers complaining that his site was too simple. My guess is that the culture emphasizes on conformity more than uniqueness. If enough people are doing it, it becomes a "tradition", even though it's been around for less than 10 years. And then if you do something different, people will complain.
That is a really interesting observation, Nan. Nice to hear an opinion from a native speaker, even if a "converted" one. Perhaps it is like have a room empty or filled with stuff. I can see a room cluttered with books, computers, a guitar, a small basket ball basket, etc where I could feel really comfortable, even though this might feel like a complete disarray to others. (I actually recall something from my teenage years when my parents were annoyed with my room.) But what makes the cluttered websites interesting is that in this case it is the personal preference of a whole nation.
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