Website Wars
East vs. West: Culture in Digital Wayfinding
Blasted by bright, flashing ads and visually attacked with margins riddled with cramped, tiny text, I physically shuddered from how overwhelming Shopee’s front page was. My first time navigating the site was quite the trip, as my search results were entries branded with icons of discounts, special deals, seals of approval, assurances of quality, and tightly photoshopped product images. Most frustratingly, I remember going on what felt like a wild goose chase for free shipping as I clicked link after link, going in a circle. It was not pleasing, neither in aesthetics or experience.
I have to admit that part of the trouble I had was an unfamiliarity with Mandarin characters, compounded by how accustomed I was to more modern, sleek Western websites. If we look at the most popular website designs of modern sites, they are characterized by large swathes of space and layouts marked by a central subject. Color palettes are muted and often fall into the cool tones. This contrasts with Asian websites that employ bright, bold colors and tend to pack their pages and banners of their products, services, and deals.
It reminds me of my image of Chinatown–a harmonic cacophony of street vendors, red spring couplets, and grandmas shouting to each other across the street. Asian culture has come to embrace and celebrate the messy and discordant. Meanwhile, historical development has led Western thinking to associate civilization with sophistication and restraint, characterizing a lack of color as cleanliness and purity. While this is certainly not true as a hard and fast rule, traces of these aesthetic preferences can be found in these populations’ respective designs.
Another instance I experienced website navigation disorientation was during my summer internship research. Hoping to expand beyond the limited postings on Handshake, I turned to the Taiwanese site 104 for job search. Instantly, despite and especially because of the comparable layout, I registered differences–where the former maintained a tricolor profile of dulled colors, 104 had an accent color of bright orange and text of vivid, primary colors. Instead of larger icons and larger spacing, the Taiwanese site has smaller margins and text. Effectively, the site had nearly identical functions, yet the website design made different impressions.
By nature of many East Asian languages, the written script takes up minimal space, with components that are comparatively complex to the Latin alphabet. Looking at primarily Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text, their characters are compact and have an intricate composition that looks complicated to the eye. Not only so, but they are difficult to create fonts for. This, along with a lack of capitalization, creates little visual hierarchy for designers to play with. Unlike Latin text, which has letters bearing ascenders and descenders that create visual interest, the aforementioned languages, when digitized, have characters that fit squarely into equal sized boxes. Ultimately, the effect is a sea swimming with strokes.
Typography is critical to all forms of wayfinding, as it “[prioritizes] information into logical hierarchies” (Gibson 75). One reason why Eastern websites are found to be hard to navigate is because most of the text is scaled at similar sizes–which tend to be tiny–with minimal spacing. When a user browses the page, their eyes have little to grasp onto. For those not used to such script, reading it is a strain that detracts from the user experience.
This may paint Eastern web design to be poorly thought out, obsolete, and maybe even atrocious. However, arguments that these sites yield poor user experience do not consider the audience for whom these designers are serving. Much research has been done on the way culture has impacted cognitive information processing. Attributed to historical influences and environmental conditions, Westerners are thought to think more analytically, relying on categories and rules to regard a main subject, whereas Eastern thinking is more holistic, taking in and considering more information at once (Nisbett et al. 2001). Thus, where most Euroentric websites maintain a clean profile with distinct subject matters highlighted, Asian sites come off as scattered and chaotic. However, as study results have shown, East Asians were more capable than North Americans in “dealing with information on mock web pages with large amounts of information” (Wang et al. 2012). As it turns out, Eastern thinkers may prefer the “mess”.
Websites reflect their users’ desired features.
The best evidence of this can be found in a fascinating case study on website localization. Jonathan Chen, a UI/UX designer, outlines how website User Experience (UX) Design differs between the US and Japan for the same sites. He mentions how a proliferate use of red on Japanese sites are applied more consciously in American versions because the color correlates to error or urgency rather than prosperity in Western culture. What was most interesting to me, though, was the discussion on information display.
Chen discusses how typography, information hierarchy, and navigation routes interplay to create different experiences for the two target populations.
The Japanese value obtaining contextual information. The skepticism and care with which they regard quality and credibility mean business websites must be designed to gain their audience’s trust (Saephan 2019). This is reflected in an abundance of typography and material, which allow a user to access all the content easily. Furthermore, navigation flow is more likely to be split into multiple sections, allowing users to narrow down their search through a series of pages.
On the other hand, American websites capture their subject-oriented audience’s attention through variety in elements and emphasis to create visual hierarchy and distinction. This explains the use of space and scale to guide the user’s limited, valuable attention span to particular focal points. The navigation bar further appeals to Americans’ desire for efficiency, taking the analytical approach of streamlining web pages by category.
Localization is perfect for identifying key differences in how designs cater to different culturally influenced methods of wayfinding. It also highlights how ultimately, design serves the user. A designer’s work is a user’s lifeline to orient themselves, whether in the physical or digital sphere. Culture is one more of the many factors that influence design and shape our world.
Unlinked References:
Gibson, David. The Wayfinding Handbook: Information Design for Public Places. Princeton Architectural Press, 2009.
