Understanding Taiwanese web design: #2 Busy, busy, busy
In part one of this series, I gave some background about web design in Taiwan. In this part, I will expound on why I believe Taiwanese web sites always strive to have a very busy homepage with as many colors, animated widgets, and images as you can cram. This stands in stark contrast with Western design thinking which emphasizes simplicity and focus.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying sites can’t be busy. If there’s a lot going on in the site (Taiwan’s Yahoo! portal is a good example, as is the technology forum mobile01.com), you need to surface that content on the homepage. On other sites for small businesses or small organizations however, focus is important so that people are able to get the information they need or do whatever tasks they need and get out. Unfortunately, it comes back to point 2 I made in the first post: Web design in Taiwan is focused on business image, rather than users and business goals. And one day a few years back, I came to the realization what that image was: the night market.
The Taiwanese night market is an orgy of colors, smells, sounds and people all crammed together in a narrow street. Up until ten or so years ago, this was the main nighttime entertainment besides sitting at home watching TV. A stall at the night market will have one or more of the following features:
- A long queue of eager customers
- Scores of products
- Something moving to catch your eye
- Something fragrant to catch your nose
- Something loud to catch your ear
- Colorful display
The real drivers here are population density and competition. Everything is squeezed together in a small area and stalls which offer similar goods are very competitive. The pressure to stand out amongst the cacophony and the competition means for a never-ending game of one-upmanship. If you try to map this type of thinking to web design, you get:
- Flash intros
- Lots of animation
- Using every color in the rainbow
- Plain design busy-ness
- Visitor counters
The problem here lies in one of education. Most business owners here still think of a web site as an online brochure. They don’t really “get” the web yet, in terms of the importance of data and its accessibility. In fact, that’s why it’s still relatively easy to rank high on search engines here if you do your HTML right. Also, I think the importance placed on being competitive distracts business owners from designing for their customers, instead of against their competition.
Categorised as: Design, Taiwan, Web development