I grew up and lived in China until grad school, and now work as a designer in the Valley. The trends this article identified are largely true, but the speculations are not accurate or to the point, as other comments have pointed out.<p>I&#x27;ve been wondering about this phenomenon too, and here are some hypotheses:
- As someone who&#x27;s fluent in both languages, I find Chinese text much more skimmable than English. Chinese is a compact language, and you make sense of it by recognizing the shape of characters, which is much easier than recognizing long combinations of letters. It&#x27;s not too bad to skim a wall of Chinese text to find the information you want. Though this could be biased by the fact that Chinese is my native language.<p>- Cities in China, as well as Japan, are densely populated. If you walk on the streets, all kinds of visual stimuli come at you: flashing ads, colorful banners, a lot of people in various styles etc. It seems we grow up being used to dense visuals, compared to say, Americans who grew up in the spread-out suburbs.<p>- Most people in China are not design-minded. The most popular post on Zhihu (Chinese equivalent of Quora) in 2015 discusses the general design and aesthetics level in China, why our streets are so ugly with all the poorly-designed banners etc. We don’t have a tradition of recognizing the importance of design, or developing a sense of good design. Japan, on the contrary, has a much longer tradition on that. Therefore, people are much more likely to live with poor web designs, and companies are not incentivized to redesign.