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asians are just smarter than americans.

All in one app? Sounds like an operating system.

Bad design is just bad design. It's not cultural, or related to complexity. The use of WeChat in China is for Government control (Visa is not under their control).

Now explain why Chinese apps like Temu is so overcrowdedand you constantly bombarded with popups. It’s literally like entering a wet market

Honesty, who do you think you are to suggest that your side is "ahead" just because you have what you call "modern" web design? If the Japanese society works just as well sticking with what they like, so be it. It's not a matter of better or worse. The Western notion of modernity is not what the rest of the world aspires to adapt any more.

Really interesting how different cultural cues can develop regarding trusting a vendor. I would find information overload a sign of untrustworthiness as the vendor doesn't appear to be business/marketing savvy and is ignoring the customer's desire to navigate things easily. Makes me think... maybe I'm wrong?

its quite a similar situation here in Indonesia. I notice that a lot of homegrown apps somewhat lean more into a ux philosophy similar to Chinese app design, where all apps are multi-purpose, ex. gojek, tokopedia, dana; but still implement quite a western approach with ui, something more clean and somewhat minimal. I find people here tend to have the expectation that they should be able to do a lot of things with the same app, but also want it to be a more clean user interface.

I literally found you today and you're now my favourite video essay RUclips channel, the structured layout of the explanations and the way you integrate studies and evidence is incredible!

It's still counter-intuitive to me: how can Japanese communication style be 'high context'? Like, should've it been the opposite? Like, literally, they give us 'little context' about what they really wanted to communicate. Oh, I'm so bad at this.

i love the japanese ones i hope they dont change them their so comfy

I've worked with someone who did some work in China in the early 00s, and they said that people over there just liked a lot of data/information available. You're spot on with the want for trust! The western businesses would want to sign up through a website or a single sales person whereas the Chinese businesses would want to meet in person, have lunch together, show the person their business.

Chinese website design and software is superior to Western design/software because honestly? It stimulates you, especially if you're Autistic like me?

Thank you for these informative videos. I am a designer and you touch on exactly the right points. I come from a former communist country, and we are a bit apprehensive that a company/party/government, even if it currently has wise intentions, might be replaced by someone who could misuse tools like cooperatives to subjugate us. What if someone with malicious intent or even a hacker gains access to everything on WeChat?

This video is high context. Really long winded

This was great, thank you

stumbled upon this vid, enjoyed it enough to sub! About the iphone JP keyboard (as others have already pointed out) that's just a natural way to organize things, as that is the order the "kana" are written a i u e o ka ki ku ke ko sa shi su se so and so on, it's just how a JP speaker would "think" when given a visual representation of the kana like the mobile KB, they can quickly discern all the "K" sounds are "under" the "ka" character. which leads me to a suggestion that you look at UI/UX of JP and eastern designed videogames originally meant for far east market, vs videogames of the US. Quite a lot of design differences to unpack and compare there as well, and also how some games localize well in other markets vs those that are not anyhoo looking forward to more vids!

love the way they phrased every thing ,like this was such a good informative vid

I IDENTIFY AS JAPANESE

Great video Phoebe! Not sure if there was a hidden layer to it, but as you may know the full quote is "A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes is better than a master of one." ;)

Amazing work breaking down the cultural connection to the design. I experienced a similar WeChat experience to your dad in China whilst trying to buy fruit from a streetside fruit vendor. I tried purchasing with cash and they looked at me like I was crazy.

The only thing Japanese Kept simple is their Flag

I enjoyed this❤

you are genius, dozen of UX workshops and less valuable info than from your single wideo. just keep it going!

I feel that there's a lot of factors involved including what you said. A huge part of the population is elderly and don't like changes. That along with the respect for elders in an of itself it's a very huge impediment for UI/UX changes. Japan has a very strict education system, which is very different from most of the western world. This implicates in people not used/wanting to read full paragraphs because "it's booooring and it sucks and why does it have to be soo looooong, TL:DR please". Which also links to our current "world culture" of fast content / consumerism and low attention span. There's good and bad things with tradition. The good in this case is the education, the respect, etc... The bad would be the aversion of change. And, to me, the bad tings cannot hinder progress otherwise we get stuck and eventually fall behind. My take on this is: baby steps. lol

I really thought its Maotai on the thumbnail for a second

I really thought its Maotai on the thumbnail for a second

TIL: I have "taijin kyofusho" all my life and didn't even know it. Flip side: it is positive to think about the needs of others over oneself ... unless it gets toxic and then that's a whole new slew of issues.

So much true but many things missed out. 1. Sato likes it so will Tanaka, Nakamura, Yoshida, etc … this is a cultural thing for them. 2. They don’t like white space because it isn’t busy enough. Look at a zen garden … so much is going on and yet looks so simple. Not really sure but this could be a design aesthetic. Designers I worked with lost the battle against product managers who wanted “information”. 3. Information which cause the death of white space is more of a cultural thing to provide information up front. It’s a weird trade off. Look at the cash registers that shoppers use today. Accept coins on a conveyor belt counting device. Ability to accept bills. The ability to accept “digital cash”, the ability to accept 10 point card systems. The register check out speed as this person is saying is faster is not faster. Granny still counts out her ¥1 coins at her previous speed and at times slower because the machine now counts how much extra you put in. Used car websites wanting to fill in information on every single option or thing you can think of. Icons fill up a good portion of the information provided. 4. Hardware comment. Yes and No. it’s a different problem. Look at space invaders. Japanese game designers built it on their own by probing circuits and figuring it out. Brilliant but dumb too. It’s a can do attitude but making a phone call would have likely solved many times faster. This rollaway into software. Why is a framework popular? Because someone translated it. Why isn’t a new one popular? Because it’s in English. So developers will use the language / framework that has the most Japanese language support. Yes there are experimenters but why bother when everyone else refuses to pick it up until critical language Japanese translation has occurred? 5. Developer pride: stack overflow isn’t really how to do it in Japan. Americans just want to get it done and the Japanese love powering through it. Consistently my coworkers didn’t want to call in help. 5. Options galore: yes, this does provide a false sense of authority matter expert on this. Not everyone takes advantage of them but having them makes you have that happy feeling. 6. The piano example: over stated because you would never let your kid bother the neighbor but yes they do the passive aggressive on you. 7. Yahoo vs EBay: this goes to number 1. If Sato is using so should I. There is safety in Sato having made the choice. eBay couldn’t break into the market because Sato already had made his choice. eBay should have stuck it out but they didn’t so the authority position was never created and proven. What isn’t mentioned? The manuals! The manuals that help you figure out all these crazy options overloads. So Sato spends time writing up how-to manuals to figure out how to rent a car. Then Nakamura reads it and follows along. This now helps solidify the product being explained as an authority solution because now everyone can use it. The manuals? Mostly manga powered answer solutions. The overly complicated design Ui gets broken down into more simple ones. Makes sense? Only because Sato thinks it does. As much as I break this down there are still many good points brought out about the high level as to possible reasons. But you still need to have the Japanese context to see deeper.

Super Apps don't need to be cluttered. We have some examples also in the western world and we are slowly reaching their point with super apps.

As a neurodivergent person who suffers from severe anxiety attacks every day I really appreciate asian web design because there is less uncertainty

Very interesting channel.

Very informative video, thank you!

Love your videos, really comprehensive insight into this topic.

No wonder their MMORPGS all look the same way

Another banger vid

This was really interesting!

Whenever I saw those Asian App-Designs I always thought that it looks like that because it's cheaply made and bad designed. How ignorant of me to think like that... there is so much to learn for me. "When you create something, create with culture in mind" your both videos (this one, and the japanese webdesign video) have thought me so much about UX and UI design. I'm a fresh Designer and want to learn more about UI/UX design too. Your videos have helped me so much to understand cross cultural Appp & Webdesign. It turns out those asian apps i was ignorantly thinking they are designed poorly & cheaply ARE INDEED designed with a big complex cultural mindset behind it. Thank you for teaching me better.

broooo wtf is this videooo kkkkk insane 👏👏👏👏

you tell stories like a freshman 17 year old

All I can relate to from this type of UI is gambling site. I think east asian have this kind of app design or something, Shopee, Lazada, etc...

As a Chinese, I deeply hate this over-designed UI/UX trend in China. Many of those fancy colorful widgets and buttons are actually slowing down my poor phone (not to mention the disgusting shakey ADs). More importantly, most of those functions are not part of the core app! Imagine you can complete lending services in almost any application, even in Chinese Uber! These buttons are actually like many micro clickbaits hoping to attract your precious attention. SIn this case, every app in my phone take up more than 3-4 Gb of storage even if I barely use them, and WeChat app is actually can be over 50-100 Gb in someone's phone! So I changed my phone language in to English for a purer experience and less-noisy UI.

Nah, it's just because the CCP loves to control everything about the Chinese people. WeChat is a dictator's wet dream. Discuss this topic after China abolishes the National Intelligence Law. Culture is what the CCP creates for their endless corruption.

Thanks

It’s all in Chinese, I cannot understand a thing. 😵‍💫 I think, that’s one half of the problem, when westerners look at this. It’s just not easy to understand language wise. In Russia it seems to work just fine at times, especially if you look up Yandex and T-bank. They have all the products separately but starting to integrate it over time using webview. Separate products make sense if you consider the behind the scenes teams working and updating individual products. But flawless experience is a blessing. Not every company can afford it, though. It’s a huge infrastructure and a lot of 3rd parties integrations. Costs a lot of investments. Startup culture doesn’t really encourage such endeavors. I may be wrong, but those Chinese super-apps seem to be government funded.

Indonesia have two big e-commerce apps. There are Tokopedia (Indonesian e-commerce) and Shopee (china's e-commerce). they has different UI. Me as Indonesian using shoppe facing icons same buttons, many icons thats directed to same feature. I used shopee last week, i spend 30 minutes to find "WTF where's the checkout and promos!!". Yeah, i used to order from Tokopedia, bcs they have good UI/UX tbh. But, many Indonesian feels okay using shopee (now shopee is top 1 choice indonesian e-commerce apps) bcs they liked promos and discounts.

3:26 In India, we have similar apps (UPI apps for payments) that also offer chat features, although this functionality is not widely used and people prefer WhatsApp to chat.

I followed you after the Japanese web design video and your video is getting better. Thanks for the insightful video!

Super interesting! I’m quite inquisitive to know what does high-Chinese design look like. For example, WhatsApp is not high-Western design, although it’s common in some places.

I love how you integrated lofi sounds interesting your background sounds.

good work