Take a site like Todou for example, which is a video sharing site in China. A few things stand out when compared to YouTube — Todou has a colorful template, a lot of animated Flash elements, and much more content on the signed-out versions of the home page than what's shown on YouTube. Where YouTube lists featured videos horizontally, Todou fills a grid.
Now take a look at CyWorld, a South Korean social networking site that's expanding internationally. Again, there's a lot more going on here even in the signed-out version, and again it's in a grid. (Log out of your Facebook account and you'll see that the default home page is pretty sterile.)
Now, hold your breath and go to Sohu, a Chinese web portal. My Chinese is... uh... a little rusty, so I ran it through Google Translate to see this. As you can see, there's a lot going on here. It's very crowded, with more content than anyone could hope to take in visually in a single session.
Back in 2006, I sat in on a usability session in Beijing while at eBay. We showed participants several web sites (eBay China and others) and had them tell us what they thought. Again and again participants told us through a translator that the eBay China site was "boring" and "untrustworthy." Boring I could understand, but untrustworthy? I asked the translator about this, and she told me that white space on a page made the participants uneasy... which led to feelings of untrustworthiness.
So it's pretty clear that visual design needs to be quite different in Asia, but what about the user interface?
Interestingly, it's not that dissimilar. Forms seem to be formatted more or less the same as you'd see on a Western site. Tabs seem to work the same way. Drop-down menus and buttons are just buttons. Everything around the interface elements is different (colors, grids, animation), but the interface itself is about as familiar-looking as it gets. It's a bit like finding a Starbucks on a busy Chinese street, but UI isn't really Western -- it seems to be universal.
Multi-national Internet companies face these issues every day, and I'd curious to hear from designers who have worked on Asian sites to find out more about their experience.
What works, and what doesn't?
Is it even fair to lump web sites into "Asian" and "Western" buckets?
Have popular Asian web sites evolved over time into today's frenetic visual design, or did they start out this way because... duh... it's obviously the right way for them to look?
