 All right, can you guys hear me well back? Okay, great. So let's start a short introduction about myself My name is Ryan, and I'm a front-end developer at Team Spirit So I've been asked by my PR to speak a bit about my company. So here it is Team Spirit is a Japanese company. We produce enterprise resource planning ERP software and we have a suite of applications that involve modules like resource management project management and time and expense management So here's a lovely photo of me and my colleagues. We're not doing the Ultraman. This is supposed to be tea in the team spirit Right, with that in mind, let's talk about topic First of all, thank you to Huijing and Microsoft Singapore for sponsoring this event When I was When I agreed to this event, I was very excited But I also feel regret because I'm not sure what topic to talk about So I was thinking maybe you talk about the web design trends of 2020 or even top CSS framework for web development but Maybe it would be cliche because chances are it would already find all these materials in YouTube and also a lot of blocks So instead I thought what if I share about my interests? So this is one of my interests, meme Memes are really the primary means of communication between me and my colleagues So anyone who ever use CSS to do stuff chances are you would feel like a family guy meme over there Like especially before the implementation of flex and grid how hard is it to support I6 using table vertically center itself See some some developers obviously have experience with that and this is what it's like to work in CSS Now my second interest is Beautiful UI and UX. I like apps. They are intuitive and beautiful because it makes me feel good using them And then last but not least I like psychology I like the study of human behavior and how applying psychology to your Product design. We actually make your product more intuitive and the user experience much better So with that in mind, I want to share these three interests of mine in today's topic Which is what design in different cultures for starters? This will be the agenda of the day First we'll talk about culture and what is it important and the difference between website design in West and the East as This is a rather big topic I'll just scope it to just US versus China and Japan especially Japan because that's Where my company of origin is from and then we share about reasons Why they are different and we end with key takeaways that will hopefully help you to improve in making a better product So let's start about culture This image here is a cultural map and it's published by a professor named Aaron Meyer for Harvard Business Review So what it is? It grids nationality on tooth access confrontation and Emotional expression if you look to the top left US ranks it's slightly confrontational and slightly emotionally expressive and Russia is very high-end. So if you meet a Russia guy, just don't make jokes about their nation I'm gonna just kill you and then on the lower end if you look at the bottom right, there'll be Japan basically what it shows is Japan is emotionally un-expressive and Avoid confrontation. I can tell you from experience. This is so true This is important. Why is this important? This is important because culture shifts your experience and anyone who designs website and Make products right will also be influenced by the culture So why is culture important? according to this book International user interface the authors who wrote this Alisa Delgado and Jacob Nelson They said it is no longer enough to simply offer a product translated in 10 to 20 different languages Users also want a product that acknowledges their unique cultural characteristic and business practices What this means for you is if you're a marketer if you want to drive engagement and one user to return their attention when using a product you need to localize and Nationalize your product to suit their unique cultural characteristic The better you can do this the better the engagement will be and the better the conversion rate will be which translates to better bottom line And hopefully better salary for all of us now Diane Sear associate professor at Simon Fraser says that culture affects everything it affects internet usage It affects how much you trust online purchases and most importantly website development If you think about it it makes sense because designers and developers are People and people are affected by culture influences I'll come back to this slide again in the later Slides, but let's start now So on the left is the most visited sites in USA Whereas on the right my right. It's the most visited sites in China to the left Websites that I'm sure you guys are familiar with and probably frequent visitors do To the right These are the top 10 equivalent in China that show The websites in US so Google very minimalistic a lot breeding space a lot white spaces. This is Yahoo as of yesterday Still a bit complicated, but still fine Now this is China this sex photos Screenshots of the websites the top 10 visited websites in China So right at a glance you see there's a big difference, right? Let's explore how global brands Change the website according to locale So to do this I will go to Chrome Okay first Starbucks This is Starbucks USA Because I'm lazy. I'll just use a scroll so Take it in Microsoft doesn't really have Starbucks for you, but there's coffee out there This is USA Okay, now we look at the Chinese version of Starbucks. This is the China version There's really nothing much to scroll here. It's just maybe two segments. That's it and then This is a Japanese version same brand same brand live website You can't scroll. There's no scrolling Okay Now let's look at KFC This is KFC USA It's not scrolling, but You can see big large banners and there's even arrows telling you please order now Okay, now let's look at KFC China This is KFC China and lastly KFC Japan Which is basically just tax Now last example that I'm gonna show is Honda This is Honda global or rather Honda USA again a lot of the big Hero banners large images clear call to actions Very nice very fancy a lot of building space Now we look to China this is China each one of this is actually link that you can click on and lastly Japan is basically a wall of tax grid Now that we see the difference You might start. Oh, that's the meme. Okay. There's supposed to be a Jackie Chan meme saying but why but Okay, it's missing. Just imagine is there So what is the reason behind the differences? Let's dissect the differences us websites in the West Big hero banners a lot of large and clear call to actions asking you to do things click on buttons clear navigation structure usually from top to bottom Optimized for searching when I say searching think of a museum example when you go to the museum You know your way around the place There will be arrows pointing that walk here walk there and then if you want to find a certain painting There will be two work guys as well as very clear brochures to help you to find Websites in the East is optimized for browsing a lot of tax looks crowded and busy More information than a search field and button. It's optimized for browsing The analogy that I like to use is supermarket just imagine tons of option for you and They expect you used to browse around instead of knowing what you want. Ah Sorry, this is a me. Sorry. Yeah, but why? So first reason is because typing is hard these two image show that how you should type Chinese Chinese has a lot of intonation so like the same word in English alphabet can mean a lot of things depends on how you pronounce it For example, you write Katya Then they will show you a lot of candidate words that you can choose from After you choose from then only your characters will show and to the right is How you will do it in mobile as well. It's the three-step process right in Alphabets English alphabets choose the characters wait for it to show up Japanese is even worse because they have three writing system here gonna Katakana and Kanji So first you need to Understand whether do you want to choose Hiragana Katakana and then select the Kanji and then show ups So as you can see the mobile is also pretty complicated. It's much easier to use English with this 24 characters So brand tutorial the design strategies at Mozilla has this to say Having Chinese takes a lot of time and finding the precise word isn't easy So in that case search sucks optimized for browsing To make life easier for the user Number two is the nature of the language Chinese and Japanese users Logographic characters in their writing system You will need to know a minimum of three thousand characters to read a newspaper And there are no spaces which is No capitalization and this is some example But for people who are familiar with the writing system immediately when you look at this You will see meaning whereas people who don't understand Chinese and character. They will just say painting or drawing It's concise Elephant is around nine characters, but In Japanese and Chinese is just one character What this means is they can squeeze in a lot more Copywriting in similar characters If let's say your website constraint is you have a screen with our seven hundred and sixty seven pixel and you can only input maybe 150 characters in In English 150 characters is just one sentence in Chinese and Japanese you can put in two or even three sentence To show you how concise is it. This is one of my favorite example. This is the actual word in Japanese So it's a fall character with which is a machine and what it means is when you're not hungry, but you eat because your mouth is lonely It's amazing right just how four characters can express so much So just imagine how much they can express in terms of marketing This is another example to the left is Amazon and to the right is Pinto talk a very popular website in China They're not the same but as you can see in English the characters Takes a variable number of words you can range from minimum of five to 15 but in Chinese is always just two or two characters max because of that The copywriters have more leeway in terms of putting in more copywriting to convince the buyers To buy the product now language is in in web especially topography is a very Complicated stuff and doing my research actually found a very good video to explain more about it So if you're interested you can watch this video of a whole team When he's was miss West I'm not I'm not being paid by which he's not sponsored but she can do that if he wants to it Yeah, but it's very interesting video really so Hopefully to watch it if you have time now third reason culture Remember in the first few slides we mentioned that Japan is emotionally Unexpressive and avoids confrontation, right? This is very true. I have a real anecdote when I went to Japan if you buy a ticket to a train station And there's no more ticket. They will never say no to you They will just say just to mutter cut aside, which means please wait a while And they will keep repeating it until you get it. Okay. They don't want me here So it's a culture that tries to say no and but because they don't say no You don't know what's the true intention therefore you need to convince them and how do you convince them in web? Throw a lot of text to them tell them that hey, this is really good for you This is really good for your mother's good for your family by everything Do you think not that what I'm saying is specific to Japan I'm not so sure by China, but I'm sure culture has its own influence as well Second thing is Japan is a culture that discourage wastage. They don't throw anything If you go to Japan, you won't find a rubbish bin in public spaces In fact, you're expected to carry your own plastic bag and put your own rubbish in your own plastic bag And then throw it when you probably go back to your own home country or something, but The reason this is serious. They really don't like wastage and to them white space is waste Last but not least It maybe it's the real life advertisement So I'm about to show you two photos of Japan and how advertisement is done in the physical world in Japan This is one in Shinjuku in the morning and this is in Kabukicho as well as Akehabara or someplace near but as you can see this is the way they were brought up They are used to advertisement popping up in every facet of their face Just go anywhere even through the elevator Advertisements everywhere and as such the culture of advertisement permits through the web design and carries over to the web For us people who are used to have a lot of reading space a lot of White white space in between you think that is cluttered is crowded is busy But if you ask the Japanese native or even a native Chinese right They will say it's unnatural to not have all this text because I don't know if your product is worth buying So this is perspective of local users So now that we know the reasons behind why the websites are designed differently Let's take a look at the key takeaways that we can Learn to help design better products number one higher diverse team in My company we have people from eight different nationalities and I often find that their perspective is very interesting The more people you have from different nationalities and countries the more perspective and you have and the diversity makes for a better product I remember one time when I speaking to my Indian colleague the MRT was delayed by 30 minutes and As usual, you know people start complaining, you know start coffee couple and stuff But then my Indian colleagues just just laugh and then ask him Are you not annoyed or frustrated because you know it is late and you can be really at work And then he told me like dude in my country The train doesn't stop the train sometimes delayed by two hours and the doors are not closed And it's natural for them So these are the things that we take for granted we take for granted that Singapore has this amazing Infrastructure that allows us to come to this nice wonderful place and appease us, but the perspective from different nationalities might differ So it's really important to have a diverse team and listen from their perspective Number two Always do user research Do not assume that your requirement is the same as a requirement of your user and the key is local If you are designing for a Japanese market, don't ask Singaporeans for for their user research It makes sense to go to where your local users it and ask them To use your product to test it Without assisting them so you get the most valuable data from them and those informations will help to make your product more useful for them and That's the end of my talk. Thank you so much for listening