Not a Chinese specialty: Web development under cultural differences

Not a Chinese specialty: Web development under cultural differences
Web development under cultural differences: Features are not unique to China 123WORDPRESS.COM
Web design and development is hard work, so don't design for just a few people. This is a blog written by a foreigner, detailing the web development problems caused by cultural differences in his eyes. “Characteristics” are not unique to China. Perhaps as a Chinese designer, we also need to consider Indonesian and Singaporean characteristics…
Who wants to be treated as a minority? Unless you are lucky enough to be one of the “tall, rich and handsome” or “white, rich and beautiful” people, “minority groups” are usually discriminated against. Like social discrimination, technological discrimination stems from the neglect of certain factors, but people do not seem to be fully aware of the harm of doing so.
This problem is largely due to cultural differences, or more specifically, a lack of cultural awareness. What I mean is this: developers themselves may have a preconceived culture, but from a global perspective, this may be wrong and often results in users being ignored.
In order to pursue a more harmonious Internet experience on a global scale, it is necessary to understand the 10 problems encountered in the process of web development. Some of these issues may not be new to you, but you cannot avoid them if you want to live in harmony with people of different cultures.
1. Firefox and Chrome occupy 91% of the market?
I'm not kidding, I'm serious, look at the picture below:
Indonesia's browser share is completely different from their global share
Indonesia's browser share is completely different from their global proportion. If you are in Indonesia, you will deeply experience this. The data comes from StatCounter, an internet traffic monitoring agency. Although the data from different statistical agencies may vary slightly, the overall trend is: IE is dead in Indonesia. 93% of people in this country use Windows 7 or Windows XP, so it's not the Mac or Unix's fault, they just don't use the default browser.
This is a classic example of how the key to developing a website is to understand your target audience, and global statistics are sometimes irrelevant. Although Chrome may only be a few percentage points ahead of IE globally, the situation is very different in Indonesia. Context is everything.
2. August 7th may not always be written as 8/7. Sometimes it can also be written as 7/8.
I believe many people understand this, but often ignore it intentionally or unintentionally - after all, not many places use the expression "sun/moon". But in fact, if you use "month/day", you are a "minority" instead, and most likely an American or Belizean. If you don’t believe it, take a look at the picture below:
Different countries have completely different date formats.
Different countries have completely different formats for expressing dates. Cyan uses "day/month/year", with a population of about 3.2 billion; yellow uses "year/month/day", with a population of about 1.5 billion; purple uses "month/day/year", with a population of about 310 million; red uses "day/month/year" or "month/day/year" at the same time, with a population of about 120 million; green uses "year/month/day" or "day/month/year", with a population of about 110 million. Gray uses "year/month/day", "day/month/year" and "month/day/year", with a population of about 30 million; blue uses "year/month/day" and "month/day/year", with a population close to zero.
The problem is not which way to express the month and day, which is ambiguous. If you only see "7/8", you can understand it as July 8th or August 7th. Even if it's a US or Belize site, how do I know if it will automatically adjust settings based on information like IP address or user profile?
This website called 6speedonline.com made the mistake:
What number is this?
What number is this?
Is it July or February? Without a date beyond December or other information to help you make a judgment, it's all guesswork.
The Stack Overflow approach is more desirable:
This makes the date clearer.
This way the date is clearer. No matter what order you use, as long as letters are used to represent the month, there will be no ambiguity.
3. The probability of having the surname "Wang" is 40 times greater than the probability of having the surname "Jones". There are 2.38 million people with the surname Jones in the United States, which is not a small number, but it is completely insignificant compared to the number of people with the surname Wang in China, which has a total of 92.88 million. There are many similar examples in other countries, but the key point is that a considerable number of people have non-Roman letters in their names.
It is critical for developers to be aware of this trend and adapt accordingly. Think about how upsetting it would be if you tried to register a website but were rejected because your name was "not acceptable"? People of Irish descent all over the world have an apostrophe in their last names, such as O'Sullivan, O'Brien, O'Connor. But my dear Australian government recently went so far as to not allow the use of this symbol in the e-health portal.
As a developer, you need to pay special attention to the following two situations:
(1) Is there a whitelist or blacklist that restricts such names? Irish names often encounter this embarrassment.
(2) Can the database support multi-byte characters? You need to be extra careful when configuring the database.
However, it is not only Chinese that needs multi-byte character support, Cyrillic languages ​​do the same.
4. Windows XP still has 68% of the operating system market. Yes, even compared to its nearest competitor, Windows XP has a market share that is a full two and a half times higher - but this only happens in the world's most populous country:
Yes, this is the country with the largest population in the world and the largest XP share. Foreigners don’t know the reason, but you know.
Yes, this is the country with the largest population in the world and the largest XP share. Foreigners don’t know the reason, but you know.
Whatever the reason, XP is indeed very popular in China. In other words, these 68% of Chinese people basically do not use IE9. No IE9 means no HTML5, unless you don't use the system default browser. At the current rate, XP will continue to dominate the Chinese market until around 2015, by which time the system will be in its teens.
5. $ doesn’t always mean US dollars Have you ever spent $30 on a cup of coffee? It sounds extravagant, but thousands of people in Hong Kong do this every day because in Hong Kong, $1 is only worth one-eighth of what it is in Australia and the United States. In Singapore and New Zealand, the value of $1 changes again.
There are 35 countries or regions in the world that use $ as their currency unit, so the specific value depends on the environment. Every time you use $ without considering the context, you risk confusing the value of the currency.
For example, how much does Ghost in the Wires sell for on Amazon?
How much does Ghost in the Wires sell for on Amazon?
How much does Ghost in the Wires sell for on Amazon?
I know Amazon is in the US, but does that mean it uses US dollars? Amazon also supports automatic currency conversion, so how do I know it's not showing Australian dollars?
There is a global standard for monetary units, namely ISO 4217, and AUD, HKD, NZD, USD, and SGD can be used to represent the currency of a specific country. I'm not saying that all $ should be replaced with three letters, but there are some cases where it is necessary to clearly indicate the value in this way.
Let’s take a look at eBay. The price of this product is clearly marked:
Well, the price is much better this way.
Well, the pricing is much better this way. It’s clear and unambiguous. No more guessing required. This is how it should be whenever money is involved.
6. Country top-level domain names can provide background information. If you are in Australia, you can use the .au top-level domain name; in the UK, you can use .uk; in the Netherlands, you can use .nl.
One of the important functions of country code top-level domains is to provide background information. When you see this suffix, you can immediately understand the audience range of the website. But the problem is that not everyone is willing to follow the rules.
This phenomenon is particularly evident in the United States. Although the United States has the .us national top-level domain name available, many companies or institutions never use it. For example, the following website:
Domain Name Issues
Domain name problem: The name of this organization already shows that its service scope is the United States, but the domain name is poorly chosen, which makes people mistakenly believe that they serve the world.
The same goes for a local restaurant:
Domain Name Issue 2
The second domain name issue is that perhaps they just want to prevent their international top-level domain name from being preempted, and they have also applied for the corresponding .us domain name. Unfortunately, there is no such domain name as mastrosrestaurants.us. If you enter usoutdoor.us, you will be directed to another website:
If you do not register your own country domain name
The situation of not registering your own country domain name In theory, .com is internationally used, so you can apply for it at will, regardless of the scope of your service - even if you are a local restaurant. However, according to the regulations of the domain name agency, .edu, .gov, and .mil can only be used by educational, government, and military institutions in the United States. Why?
7. iPhone may not be the absolute leader everywhere. In Australia, whoever has the iPhone will win the world:
This is Australia: Whoever gets the iPhone gets the world
This is an Australian feature: whoever has the iPhone rules the world. Judging from Australian data, Apple is in an absolute leading position in the mobile market. Although Android has made some progress this year, it's not the biggest deal.
Although the iPhone only has a 15% market share in China, it was not officially launched in China until the end of 2009. There was no WiFi at the time, so it is completely understandable. Moreover, there are many counterfeit iPhones in China. Let's look at Brazil, where Nokia and Samsung account for two-thirds of the market share. India is a different story.
The key to discussing these data is that the mobile market landscape varies greatly around the world. The same phone may be released at different times in different countries, and in some regions it may not be released at all. In addition, the attitude of operators and the overall prosperity of the country will also lead to differences in the market structure.
Although the accuracy of StatCounter's data may be questionable, it is basically consistent with my observations.
8. Time zone is very important. Different times are different. What is 4:30 here may be another time where you are. Although most people know that the world is divided into 40 time zones, they are not necessarily divided strictly according to longitude. The details are as follows:
It is important to have an international perspective on time zones, especially for media websites.
We should have an international perspective on the issue of time zones, especially for media websites, as each time corresponds to a specific time zone. Without knowing the time zone, misunderstandings can occur. For example, what time does the following website actually say:
It's really frustrating to not know the time of "Important Notice"
"Important Notification" It's really frustrating to not be able to figure out the time. Is it noon here? Or is it noon in the US and morning here? Or is it noon in the UK and evening here? This is an Android development forum that attracts people from all over the world, so obviously you need to pay attention to time zones, otherwise misunderstandings will occur.
Let’s go back to Stack Overflow and see how they do it well:
Stack Overflow Example
Although the Stack Overflow example requires the user to actively hover the mouse over the time, it at least provides time zone information. Some websites directly use coordinated time, which is the UTC you see, instead of targeting a specific time zone.
On some websites, time plays an important role, and it is important to allow people to set their own time zone. Just like ASafaWeb:
Allows you to set your own time zone
Allows you to set the time zone independently. These time zones come from the TimZoneInfo class of .NET, and conversion is easy to achieve. But don’t do this:
Too complicated is meaningless
Too much verbosity to be meaningful Although this is straight from the time zone database, to most people this won't make sense. Many countries do not have "Southern" or "Western" time, nor do they have different time zones.
9. Treat international users equally Some websites are designed for people in a specific area. For example, a grocery store website is only for nearby residents, so there will be some preconceived ideas, such as the contact page that only locals can understand:
For locals, such calls are no problem.
For locals, such calls are fine. If you are calling in the same country, there will be no problem and no misunderstanding of business hours. But if you allow people everywhere to sign up for free, like IFTTT does, there will be a problem:
Don’t differentiate between “local” and “non-local”
Do not differentiate between "local" and "non-local". There are 8 places in the time zone list above that are not arranged in alphabetical order because they are all places in the United States. That would be fine if IFTTT was a US-only site, but it isn't. For such an excellent service, this approach results in users being divided into two categories: Americans and inferior non-Americans.
Of course, a website designer might say, “Our main users are from the United States.” But it’s perfectly acceptable to follow these steps:
Sorting by subtitle order will be more consistent
Arranging by subtitle order will be more consistent. This mode does not disrupt the alphabetical order, but only highlights some American regions. This gives a much better feeling: although their main target users are Americans, foreign users will not be ignored.
10. Don't forget 360 Safe Browser. Are people abandoning Chrome and Firefox and switching to 360 Safe Browser? In just two months, the market share of this browser in China has climbed from less than 3% in May to 26%:
The highlight is always at the end
The highlight is always at the end. If you are not Chinese, you may not know much about this product, but you can take a look at their logo first:
This familiar logo
This familiar logo
Does it look familiar? Similar copycat logos are very common in China.
Putting this aside for now, 360 Browser has indeed achieved impressive results. Data from some institutions even show that the product has captured 57% of the browser share in China. Don’t forget, this is a country with 512 million Internet users, more than the United States, India and Japan combined - the three countries with the second to fourth largest total Internet users in the world.
For various reasons, Chinese netizens rarely visit foreign websites, but as a developer, you have to ask yourself a question: "Can my website be well compatible with this browser used by 250 million netizens?"
Practical Advice When it comes down to it, these are mostly about emphasizing the target audience. If you develop a website for Indonesians, it will definitely be different from developing a website for Chinese. But if you’re not designing for just one cultural context, you have to be aware of the diverse landscape of today’s Internet market.
Often times, better global visibility won't have any impact on primary users, but it can benefit users in other countries. Would having an extra letter on the date affect the usability of the site? Would showing the time zone ruin the experience for American users? Of course not, so try to be nice to your users - especially Chinese users.

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