About Us

Our Proposal

“What is the future of excellent ‘Chinese UX’?” by Stacey Baradit

Overview & Motivations

Over the next semester, I’m very interested in researching US UI vs. Chinese UI standards and UX design philosophy. In the past, much of the world’s UI has been largely driven (defacto) from western, particularly US standards and trends; however China, which has been largely isolated from western sites, has recently moved from ‘haphazard copying’ to ‘thoughtful design’ in a way that does not mirror US trends. Their homegrown UX designers have created interfaces that have enhanced usability and appealed to the specific needs of their users, even though these designs defy Western traditional standards of ‘excellent UX’.

Plan of Action

In order to tackle this research, I propose a project with three parts.

  1. Part 1: Research, identify and define ‘UI standards’ for US sites/apps and Chinese sites/apps. Explain the appeal and usability these standards hold for their market and note key areas of divergence between US and Chinese standards.
  2. Part 2: Identify trends and underlying causes/explanations behind each set of standards. This can include historical approaches to design and art, text input usability/optimization, key cultural influences, and overall market trends which are favored by users.
  3. Part 3: Propose a vision for the future of Chinese UX.

By doing Part 1, I can sufficiently expand my knowledge of UI standards in order to tackle Part 2. Part 2 will allow me to understand underlying trends and behavior, all the way down to psychological motivations (cognitive & social) for their preferences.

Areas of Research

In particular, our team will research a combination of the following in order to understand the underlying UX trends:

  • Social-Cultural customs
  • Art/Design history
  • Business Practices
  • Political Philosophy/Customs
  • Modern Visual Design
  • Cognitive Science/Psychology
  • Economics & International Relations

After understanding the underlying reasons for the differences, we plan to hypothesize the direction in which Chinese UX will grow over the next few years.

Although this may seem daunting, I do have sufficient background in this field in order to complete the work with minimal supervision. My undergraduate degree (double major) is Psychology and Chinese, and I’ve spent the last 5 years working in China. During the last 2.5 years, I was a UX team manager and spent much of my time planning UX design projects for clients, evangelizing the benefits of UX methodology and practice, and designing and conducting usability testing for Chinese, Japanese and western clients/users. I still have connections in with User Experience designers in China and have worked with other designers here who have dealt with cross-cultural design which I plan to leverage for resources, knowledge and guidance.

My initial hypothesis is that excellent ‘Chinese UX” will be driven by different principles and therefore allow for new types of UIs to emerge. The ultimate goal of this project is to understand what those new types of UIs and their standards will be.