Mobile-only design trumps mobile-first on China’s internet
Kendra (whose writing we previously featured) writes about the state of Chinese web design in 2015 in Smashing Magazine’s On China’s Bleeding Edge: Web Design Trends 2015. Reporting on the advent of responsive, mobile-first design in China, she discovers that companies are instead going for a Wechat-friendly, mobile-only approach. In an interview with Saber Zou, head of creative at Logic Design, she quotes him as saying:
“There aren’t a lot of responsive websites in China, as most clients prefer separate websites for different devices. In terms of responsive, we don’t really relate to the web in that way; we don’t think of the desktop website as a mothership, or even as a scaled-up version of a more streamlined mobile website. Actually, a significant number of Chinese companies are bypassing the desktop experience entirely.”
To that end, many companies are building mobile-only “light apps” (轻应用) for access within the mobile and/or Wechat browser. Many are, crassly speaking, like mobile-optimized, animation-heavy, Flash apps, but built in HTML5. Kendra’s article has a great showcase, and we’ve captured our favorite one here:
Some pretty great animations in this mobile-only HTML5 (not Flash) ad for a recent Jiang Wen movie.
A video posted by Jason Li (@hongkonggong) on
The article also covers the Wechat wallet, Typekit-like services for Chinese fonts, the latest in desktop web design, and more. Read the rest in Smashing Magazine’s On China’s Bleeding Edge: Web Design Trends 2015.