Mae

If you open a Chinese app for the first time, you’ll probably think it’s badly designed. Too many icons and features. Everything crammed onto one screen. If you grew up on Western apps, your instinct is immediate: this is cluttered. But it works. In the U.S., we’ve been trained to associate good UX with minimalism. In China, density often signals value. Open WeChat or Alipay, and it feels overwhelming at first. Information-heavy, feature-packed. But to local users, that density means capability. It says: everything you might need is already here in front of you. If you enter a new market assuming your design taste equals good UX, you’ll misread the signal. Good design is contextual.