How culture shapes UX: Western vs. Asian product design

Why Asian UX feels so different — and what we can learn from each other.

Illustrations by Kristina Volchek

After five years in Poland, I decided to fully embrace the digital nomad lifestyle. My partner and I sold, donated, or threw away most of our belongings and packed our lives into just two suitcases. We kicked things off with two months in Bangkok, Thailand (where I’m writing this from), and next up: Fukuoka, Japan, just in time for the Sakura season.

As I settle into life in Asia, I’ve been noticing cultural differences everywhere — not just in daily life, but in design. And in January, something particularly interesting happened: thousands of Western “TikTok refugees” found themselves on the Chinese app RedNote (小红书).

This unexpected migration got me thinking — how do Western and Asian design cultures differ? And where can we find common ground?

What the TikTok ban taught us about design & adaptability

Last month, the temporary TikTok ban in the US sent thousands of users scrambling for alternatives. Some landed on Instagram Reels, others on YouTube Shorts — but a surprising number ended up somewhere completely different: RedNote (follow me there 😉), China’s Instagram-TikTok hybrid.

At first, it seemed like just a temporary switch. RedNote’s interface is busier, denser, and packs in more information upfront — quite a contrast to Instagram’s clean, photo-based simplicity. By Western UX standards, it should have felt overwhelming.

But something surprising happened: Western users adapted.

Despite cultural differences in design (and poor translation), many users figured out how to navigate the app, engage with its content, and even appreciate some of its design choices. This challenges a common assumption — that Western users inherently need minimalism to function efficiently in digital spaces. Instead, it turns out they’re more adaptable than expected — and maybe the way we think about “good UX” is more flexible than we thought.