How is Japanese web design different?

133 114 4 years ago

I think that the design with a lot more text, and less pictures, is a better design. (Unfortunately, almost required them to use Unicode; although Shift-JIS is sometimes in use, TRON code is not.) (There are other problems with web design all over the world including Japanese, but I have seen many Japanese web pages with a better design than ones with English text.)

Aardwolf• 4 years ago

breaking the 3 colour design principle

Is it possible designers have some principles that don't necessarily match real life usability? Only 3 colors is incredibly boring to me.

I see that hacker news also only has 3 colors, it's fine in this case because there's not much reason to have more. That doesn't apply to, say e.g., photoshop (and gimp following this too now for unknown reasons) only having 2-color icons, while multicolor ones are faster to distinguish visually

jfengel• 4 years ago

Note that the "rule of 3 colors" is about three hues. The full design will incorporate variations of those colors: brighter and darker, more and less saturated. Your brain actually thinks of these as "the same color", though HTML and CSS don't.

It's a design principle which is safe: it's not going to clash in an ugly way, or make combinations that are hard to read. They can be used (in conjunction with other design principles) to draw the attention where it's needed, and have the eye flow through the page without distraction.

"Safe" and "boring" are two sides of the same coin. I personally don't mind boring, and easily get aggravated by choices that distract. A truly great design breaks the safe principles, though usually at a high cost. (Usually, having tried and rejected many combinations.)

nstbayless• 4 years ago

Gimp takes strange turns now and then, does but gradually improve over time. It used to be that fuzzy-select would cause immense lag practically every time. Now my biggest complaint with selection is merely that the rectangle select tool defaults to centred.

If it helps, you can enable the old style icons in preferences.

wolpoli• 4 years ago

Well, design principles aren't actually laws, but they follow trends so they change and evolve.

nottorp• 4 years ago

Let's not forget there must not be any contrast :)

amadeuspagel3• 4 years ago

Curiously, twitter, a beautiful minimalist website, is very popular in japan, has as much users there as in the US.

ideamotor2• 4 years ago

Twitter is an incredibly well designed app and website. Well, it was.

canadiantim• 4 years ago

What changed?

amadeuspagel3• 4 years ago

It still is.

theCrowing4• 4 years ago

Was it? They had an outdated "street art style" startpage with nothing but a login for over 4 years. No search, no trends nothing just a login.

michalf6• 4 years ago

It's slow as hell and I'm afraid to click anywhere because I'm never sure if there's a way to return.

sarasasa28• 4 years ago

What? No. I mean, what? What??

First time I tried to get myself more into twitter I felt the same barrier as trying to use snapchat as a 30+ y.o.

deafpolygon• 4 years ago

I find japanese web design refreshing in some ways.

ericol• 4 years ago

Just found [1] this in "newest" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6ep308goxQ "Why Japan’s Internet is weirdly designed [video]"

[1] I made a comment before regarding how HN works, and usually when one certain issue piques interest there's an influx of related posts.

woojoo6662• 4 years ago

I wonder why Sabrina didn't link to her video from her article

O__________O• 4 years ago

Related YouTube:

why Japan's internet is weirdly designed

https://youtube.com/watch?v=z6ep308goxQ

xwolfi• 4 years ago

It's not ! China is the same, and I bet my shirt India isnt far.

jimmaswell• 4 years ago

Maybe Japanese people have resisted the western degeneration in attention span and patience, and retain the ability to not have a seizure looking at a webpage with a modicum of information density. I've noticed this trend following very "busy" 1800s signs/newspapers/etc up to now. People back then weren't addicted to fast and easy dopamine and had the mental space to parse something with detail on it.

Waterluvian• 4 years ago

That's an interesting perspective. I've always seen it to be the opposite, particularly when playing many Japanese video games: signs everywhere, tons of over-emoting both verbal and physical, exaggerated everything, lots of noises, ridiculously large numbers that must be flashed all over, lots of visual flashing. Lots of particle/special effects. Just a ton of really inexpensive dopamine for retaining capture of low attention span.

Not that any of this is inherently wrong. I'm not judging it (and I often enjoy it). But I think there's a sufficiently strong example of the opposite in modern Japanese culture.

What's interesting is, I think, we're both describing "very high information density" but seeing it as a result of high attention span, or low attention span. Heh!

bakugo• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure this is indeed a significant part of it. While watching the relevant video she says she gets "overwhelmed" by the old reddit layout because of the "amount of text" (which isn't even that much) and I really do have to wonder how these people even managed to live their lives before the age of the smartphone without suffering regular mental breakdowns every time they saw a newspaper. The future does not look good.

hbn• 4 years ago

I certainly don't get the feeling of a patient attention span whenever I've seen clips from Japanese TV where on top of the main action they have shining brightly-colored text and graphics popping up all over, scrolling banners, maybe a reaction cam cutting between multiple people hamming up their reactions to everything, etc.

And the websites look pretty similar in design.

Oxidation2• 4 years ago

I'm not sure I agree with all of that: a notable difference between modern media and 1800s newsprint is the paper was very expensive then compared to more recently, so it was highly economical to cram everything onto fewer physical pages. Electronic media has essentially zero marginal costs for longer or less dense content.

The same goes for cheaper books (which still were not as cheap as modern mass-market books in PPP terms): narrow margins and crammed text. But as soon as you move up market to expensive books, the margins widen and the text lines open up. People still liked the aesthetic of open and airy, but it cost a lot.

Further more, for signs, you had to get everything on them. There was no Internet, no phones, no Yellow Pages, no CeeFax. Someone interested in your service would have to stand there and copy the relevant details into their pocket book.

On the other hand, I do very much detest the glossy websites where there are something like 20,000 vertical pixels of flashy content, but none of it useful. Just endless fluff, vagueries and calls-to-ill-defined-actions. 90% of people just want to know your opening hours, contact details and a price list (services) or menu (for food). And the delivery costs. Everything else is a waste of everyone's bandwidth until you have made those things front and centre.

viraptor• 4 years ago

People back then weren't addicted to fast and easy dopamine and had the mental space to parse something with detail on it.

That's one serious assumption you're making. Has anyone actually proven that?

tablespoon• 4 years ago

I've noticed this trend following very "busy" 1800s signs/newspapers/etc up to now. People back then weren't addicted to fast and easy dopamine and had the mental space to parse something with detail on it.

I've recently been reading Amusing Ourselves to Death (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death), and it noted that in the 1800s America has a "literate" culture: people read a lot and had correspondingly longer attention spans. Apparently attending debates and lectures were a fairly common activity, and those went on for hours, with each side having plenty of time to express complete and complex thoughts, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Douglas_debate...:

Each debate lasted about three hours; one candidate spoke for 60 minutes, followed by a 90-minute response and a final 30-minute rejoinder by the first candidate. The candidates alternated speaking first. As the incumbent, Douglas spoke first in four of the debates....
The debates took place between August and October 1858. Newspapers reported 12,000 in attendance at Ottawa,[7] 16,000 to 18,000 in Galesburg,[4] 15,000 in Freeport,[8] 12,000 in Quincy, and at the last one, in Alton, 5,000 to 10,000.[6] The debates near Illinois's borders (Freeport, Quincy, and Alton) drew large numbers of people from neighboring states.[9][full citation needed][10] A number travelled within Illinois to follow the debates.[7]

kaba04• 4 years ago

I have already linked it ( https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790.amp ), but attention span itself didn’t decrease, it’s not even an existing concept. Media producers just got better at maximizing our engagement with their content, and comparatively a plain old book will be boring to our brains. This thought actually did help me in that I can’t fall victim of “learned helplessness” here, just put that phone down and work on the thing you want. Focus modes are also very beneficial.

Nonetheless, interesting historical fact, thanks for sharing!

sph• 4 years ago

Ah yes, the famous modern Japanese restrained design because they have longer attention span than ours. They wouldn't need flashy neon colours to keep engaged. That's some confirmation bias.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabukich%C5%8D#/media/File%3...

kaba04• 4 years ago

Attention span hasn’t decreased, hell, it is not even a thing. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790.amp

sourcecodeplz• 4 years ago

Looking at the websites mentioned in the randomwire article, those popular websites are not like this article portrays them to be anymore, imho.

iszomer• 4 years ago

Because KISS?

neilv• 4 years ago

Loading much faster for me: https://web.archive.org/web/20221125181106/https://sabrinas....

datene• 4 years ago

Well found, images are so slow on original link

Markoff5• 4 years ago

Author loads full size images which are just shrinked instead loading thumbnails and then writes article about website design.

IshKebab• 4 years ago

Is he drawing conclusions based on those 13 red dots, which appear to be as randomly distributed as all the other countries' dots?

Seems like a case of "as you can see from this completely random graph there is a clear correlation..."

bitwize• 4 years ago

She.

yamrzou• 4 years ago

People nowadays can't handle information-dense websites anymore. I showed HN to a couple friends once and they were like “How can you read on this website?”. I'm glad HN kept the same design since 2007.

dmitshur• 4 years ago

I'm glad HN kept the same design since 2007.

As someone who enjoys and prefers high-density of information, I generally agree.

I do, however, wish HN would add support for @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark). By now it's one of the few sites that are still unpleasantly bright to look at when in a dark environment. (When I don't forget, I visit https://darkhn.herokuapp.com/ instead, which helps but can't be used to upvote/comment.)

aeontech• 4 years ago

If you're on iOS/macOS, "HN Dark Mode" extension adds a dark mode style sheet that works pretty well:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hn-dark-mode/id1611040838

xvello• 4 years ago

Agreed. In the meantime, I use the following uBlockOrigin rules:

    news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter:invert(100%) hue-rotate(180deg))
    news.ycombinator.com##body:style(background: white)
    news.ycombinator.com##div.toptext:style(color: black)
    news.ycombinator.com###hnmain td[bgcolor="#000000"]

mlindner• 4 years ago

I'm not sure on your browser, but I've used this for quite a long time, since long before dark mode was available on most websites: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/darkreader/

It turns most websites into a dark mode equivalent (mostly) correctly. Some websites it just doesn't work for and you need to disable it, but it's otherwise great. It also auto-detects (most of the time) when a site supports dark mode and shuts itself off for that site.

RajT88• 4 years ago

I love information-dense websites.

As long as you strip out the distractions: Pictures and videos which add nothing, ads, other visual cruft.

Clean design is nice, but I like being able to consume the relevant bits without having to scroll. I can move my eyes around.

Which brings me around to my point - not everyone has the same preferences with regard to presentation and parsing of information. The latest trends in web design aren't necessarily better - they are Western (and English) centric, and as well highly informed by an industry which likes to foist things on their users and hope they become trained to accept it as normal.

I don't see Japanese web design as backward, ancient, dated, just different. Possibly, in some ways, better.

I'd love to see an analysis of loadtimes, page size, tracking javascript, etc. When I have low signal on my phone (and thus not much bandwidth), these beautiful clean, minimal websites somehow take an age to load - because of all the largely invisible baggage they come along with.

It's part of why I love this site for news, as well as lite.cnn.io. (If anyone knows of more sites stripped of everything but text for news, I'm always looking for some)

hoppyhoppy2• 4 years ago

https://text.npr.org/

Markoff5• 4 years ago

I use compact layout in Reddit, mailbox and pretty much everywhere but still can't stand HN layout, I read it through Serializer.io much cleaner design and anyway I don't want curated home page but also don't wanna go through all New.

Animats• 4 years ago

Japan had phones with lots of graphics well before smartphones. Those systems were not web-based. They were mobile-only, and for small screens.

China has another system. Many things are applets within the WeChat environment. This is a whole different world, using MINA, WXML, and WXSS. It's kind of like XML with an external XSS style sheet. Here's the official repo.[1]

It's interesting to see where that division leads. The XSS approach separates content and look much more strongly than HTML/CSS does. (At least as HTML/CSS is typically used. It's possible to have an HTML document with just the data, and use a single separate style sheet in CSs. There are people who argue for that, and some elegant examples.[2] But they are voices in the wilderness.)

The funny thing is, despite a different underlying technology, WeChat applets seem to look a lot like HTML/CSS web pages. The difference may be that the WeChat system was efficient enough to eliminate the demand for "native" smartphone apps.

[1] https://github.com/Tencent/weui-wxss

[2] https://every-layout.dev/blog/css-components/

cuttysnark• 4 years ago

Anyone else having issues loading the images? They appear to be (not even large, dimensionally) pngs, but loading, line-by-line as if they are massive files—calculating ~10mins to download. Checked my download speed, no sign of an issue.

Edit: curl https://sabrinas.space/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/goo-1024x5... --output 'test.png' took 0:04:22

ThinkBeat• 4 years ago

after running 2,671 images of the most popular websites in every country through an AI

Um. That did what? How were the images processed?

I ran the images through an AI feels oddly nonspecific. Perhaps it is specified better somewhere the page didn't entirely load for me. I see some images of clustering that I presume was the output from the AI.

flobosg• 4 years ago

How were the images processed?

The methodology is described further down in the article. The author extracted features from the screenshots with OpenCV and then reduced the dimensionality of the feature set using t-SNE.

vinyl7• 4 years ago

Have to use the word "AI" for SEO and clickbait purposes. If you can't relate to Current Thing then are you even worth reading?

andsoitis• 4 years ago

What’s an example of a “Japanese web design” site that has global appeal?

csa• 4 years ago

I love the style of analysis, but it doesn’t hit on some key things, imho.

1. Japan pretty much missed the desktop internet phase in the 90s and early 00s. Services like Compuserve and AOL (or Japanese equivalents) were not often utilized. ISPs, while often quite good (shout out to TWICS), were used mostly by tech folks, who have never been in high demand or had high prestige in Japan. A consequence of this is that desktop-based web design in Japan did not have a robust or competitive forcing function for optimization or usability in the 90s or the 00s, and then was just able to be skipped by the smart phone revolution.

2. That said, and as mentioned by the OP, Japan was way ahead in cell phone tech. In the early to mid 00s, I used the web as a critical info dump for some folks with whom I was working. They all accessed via phone, and I quickly learned that I needed to design accordingly (light and clean) if I wanted the info to be accessed and used. Most commercial websites were not designed this way, and they also were not accessed by users regularly — the data charges would have been insane.

3. Class signals 1 - I read something about minimalist design in Japan many years ago that jibes with my anecdotal experiences. Basically, if you see something with a simple and clean design with a lot of empty space, it’s usually a signal of high class and/or high quality and almost certainly high cost. This holds for a wide range of things like magazines, restaurants, menus, hotels, etc. Most Japanese folks see these types of designs as either expensive things to avoid (due to budget) and/or possible conspicuous displays of affluence that are frequently avoided by those who have the means (there are some folks who like to virtue signal while pretending to be something that they are not, but that’s a different issue). So a default reaction for many Japanese people to an empty design, especially empty dark, would be “I am not their target market”, even if they actually are.

2. Class signals 2 - The following is my opinion based on my experiences living in Japan for 8 years and working with things Japanese for many more, and I have no citations, but… Japanese people across the whole country (i.e., not just people in Tokyo) can mostly be grouped into the category of middle class income with working class tastes. This can be seen across a wide range of categories including food, clothing, housing, media consumption, etc. The exceptions outside of this large group (e.g., people who were raised with and embrace a classical and traditional upbringing) are easily noticed once some amount of time is spent with them.

As a simple example, compare the design of this sports newspaper (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_Hochi) with that of its mainstream parent company counterpart (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yomiuri_Shimbun). The “everyday man” magazines and newspapers with the bold and garish design are abundant and ubiquitous (easily seen in convenience stores), while the relatively gray and conservative mainstream paper is pretty much only seen in salaryman-world. Japanese websites look quite a bit like the sports newspaper (to my mildly trained eye), and I think websites mimic this design because it works with their target audience. I think that this is comparable to sites in the US that lean heavily on ad networks like Taboola and Outbrain as their primary revenue sources — it works for their target market.

CONCLUSION

Internet use in Japan has always been an enigma to me. Japan has been so far ahead in some ways (e.g., I had screaming fast fiber optic to the home for less than $100 a month in the mid-00s), while being so far behind in so many other areas.

I think that there is a lot of room for disruption for companies that can take the reality of Japanese web use and tailor a better design around that reality. It seems like there is a lot of design inertia that is very sub-optimal. I’m not sure if the best way to attack this is by segmenting aggressively and targeting a lot of small accessible markets, or if the only way to changes things will be via a big mover that dictates online design taste (e.g., a domestic, Japan-grown Apple type of company). Perhaps both are possible.

Anyway, I hope that others who actually live and work in Japan can add some additional insights to my comments.

fomine32• 4 years ago

3. Class signals 1

This is good point. Rakuten style design is friendly in general.

layer8• 4 years ago

From one of the YouTube comments:

I live in Japan and personally I think it's cultural and has more to do with the aversion to change and also the critical shortage of competent IT professionals and foreign-language speakers in this country. Often times websites aren't just designed differently, they are lacking basic functionality. Any foreign resident has a story about how some important website like their bank or a government site wouldn't let them in because their name was too many characters to enter into a text field or something. The government released this contact tracing app for covid and it didn't come out until like 5 months later that the app was broken on android and just literally didn't do anything. Japan's former cyber-security minister was outed as having never used a computer in his life after admitting in front of some committee that he didn't know what a USB drive is. Just look at the difference between Amazon jp and the local version, Rakuten, and it's clear how dated and non-functional Japanese sites are.

The problem is these companies are all headed by septuagenarian nepotism hires who can never be told they're wrong, staffed by programmers who have no idea of industry best-practices because they've been trained by these old guys who don't have a clue either and just want to keep doing what they've been doing since they learned to code in the 90s and can't read non-Japanese documentation, and the consumers also are tech illiterate enough not to notice or care that the websites are dogshit because they're used to it and again never access any non-japanese content because of no foreign language skills. And also old tech is rampant in major companies for the same reasons, which means often times these ancient devices are too slow to run modern websites well.

ionwake• 4 years ago

Very interesting comment thank you

bluedino• 4 years ago

Sounds like a lot of government signs in the US.

I wonder if their backend systems are also ancient and it's hard to bring that to the web.

ram4jesus2• 4 years ago

I would love to work in Japan on their websites. I would take a pay cut if I could become a Citizen. But they don't want Hispanic people over there; which I understand their needs to be insular and homogeneous.

quelltext2• 4 years ago

Plenty of hispanics in Japan.

If you tried in earnest to go live in Japan and it didn't happen it's not because of racism. Yes there are some xenophobic tendencies, but they don't play into it. Money and "skills" on paper do.

If you don't tick the right boxes (e.g. graduated 4 years of university education, have demonstrable skills in a technical field, work experience, etc.) it's going to be difficult, of course. But that's the same anywhere.

franciscop5• 4 years ago

This is basically what I thought a while back (front-end dev living and working in Japan) but it cannot be the whole true because we foreigners have been saying this for a decade, and the obvious conclusion is that foreign websites that are "better" would come in and sweep the local competition. If Japanese were also horrified with these local designs, they'd JUMP as soon as a decent design comes, right?

But that just doesn't happen, and except in a few cases (so little that could be attributed to luck or natural competition, a big example being Twitter) what usually happens is the opposite, foreign companies come in blazing and get smashed into the ground. See Uber or Airbnb, the former disappeared and the latter is used almost exclusively by foreigners.

So I have two/three extra possible points that might happen, could also be a combination:

- Japanese are used and expect the density of websites here. As others said, look around Tokyo city and it's all hyper-dense, menus in restaurants have multiple layers of information within a page, the TV looks actually like the websites and we foreigners also meme about it[1]. So it might be the cultural norm and expectation, even if we foreigners find it ugly. And saying "consumers also are tech illiterate" about Japan is ignorant at best, condescending at worst.

- It is just a dinosaur thing, and those same dinosaurs use anti-competitive measures to stifle competition. A big one I've been waiting and I'm sure 99% of my friends and I would jump is a BANK with a decent UI. I cannot make international transfers (in EU it's literally like a national transfer) without signing for a different company which is a subsidiary (I believe) and cannot make recurrent payments, which are my two main complains, but it also just sucks in general. Laws based on a strong nationalistic feeling get passed to make e.g. Airbnb or financial companies harder.

- Companies entering Japan don't treat it with respect as a big market, but just as a "let's slap a bad translation on top and expect numbers as strong as in the USA", which is an issue I've seen first hand multiple times as well. For very similar cultures this might work, but for vastly different ones like USA vs Japan you'll need to do i18n besides just translation.

[1] this is really painfully brilliant: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/418/147/086...

bluepizza12• 4 years ago

- Uber Eats is super popular, what do you mean with disappeared?

- TeamLab’s design of the Resona Bank app is modern, lovely, functional, and full of features. All done by locals, for a local bank, to be used by locals. Don’t confuse lack of investment with a cultural effect.

- International transfers are difficult in any non European country, that’s why Wise became so popular. Shinsei makes a lot of their money on their antiquated but easy to use transfer system, for example. But Wise is the most popular international transfer app in Japan. Which also has a modern, easy to use UI. Both support recurrent scheduled payments.

- A lot of well designed UIs were jumped at, including iPhones, Apple TVs, Balmuda appliances, the new touch screen 7-11 ATMs, Uber Eats, etc.

It seems to me that you got trapped in the “I can’t criticise my host country and need to assent to every one of its quirks” attitude that plagues most foreigners in Japan. Most Japanese people find those websites fucking ugly, they just don’t care. I believe that this is the cultural effect at hand here - a lot of locals really don’t care if the design is good or not.

ben_w• 4 years ago

Companies entering Japan don't treat it with respect as a big market, but just as a "let's slap a bad translation on top and expect numbers as strong as in the USA", which is an issue I've seen first hand multiple times as well. For very similar cultures this might work, but for vastly different ones like USA vs Japan you'll need to do i18n besides just translation.

While I can’t speak for software going into Japan, I can absolutely believe it having seen this exact thing in reverse for a game coming out of Japan. You could give yourself a banner with a customisable name, but there was only room for one character on that banner. Great if your language has “狐”, not so much if 20% of your users pick “E” and another 10% pick “T”.

Even with much smaller cultural divides, I’ve faced “Knopf” being incorrect placed on a German naughty words filter because someone literally translated “knob” without asking a native speaker. (And you might be surprised how often IRL Germans ask me, in English, if I drove the train to work, though I do also appreciate that in reverse I probably sound like Crabtree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilhJvFngWcY)

porknubbins3• 4 years ago

On the unwillingness of Japanese to change- I think its actually Americans who are more unique because we are willing to upend large institutions and our whole social fabric when new technology comes along. Faith in progress and willingness to replace old systems to try something new is historically part of our national DNA, for better or worse. Japan values stability and generally only wants to use technology in a way that fits into the existing heirarchical social structure.

Markoff5• 4 years ago

I think you are confusing internalization with localization. Internalization can be used for similar cultures, localization is required for different cultures.

fomine32• 4 years ago

Govt/traditional big corp related IT jobs are crappy. Generally competent IT professionals aren't happy to work for it.

Markoff5• 4 years ago

Why all thumbnails seem to be loading full version of image? Haven't seen this in long time that as I scroll through article thumbnails are still just slowly loading while they should be loaded instantly. I mean it's hard to take seriously someone talking about other sites who can't design own site to load properly.

csande17• 4 years ago

The Rakuten screenshot included in the first set of examples looks a bit out of place to me. It's a pretty normal, modern, flat-design shopping website? Amazon similarly features a big colorful carousel and a bunch of different images all competing for attention. (Well, if you visit Amazon today you'll get a more consistent-looking Black Friday takeover.)

The only thing that really stands out to me about Rakuten is that the Japanese UI strings are bit longer and more visually dense than the English ones. But that's a far cry from Yahoo Japan's early 2000s aesthetic.

timoth3y• 4 years ago

I've lived in Japan for 30 years, and built several Internet based startups in that time. Three quick things the author does not seem to really consider.

1. Japan's information-dense design pre-dates the Internet. If you look at commercial fliers from the 80s (and probably before) until today, they have similar information-dense designs.

2. This design is not a result of a "critical shortage of competent IT professionals." Just because something is different doesn't mean it is wrong or the makers are incompetent. Some of these e-commerce firms have thousands of good developers. Designs are extensively A/B tested. They are common because they work.

3. Hacker News is also very info-dense and has changed little over past decade. It's not due to incompetence, but because we users like it this way. Now, imagine we had a steady steam of designers posting about how backwards we are and how they needed to "fix" the site to improve our experience. That's what it often feels like reading these articles from Japan.

woojoo6662• 4 years ago

Speaking from a US perspective

1. The US also had information dense fliers / magazines / newspapers back in the day. The point is that the US moved away (at least in web design), while Japan didn't

2. Hard to comment on "competence", though I guess I'd like to see a minimalist redesign of a japanese website and see a survey on which one Japanese people prefer

3. Hacker News is extremely niche. And as much as HN people hate Reddit's new modern design, Reddit has orders of magnitude more users than HN. I would bet the vast majority of people prefer the UI of Reddit over HN

bluepizza12• 4 years ago

Just because something is different doesn't mean it is wrong or the makers are incompetent. Some of these e-commerce firms have thousands of good developers. Designs are extensively A/B tested. They are common because they work.

Everyone in Rakuten repeats this. It's not true. A/B testing between bad and bad still results in bad. You just get which bad works better.

If Japanese design was awesome, it would be pretty obvious to anyone how awesome it was. This sort of rationalization of bad quality is the mark of today's Japanese mediocre output.

Luckily there are strong local players, like Recruit or TeamLab, who refuse this idea of "it's good because I say so", and are actually pushing for better products.

awinter-py• 4 years ago

I have been looking for the linked 2013 post on density for years, thank you

flexlayout• 4 years ago

Every one of these Japanese sites would conform to what the author calls "the 3 colour design principle" if they just removed the banner ads. In fact, I'd argue that the prevalence of first party ads is the only significant difference. Without them, the Japanese sites are no more cluttered than Wikipedia or NYT.

quelltext2• 4 years ago

Instead, let’s look at websites over time. If Japan had been impacted by the global smart phone revolutiooon, we would expect its web design to shift around 2010. It didn’t – to an almost comical degree.

I'm confused. The American examples don't really show any remarkable change in terms of overall design language either. Also, if we are talking about smartphones should we not look at smartphone layouts?

xrd• 4 years ago

This is really fascinating.

I wonder how much was informed by i-mode.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode

It was an alternative to the other content delivery offerings at the time, like WAP. Japanese handset manufacturers created devices that catered to the needs of that format. Japan is an interesting case study as always because they were always in tight coordination with software and hardware before it was widely popular.

kaba04• 4 years ago

I really liked the clustering of image screenshots, that was much more contentful and less biased due to relying on that than what I have expected.

xtiansimon• 4 years ago

Writing system.. There’s over 1000 kanji for grade school and over 2000 in common use.

How many times have you heard English speakers complain about type experiments with dark backgrounds or gray type?

The difference is readability versus legibility. Bad color choices can made type difficult to read, or can make something impossible to read.

And with Japanese there is a great diversity of significant marks in various signs which must be legible in order for a reader to understand the message.

I would expect Japanese sites to have a design sensibility that separates text and image/illustrations to a greater extent then designs using an alphabet of 26

How is Japanese web design different?

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