
Why Japanese web design is so different (2013) - thecortado
https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/
======
TeMPOraL
> _Advertising – Rather than being seen as a tool to enable people Japanese
> companies often see the web as just another advertising platform to push
> their message across as loudly as possible. Websites ends up being about the
> maximal concentration of information into the smallest space akin to a
> pamphlet rather than an interactive tool._

This is rich. I'm not sure who they're comparing Japan _to_ , because
definitely not to modern American/mainstream web customs. In fact, my biggest
complaint about the latter could be written like this:

Advertising - Rather than being seen as a tool to enable people, modern web
companies often see the web as just another advertising platform to push their
message across as loudly as possible. Websites ends up being about the
_minimal_ concentration of information into the _largest_ space akin to a
_billboard_ rather than an interactive tool.

> _People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions
> and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision – they are
> not going to be easily swayed by a catchy headline or a pretty image. The
> adage of “less is more” doesn’t really apply here._

That's actually a pretty strong compliment. One could reverse it and ask, why
in America and Europe people _are_ easy swayed by lies in "a catchy headline
or a pretty image", instead of demanding actual information about the product?

~~~
mrtksn
>That's actually a pretty strong compliment. One could reverse it and ask, why
in America and Europe people are easy swayed by lies in "a catchy headline or
a pretty image", instead of demanding actual information about the product?

Maybe because the information is useless when it's too complicated or out of
context?

For example, if you look at the spec sheet of an iPhone you might think that
it's less capable than a cheap Android phone unless you have very deep
understanding of the technology.

In west, companies try to communicate the utility or the feeling that this
product will give you and most of the technical information is seen as
distraction and only the cheapest, lowest quality companies will bombard the
users with that information in a bid to convince you that they offer the same
thing for cheaper.

Apple famously doesn't advertise RAM or processor clock speed on iPhones.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
> Apple famously doesn't advertise RAM or processor clock speed on iPhones.

As long as I can remember, they've _always_ under-specced their hardware and
then jacked the prices up for the cost of "experience". And my memory goes
back to the mid 80's. Same old game then as it is now.

~~~
mrtksn
What does under-specced even mean? How do you provide better experience by
"under-spec" a product?

~~~
phil248
It means you provide the minimum hardware necessary to provide a quality
experience now, without regard to (and in anticipation of) near-future
developments that render that hardware under-powered.

~~~
mrtksn
I didn't knew that Apple is doing it. iPhones are used for very long time,
holding 2nd hand value the most of any other smartphone.

The same goes for Macs, people tend to use these things for many years. In
fact, Apple is still selling Macbook Airs like hot cakes despite the device
not being significantly updated for almost a half decade now and people are
happy with that product.

The claim sounds like induced anxiety of a user who just couldn't swallow the
premium paid over the same Ghz laptop or same Megapixel smartphone :)

~~~
hesarenu
Maybe they are happy with Air because its the cheapest Apple. I know since i
got one recently for development purpose. I would have liked a better spec'd
once, but others were costly.

~~~
mrtksn
I also have an 2015 Air, it performs as advertised. I can't say that the
performance degraded over time, contrary to the claim.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
I'm also going as far back as their first 20 MB SCSI drive that they charged
$550 for when IBM compats were charging $400. They did something goofy,
unsurprisingly to the hardware to prevent users from using the cheaper SCSI
drives.

And this was back in the '80 s. Its not surprising they still play their
stupid games. People in tech have such short term memories - much here is on a
day by day basis, or weekly. Yet, its the same actors in the Apple
administration (well, minus Jobs).

------
xt00
If you do online check in with a japanese airline like ANA or JAL its kind of
hilarious how many things you have to click to confirm just about
everything... "Click here to go to online check in", then you are there and
its like "click here to start checking in online"... then its like "type
confirmation number here.." etc.. all on separate pages like we are engaging
some kind of nuclear code sequence that requires multiple stages of fail-safes
where you can go back at any moment.. yes the webpages in japan are
hilariously over complex for a non-japanese audience all with the goal of
ensuring you don't accidentally do the wrong thing.. the idea of one-click
buying on amazon I have a feeling either rarely exists or is probably actually
2 clicks somehow..

~~~
m_mueller
Since you mention Amazon: They do have massive success in Japan, especially
over the last few years. Same day delivery got to Japanese cities 1-2 years
earlier than in the US I think, at least we got it in Tokyo for a while now.
So I think the lack of polish in web design is actually a good chance for
disruption by Western technology companies, it's just that you have to get all
the _other_ stuff just right to exceed in Japan (e.g. good localization, high
levels of customer service, precision in delivery).

~~~
xt00
Oh cool, so do they actually have "Buy it now with 1-click" on the amazon
japan webpage? I'm super curious if they have it or if its actually used by
people?

~~~
ekianjo
they have. Its used.

------
cooper12
My experience with Japanese websites:

* All text is embedded. Fat chance ever finding it with a search engine, copying anything, searching within the page, or using Google Translate on it

* Every URL is guaranteed to die. While link rot is pretty common in Western webdev as well, things like SEO have caused some to clamp down on it. And it's no way as bad as it is in Japan, where I'll come back a month later to find the link dead or the whole website has moved and none of the old content exists anymore.

* They still use Flash.

* Navigation is often not as efficient as it can be, with sites often throwing you on a landing page, navbars being confusing, and lack of search

* Images are often low resolution and low quality

Some of the reasons given in the article make sense (for example webfonts
being expensive or large in size), but it's really disappointing when you
compare it to a Japanese novel or magazine and see that the country is
perfectly capable of beautiful work.

~~~
freehunter
I noticed the first one when I clicked a link here in these comments to a JP
site and clicked "translate" in Chrome... it translated much of the page, but
quite a bit of text was in images and of course couldn't be translated.

Then of course I switched to Amazon.com for a comparison and almost every word
on the page was part of an image and could not be translated either. I guess
it's more common than I thought.

------
6t6t6t6
There's as well a cultural factor that, IMO, affects design as well. This
factor is the obsession of the Japanese to show that "they are working hard"
and the culture of sacrifice. Everything in the company culture is based on
that. People staying until really late at work without actually doing anything
productive, meetings scheduled on Saturday just because, etc.

That makes that, when they present a design, it has to look like they worked
really hard in the design. That's why there is always so much information.

To the eyes of an executive who has no idea of design (most of them) a
minimalist design would look like if the designer was lazy and didn't work
hard enough.

Of course, I am exaggerating.... But not a lot.

Source: Working as a Web Developer in Japanese companies in Japan since 5
years ago.

~~~
whoisjuan
Hmmm...the work culture fact is undeniable, but no smart person regardless of
culture would be impressed or fooled with density as a proof of hard work....
This is probably more related to the highly methodical and intensive approach
to optimizing space. Reductionism and efficiency are concepts that the
Japanese learn from very early ages. The extreme lack of space and the
atomization cities are one of the reasons why the Japanese take density as a
standard of life.

~~~
tkazec
Having worked long-term in South Korea, which has a corporate culture very
similar to Japan, I'd have to agree with 6t6t6t6. The more "information" you
can fit on something, the better. This is taken to the extreme with powerpoint
presentations.

------
grose
I don't this this article is very relevant in 2018. Modern Japanese websites
look the same as any "hip" Western site. Take a look at Coincheck.com, for
example (the exchange whose NEM just got stolen). Their landing page is the
standard Bootstrap-y, scroll heavy, big icons, sparse kind of layout you would
see anywhere. Every startup is like this. Even big corporations like
Nintendo.co.jp manage to have modern looking websites these days. If all this
cultural speculation were true, then startups would still be doing the
information-dense Web 1.0 thing.

The article does make a good point about how sites were "mobile first" for
Japanese feature phones. Smartphones took a while to catch on in Japan because
people were already satisfied with their feature phones, but now smartphones
are in full force and web design has mostly caught up with modern/trendy
practices. You can see all kinds of articles about modern web stuff on
Qiita.com, even translations of buzzy blogposts.

I think any speculation about cultural differences is nonsense. Overwork or
trying to appear busy or neon signs or whatever doesn't make for shitty web
design. Web design was bad simply because the main focus was on the feature
phone (which had limited rendering capabilities) and desktop sites were an
afterthought.

~~~
Angostura
Now compare the popular sites like
[https://www.rakuten.co.jp](https://www.rakuten.co.jp) The two you quote
appear to be outliers.

~~~
TheCoreh
Rakuten doesn't look any more crowded than say, Amazon. It seems to be a
shopping website, so perhaps the amount of information is more related to the
type of website than the culture in this case.

~~~
jcelerier
It's also a bank, a mobile phone provider, and many other things. See also
[https://www.infoseek.co.jp/](https://www.infoseek.co.jp/)

Also, compare [https://yahoo.co.jp](https://yahoo.co.jp) (afaik most visited
site in japan) and [https://yahoo.com](https://yahoo.com).

------
tuvistavie
The article seems to be missing what I think is the major reason why Japanese
websites are how they are.

I think one of the major factor is how the IT industry works in Japan, and the
process to build a website, an application or anything which involves software
engineering. A good majority of Japanese websites are not built or controlled
by the company, but rather by what they call "System integrators", which they
refer to as SIer, and these are quite different from the software/design
agency we see in the US or in Europe. The usual flow is something like

\- Company A wants to build a website \- Company A talks to the SI company B
\- Company A and B spend hundreds of hours doing meetings \- Company B's
"System Engineers" write tons of specifications on Excel \- Company B asks
company C to actually code the specification written on Excel \- Company C may
then again delegate part of the system to company D, and this can a few more
levels down depending on the size of the project

As nobody actually does the "building the service" part in company A or B,
they usually do not have any designers, and therefore cannot give enough
design related information to the company actually implementing the software.
However, the only incentive for company C being to get paid by company B, the
quality of the work or the UI/UX does not really matter that much as long as
it fulfills all the specifications written on Excel.

Now, some companies are starting to see that this model is quite flawed, and
either recruiting engineers and designers of their own (e.g Recruit, a huge
company in Japan owning many different webservices [1], has put a lot of
efforts recruiting engineers and designers these past years). Some other
companies start choosing companies which are closer to the software/design
agency model - companies who actually do the engineering and designing part -
but the SI model is still prevalent [2].

[1]: [http://www.recruit.jp/service/](http://www.recruit.jp/service/)

[2]:
[https://www.jisa.or.jp/Portals/0/report/basic2015.pdf?201602...](https://www.jisa.or.jp/Portals/0/report/basic2015.pdf?20160205)
(p14)

~~~
jtolmar
I don't think the giant chain of subcontractors explains the problem - I've
been a part of the same process in the US and the resulting website[1] was
quite pretty.

[1]: [http://www.spaceneedle.com/](http://www.spaceneedle.com/)

~~~
tuvistavie
I'm curious to know how this is usually handled in the US. What would be the
usual process for company B and C to work on the product?

------
wigazemare
This article is entirely focused on sites built by corporations. In my
opinion, Japanese and English sites are more similar than ever today, as more
of the web is dominated by blog and social media platforms, but there used to
be more interesting differences.

I spent a lot of time on the Japanese web about ten years ago, when there were
still a lot of self hosted amateur sites for fiction, tech, and other hobbies.
These sites were spartan compared to their English counterparts, with a much
higher ratio of text to images. What few images there were were often original
photos or illustrations. It's hard to express how different the aesthetic was,
but it was as though everyone from artists to meme makers to TV show fandoms
were taking design cues from 90's programmers.

In comparison, the equivalent English sites of the time had a strong aversion
to emptiness. Every page needed banners and buttons decorated with copyrighted
images that had been cropped and filtered. Authors were more concerned with
elevating the best work taken from elsewhere than showing one's own work, and
one could participate in that work by remixing it.

Seeing this cultural difference changed how I thought about copyright.
Copyright is easy to enforce when social norms and cultural aesthetics don't
treat content as a commodity everyone needs to have. This isn't a popular
opinion among tech libertarians, but I'd rather live in a world where private
content creators had more control, but where everyone was doing more creating
than sharing.

------
mc32
They remind me of the portals of yore: Excite, Yahoo!, Netscape, etc.

Likely density of meaning per char would enable this layout --even in
newspapers.

Anyhows, it's functional, if not beautiful, and it works for people. No need
to "refresh the look and feel" of their web properties every so often.

~~~
pilaf
Funnily enough Yahoo! is still one of the top websites in Japan and still
looks like it did back in 1999:
[https://www.yahoo.co.jp/](https://www.yahoo.co.jp/)

------
maruhan2
Korean websites have similar aspects. However, Korean websites are slowly
changing to be simpler and more visually appealing. Having experienced from
Korea, I would extrapolate that Japanese (or Korean) websites are cluttered
not because they believe it is better than non-clutter. It's cluttered because
most people there don't have expertise in designing a simple and appealing
website. In addition, Asian countries tend to be more focused on following the
design of their rivals, and since early design is obviously more focused on
information than beauty, people follow that. However, if you give a finished
product where one is cluttered with information and the other is simple and
visually appealing, I highly doubt that people will prefer the clutter.

~~~
jvkersch
Korean websites also suffer from the early adapter phenomenon. Many were build
when ActiveX controls were the new hip thing and everybody was on the same
version of Windows, and same with flash. Add to that that some websites
require logging in with government-issued credentials (which is probably not
something that you can easily rip out and replace by a nice form) and you can
see that there's a lot of early 2000s cruft floating around... I'd be
interested in knowing Japanese websites have similar baggage.

I had to look up the results of my Korean language test the other day. This
should be as easy as entering your name + test registration number to get one
number of info back (your test score). I had to install so many suspicious
browser plugins that I ended up downloading a VM just for this.

~~~
yongjik
Hah, at least they didn't have an anti-VM plugin (yes, there's such a thing)
that forces you to install a dozen "security plugins" onto your host OS.

------
kunle
This part really struck me:

"Character Comfort – Logographic-based languages can contain a lot of meaning
in just few characters. While these characters can look cluttered and
confusing to the western eye, they actually allow Japanese speakers to become
comfortable with processing a lot of information in short period of time /
space (the same goes for Chinese)."

The concept that your native language can impact information processing
speed/density is pretty interesting.

~~~
toyg
I personally think this is the main reason, coupled with the natural tendency
of kanji to look like squares. Western languages deal with _lines_ , Eastern
ones with _squares_. The former need significant amount of empty space to be
readable, the latter not really; the former must flow horizontally, the latter
not really; the former is drastically different from images, the latter not
really (which is why emojis originated in Japan, among other things).

That’s all stuff that directly impacts design density and so on.

~~~
kijin
Exactly. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean letters are all designed to fit in a
square grid.

Movable type was invented in Korea 200 years before Gutenberg, and their
version was much easier because they just had to plug letters into a square
grid. When I was a kid, everyone learned to write on sheets of paper
containing a 20x10 grid. Lengths of books and school essays in Korea are still
frequently measured by the number of 20x10 sheets they would take up if
printed on such a grid.

When your writing system is designed to fill a two-dimensional grid,
whitespace is not only unnecessary but also potentially distracting. Chinese
and Japanese don't even use spaces between words. (Korean does, at least in
modern usage.) Leaving a large amount of space between lines would break up a
block that should belong together.

Probably for the same reason, WYSIWYG editors here tend to insert <br> instead
of <p> when you press the Enter key, Western semantics be damned. Extra space
between paragraphs is implemented using two <br>'s instead of margins on the
<p> tag. In other words, people see no need for vertical space that isn't an
integer multiple of the height of a 1-em square.

------
hw
It's not just the Japanese. Chinese websites are also similar - pages full of
links, messy to the untrained eye and difficult to navigate. However, that
sort of web pages suit the Chinese more. Build a traditional, Stripe-ish style
landing page and you'd score lower points with them.

------
Yhippa
For some reason I really appreciate the information density of these sites
even if they're quite busy. I feel like one large page load allows me to do a
lot of things whereas it seems the trend in the west is to download a heavy
SPA JS app one time only to have it sparsely populated and take tons of clicks
to get to information.

Check out the desktop version of this site for what seems to me to be an
English version of Japanese design:
[https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/)

~~~
larrymcp
Some other great Western-language examples are highlighted here:
[https://websitesfromhell.net/hell/](https://websitesfromhell.net/hell/)

Funny.

------
ggm
You see this in real-world UX in Japan too. Almost every travel guide to JR
railways and/or metro says some variation of "press the button on the top left
(ok, I forgot which button) and a guy will pop out of a hidden door, and help
you buy a ticket"

Or, their ATMs. Amazingly confusing at times. Yet, no Japanese seems harmed in
the making of this situation.

------
subhrm
HN traffic effect :

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------
Figs
> Japanese doesn’t have italics or capital letters

It does, however, have katakana -- which is sometimes used in a similar
fashion.

~~~
xelxebar
I believe the mincho font (pretty much the de facto standard of modern kanji)
does have italics. They're not used all that often or to the same effect as in
English though.

Others have also pointed out the dots which are quite common in formally
printed materials. In emails and such, I see people use the 「」 quotation
bracings as emphasis from time to time.

~~~
crooked-v
Doing a 「Dramatic Quotation」 is common in manga, similar to how US comic books
put bits of text in bold.

------
jack1243star
On iOS Safari I only see a huge ad overlay, cannot scroll or read the article.

------
manigandham
This page is down but it just copied the article, here's the source link:
[https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-
differe...](https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/)

------
eurticket
This has been an interest of mine since seeing web designs from that part of
the world. They have cool things like fixed footers with 10px font just to
display quick simple site maps, and small ideas that would be considered taboo
in the US / EU.

------
heavenlyblue
The author is joking, right?

Look at the amazon and ebay websites. What, are then not as filled with
information? Most of the time as much useless.

The only difference is that they use the older 2000-s fonts which are smaller,
and therefore enable the newspaper-look.

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067)

------
rspeer
"Some kind folks have translated the article into..."

They are not doing it out of kindness, they are probably going to add ads and
PageRank-siphoning links to the translation when you're not looking.

"WebDesignGeeks" was an outfit who used to pull this scam all the time to
popular programming articles, and their "translations" were just the output of
Google Translate.

Don't link to unchecked translations and don't let them be hosted on someone
else's site.

------
eecc
Hmm, interesting. About the lack of web-fonts for ideographic writing, let me
ask: how do people write them with a keyboard? Don’t they use some sort of
multiple key encoding, a sort of predictive writing, to navigate the code
space and select a particular symbol? Well, at every waypoint the font can add
a single fragment to the ideograph so it just needs to encode these as the
font glyph? I guess it can’t be too many right?

~~~
uryga
I think the Japanese font used on Android might be doing something like this!
Look at this screenshot: [https://ibb.co/hUAgWw](https://ibb.co/hUAgWw)

Upper line - complex kanji, Lower line - its components.

When you look at the complex kanji on the upper line, some of its components
look unnaturally stretched, as if they were automatically scaled instead of
being drawn by hand. So I'm guessing the design is at least semi-automated.

(It's common for kanji like 日 and 雨 to have slight visual differences when
used as components – the tiny 'legs' 日 has are missing in 曇 and 温, at least in
the font I have. But it still looks like they just have a few variants of each
character that are reused)

~~~
eecc
Oh I don't know much about ideographic writing, but I wonder if one can
describe the language as a big search tree where the leaf ideograph is the
overlay of all intermediate nodes (say each node being a vector
representation.)

------
cooper12
Mirror: [https://archive.is/bboAK](https://archive.is/bboAK)

~~~
manigandham
Better to link to the original source article: [https://randomwire.com/why-
japanese-web-design-is-so-differe...](https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-
design-is-so-different/)

~~~
dang
Thanks! Changed from [http://designmadeinjapan.com/magazine/web-design/why-
japanes...](http://designmadeinjapan.com/magazine/web-design/why-japanese-web-
design-is-so-different/)

------
scrimpton
It's always difficult for me to trust the rest of an article when it's really
confident about a meaningless detail and gets it entirely wrong. What am I
supposed to think about a story that goes out of its way to define pachinko
parlours as "game arcades"?

------
d--b
While this was true in the mid-2000s, I think the modern websites are much
more similar to Western websites.

Perhaps the one thing that stands out is my adblocker doesn't work on japanese
advertising so I get all the ads that I'm no longer used to seeing on my usual
websites...

------
wyuenho
The simplest answer to anything anachronistic can generally be explained by
the population's composition. The older the population is, the more resistant
to change, and perceived problems by OP is a matter of change. In really
popular websites, the population's composition largely reflects your
customer's demographics. In newer websites targeting younger demographics, you
are allowed to be more "hip" and "trendy". I also think the devices used to
look at these websites also played a huge role. Lo-res images and text-heavy
simply load faster.

------
ekianjo
FUnny to see Apple being so popular in Japan while all their ads here and
websites are minimalist bY design.

------
ngold
How well does this translate to mobile since the majority of Internet browsing
is mobile?

------
magicbuzz
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/randomwire/5062013491/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/randomwire/5062013491/)
says it all really.

~~~
digi_owl
Supposedly cities like New York looked similar into the 70s, but then came a
backlash because much of the ads were for "burlesque" entertainment and
similar.

Japan, and perhaps also the rest of Asia, has not had such a backlash.

------
jesterson
Site unavailable now.... HackerNews effect?

------
glandium
(2014)

