Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

&gt; <i>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.</i><p>This is rich. I&#x27;m not sure who they&#x27;re comparing Japan <i>to</i>, because definitely not to modern American&#x2F;mainstream web customs. In fact, my biggest complaint about the latter could be written like this:<p>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 <i>minimal</i> concentration of information into the <i>largest</i> space akin to a <i>billboard</i> rather than an interactive tool.<p>&gt; <i>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.</i><p>That&#x27;s actually a pretty strong compliment. One could reverse it and ask, why in America and Europe people <i>are</i> easy swayed by lies in &quot;a catchy headline or a pretty image&quot;, instead of demanding actual information about the product?

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... &quot;Click here to go to online check in&quot;, then you are there and its like &quot;click here to start checking in online&quot;... then its like &quot;type confirmation number here..&quot; 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&#x27;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..

My experience with Japanese websites:<p>* 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<p>* 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&#x27;s no way as bad as it is in Japan, where I&#x27;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.<p>* They still use Flash.<p>* 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<p>* Images are often low resolution and low quality<p>Some of the reasons given in the article make sense (for example webfonts being expensive or large in size), but it&#x27;s really disappointing when you compare it to a Japanese novel or magazine and see that the country is perfectly capable of beautiful work.

There&#x27;s as well a cultural factor that, IMO, affects design as well. This factor is the obsession of the Japanese to show that &quot;they are working hard&quot; 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.<p>That makes that, when they present a design, it has to look like they worked really hard in the design. That&#x27;s why there is always so much information.<p>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&#x27;t work hard enough.<p>Of course, I am exaggerating.... But not a lot.<p>Source: Working as a Web Developer in Japanese companies in Japan since 5 years ago.

I don&#x27;t this this article is very relevant in 2018. Modern Japanese websites look the same as any &quot;hip&quot; 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.<p>The article does make a good point about how sites were &quot;mobile first&quot; 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&#x2F;trendy practices. You can see all kinds of articles about modern web stuff on Qiita.com, even translations of buzzy blogposts.<p>I think any speculation about cultural differences is nonsense. Overwork or trying to appear busy or neon signs or whatever doesn&#x27;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.

The article seems to be missing what I think is the major reason why Japanese websites are how they are.<p>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 &quot;System integrators&quot;, which they refer to as SIer, and these are quite different from the software&#x2F;design agency we see in the US or in Europe. The usual flow is something like<p>- 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&#x27;s &quot;System Engineers&quot; 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<p>As nobody actually does the &quot;building the service&quot; 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&#x2F;UX does not really matter that much as long as it fulfills all the specifications written on Excel.<p>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&#x2F;design agency model - companies who actually do the engineering and designing part - but the SI model is still prevalent [2].<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.recruit.jp&#x2F;service&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.recruit.jp&#x2F;service&#x2F;</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jisa.or.jp&#x2F;Portals&#x2F;0&#x2F;report&#x2F;basic2015.pdf?20160205" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jisa.or.jp&#x2F;Portals&#x2F;0&#x2F;report&#x2F;basic2015.pdf?201602...</a> (p14)

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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s programmers.<p>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&#x27;s own work, and one could participate in that work by remixing it.<p>Seeing this cultural difference changed how I thought about copyright. Copyright is easy to enforce when social norms and cultural aesthetics don&#x27;t treat content as a commodity everyone needs to have. This isn&#x27;t a popular opinion among tech libertarians, but I&#x27;d rather live in a world where private content creators had more control, but where everyone was doing more creating than sharing.

They remind me of the portals of yore: Excite, Yahoo!, Netscape, etc.<p>Likely density of meaning per char would enable this layout --even in newspapers.<p>Anyhows, it&#x27;s functional, if not beautiful, and it works for people. No need to &quot;refresh the look and feel&quot; of their web properties every so often.

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&#x27;s cluttered because most people there don&#x27;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.

This part really struck me:<p>&quot;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 &#x2F; space (the same goes for Chinese).&quot;<p>The concept that your native language can impact information processing speed&#x2F;density is pretty interesting.

It&#x27;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&#x27;d score lower points with them.

For some reason I really appreciate the information density of these sites even if they&#x27;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.<p>Check out the desktop version of this site for what seems to me to be an English version of Japanese design: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;na.finalfantasyxiv.com&#x2F;lodestone&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;na.finalfantasyxiv.com&#x2F;lodestone&#x2F;</a>

You see this in real-world UX in Japan too. Almost every travel guide to JR railways and&#x2F;or metro says some variation of &quot;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&quot;<p>Or, their ATMs. Amazingly confusing at times. Yet, no Japanese seems harmed in the making of this situation.

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&gt; Japanese doesn’t have italics or capital letters<p>It does, however, have katakana -- which is sometimes used in a similar fashion.

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

This page is down but it just copied the article, here&#x27;s the source link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;randomwire.com&#x2F;why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;randomwire.com&#x2F;why-japanese-web-design-is-so-differe...</a>

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 &#x2F; EU.

The author is joking, right?<p>Look at the amazon and ebay websites. What, are then not as filled with information? Most of the time as much useless.<p>The only difference is that they use the older 2000-s fonts which are smaller, and therefore enable the newspaper-look.

Discussed at the time: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6718067" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6718067</a>

&quot;Some kind folks have translated the article into...&quot;<p>They are not doing it out of kindness, they are probably going to add ads and PageRank-siphoning links to the translation when you&#x27;re not looking.<p>&quot;WebDesignGeeks&quot; was an outfit who used to pull this scam all the time to popular programming articles, and their &quot;translations&quot; were just the output of Google Translate.<p>Don&#x27;t link to unchecked translations and don&#x27;t let them be hosted on someone else&#x27;s site.

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?

Mirror: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;bboAK" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;bboAK</a>

It&#x27;s always difficult for me to trust the rest of an article when it&#x27;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 &quot;game arcades&quot;?

While this was true in the mid-2000s, I think the modern websites are much more similar to Western websites.<p>Perhaps the one thing that stands out is my adblocker doesn&#x27;t work on japanese advertising so I get all the ads that I&#x27;m no longer used to seeing on my usual websites...

The simplest answer to anything anachronistic can generally be explained by the population&#x27;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&#x27;s composition largely reflects your customer&#x27;s demographics. In newer websites targeting younger demographics, you are allowed to be more &quot;hip&quot; and &quot;trendy&quot;. 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.

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

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

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;randomwire&#x2F;5062013491&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;randomwire&#x2F;5062013491&#x2F;</a> says it all really.

Site unavailable now.... HackerNews effect?

(2014)