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Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

257 points by thecortado 9y ago

eecc 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.)
- Pete_D 9y ago
  There was an article posted here recently that discussed Chinese font design: https://qz.com/522079/the-long-incredibly-tortuous-and-fascinating-process-of-creating-a-chinese-font/ https://qz.com/522079/the-long-incredibly-tortuous-and-fasci... It sounds like while there are a lot of reused components, there's a lot of tweaking needed for it to look right: > For instance, just have a look at the various uses of the radical 言 (yan, speech). Even in cases where it is in the same position, such as the left half of the character, the stroke weights and shapes are slightly different (the characters shown below are the exact same font and size). As for input: there are component-based input methods where you would for example type 明 by entering the keys corresponding to 日 and 月, but as far as I know, they aren't very popular. Most people use phonetic input systems where you type e.g. 明 by typing "ming" and picking it from a list (or letting auto-correct do it for you).
mc32 9y ago
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.
- losteric 9y ago
  I really like it. Their websites feel more authentic, alive and direct.
- pilaf 9y ago
  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/
- BerlinMarkets 9y ago
  > 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. This is the most infuriating characteristic of modern web-deveopment, the constant churn to change what is working for people. Glad to see that it is not universal.
jack1243star 9y ago
On iOS Safari I only see a huge ad overlay, cannot scroll or read the article.
glandium 9y ago
(2014)
xt00 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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?
    - glandium 9y ago
      It's there.
    - ekianjo 9y ago
      they have. Its used.
  - inferiorhuman 9y ago
    Interesting. I'm surprised that this is successful in Japan given the proliferation of Takkyubins.
ggm 9y ago
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.
Yhippa 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Some other great Western-language examples are highlighted here: https://websitesfromhell.net/hell/ https://websitesfromhell.net/hell/ Funny.
magicbuzz 9y ago
https://www.flickr.com/photos/randomwire/5062013491/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/randomwire/5062013491/ says it all really.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  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.
ngold 9y ago
How well does this translate to mobile since the majority of Internet browsing is mobile?
deleted 9y ago
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hw 9y ago
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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
Figs 9y ago
> Japanese doesn’t have italics or capital letters It does, however, have katakana -- which is sometimes used in a similar fashion.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Yeah but that is tiring to read. They have the dots over letters for emphasis too.
  - alphonsegaston 9y ago
    Dakuten(what you call “dots over letters”) are used to modify the way consonants are pronounced, not for emphasis, e.g to turn the character for “Ka”(カ) into “Ga”(ガ). And the usage of katakana in the way the parent describes isn’t “tiring.” It follows almost the exact same pattern as words are italicized in English, where a word or phrase is represented differently from the surrounding text. Less common/standardized, but not tiring. EDIT: My bad on the bouten/dakuten confusion. Apologies.
    - chch 9y ago
      I believe GP is talking about boten/wakiten, not dakuten :) https://r12a.github.io/scripts/tutorial/images/misc.png https://r12a.github.io/scripts/tutorial/images/misc.png
    - cooper12 9y ago
      I think they're referring to bōten or wakiten: https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/1737/22682 https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/1737/22682
    - fenomas 9y ago
      GP was talking about 圏点/傍点, not dakuten. Their point about katakana was also correct - normally a word is either written in katakana or it isn't, regardless of emphasis. Using katakana for emphasis happens but it's not common, and would get tiresome very quickly.
    - 9y ago
TeMPOraL 9y ago
> 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?
- fspear 9y ago
  >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? Makes sense since Japanese culture is risk averse.
- mrtksn 9y ago
  >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.
scrimpton 9y ago
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"?
6t6t6t6 9y ago
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.
- e_b 9y ago
  >Of course, I am exaggerating.... But not a lot. More like making it all up.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- whoisjuan 9y ago
  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.
  - 6t6t6t6 9y ago
    > no smart person regardless of culture would be impressed or fooled with density as a proof of hard work I am far from being a person who has deeply studied Japanese culture (I just happen to live here) but my impression is that it is so ingrained in the mentality that it works at a subconscious level.
cooper12 9y ago
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.
- aikinai 9y ago
  Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted; this is all true.
- freehunter 9y ago
  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.
- bootlooped 9y ago
  Based on this, I can say I think that Korea may be worse: * Many websites, especially government ones, require Active X. You might need to dust off that IE6 installation file. * In lieu of Active X, some sites require you to download and install their own proprietary "security" program; what it does, I don't think anybody really knows * Like you describe Japan, lots of Korean text is embedded in an image * Many sites try to prevent users from right clicking or copying text, for "security" of course * The eCommerce site I used had quality issues similar to Ali Express. Listings could be anything, a seller could list a baseball bat, a cell phone and a watermelon on the same page. Sellers would play this trick of having at least 2 variations of a product, one being a very low price and also conveniently out of stock all the time, this would ensure it showed up when you sort products by lowest price first, but it was impossible to ever get it for that price. When I was there a year or so ago it was getting better. Hopefully it's mostly fixed by now. On the bright side the internet is really fast and cheap.
subhrm 9y ago
HN traffic effect : This site is currently unavailable If you are the account holder, please contact customer service. Our customer service center is available 24x7 via phone, chat, or email: Email: support@inmotionhosting.com Phone: 888-321-4678 (757-416-6575 Int'l) We cannot disclose any information regarding this account if you are not its owner or authorized party. For the security and privacy of our customers, all account requests are verified prior to the disclosure of account information
cooper12 9y ago
Mirror: https://archive.is/bboAK https://archive.is/bboAK
- manigandham 9y ago
  Better to link to the original source article: https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/ https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-differe...
  - dang 9y ago
    Thanks! Changed from http://designmadeinjapan.com/magazine/web-design/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/ http://designmadeinjapan.com/magazine/web-design/why-japanes...
lerie82 9y ago
couldnt read it. ran out of bandwidth?
deleted 9y ago
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kunle 9y ago
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.
- Double_a_92 9y ago
 I think we westeners also do that. Words are symbols to us too, we don't really read the words letter by letter... Thats why the "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch…" text is still readable ( http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/aoccdrnig-to-rscheearch http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/aoccdrnig-to-rscheearch ).
 - baconizer 9y ago
 I think he meant more in the fundamental difference between phonetic vs logographic. For the latter, when speaker can't read a new word but can have a good guess of what it means.
- toyg 9y ago
 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 9y ago
 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 instead of when you press the Enter key, Western semantics be damned. Extra space between paragraphs is implemented using two 's instead of margins on the 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.
maruhan2 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
jesterson 9y ago
Site unavailable now.... HackerNews effect?
tuvistavie 9y ago
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?20160205 https://www.jisa.or.jp/Portals/0/report/basic2015.pdf?201602... (p14)
- jtolmar 9y ago
  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 9y ago
eurticket 9y ago
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.
manigandham 9y ago
This page is down but it just copied the article, here's the source link: https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/ https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-differe...
ekianjo 9y ago
FUnny to see Apple being so popular in Japan while all their ads here and websites are minimalist bY design.
rspeer 9y ago
"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.
dang 9y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067
grose 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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.
wigazemare 9y ago
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.
wyuenho 9y ago
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.
anitadig01 9y ago
Obviously, Most of Japanese websites look like a product base or advertising base website. May be they would to cover all necessary details within one website. By the way nice topic.
d--b 9y ago
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...
heavenlyblue 9y ago
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.
lerie82 9y ago
I think they are just making assumptions about Japanese people and comparing them to what they know about Americans.

257 points by thecortado 9y ago

eecc 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.)
Pete_D 9y ago
There was an article posted here recently that discussed Chinese font design: https://qz.com/522079/the-long-incredibly-tortuous-and-fascinating-process-of-creating-a-chinese-font/ https://qz.com/522079/the-long-incredibly-tortuous-and-fasci... It sounds like while there are a lot of reused components, there's a lot of tweaking needed for it to look right: > For instance, just have a look at the various uses of the radical 言 (yan, speech). Even in cases where it is in the same position, such as the left half of the character, the stroke weights and shapes are slightly different (the characters shown below are the exact same font and size). As for input: there are component-based input methods where you would for example type 明 by entering the keys corresponding to 日 and 月, but as far as I know, they aren't very popular. Most people use phonetic input systems where you type e.g. 明 by typing "ming" and picking it from a list (or letting auto-correct do it for you).

mc32 9y ago

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.

losteric 9y ago
I really like it. Their websites feel more authentic, alive and direct.
pilaf 9y ago
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/
BerlinMarkets 9y ago
> 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. This is the most infuriating characteristic of modern web-deveopment, the constant churn to change what is working for people. Glad to see that it is not universal.

jack1243star 9y ago

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

glandium 9y ago

(2014)

xt00 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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?
  - glandium 9y ago
    It's there.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    they have. Its used.
- inferiorhuman 9y ago
  Interesting. I'm surprised that this is successful in Japan given the proliferation of Takkyubins.

ggm 9y ago

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.

Yhippa 9y ago

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 9y ago
Some other great Western-language examples are highlighted here: https://websitesfromhell.net/hell/ https://websitesfromhell.net/hell/ Funny.

magicbuzz 9y ago

https://www.flickr.com/photos/randomwire/5062013491/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/randomwire/5062013491/ says it all really.

digi_owl 9y ago
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.

ngold 9y ago

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

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

hw 9y ago

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.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

Figs 9y ago

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

emodendroket 9y ago
Yeah but that is tiring to read. They have the dots over letters for emphasis too.
- alphonsegaston 9y ago
  Dakuten(what you call “dots over letters”) are used to modify the way consonants are pronounced, not for emphasis, e.g to turn the character for “Ka”(カ) into “Ga”(ガ). And the usage of katakana in the way the parent describes isn’t “tiring.” It follows almost the exact same pattern as words are italicized in English, where a word or phrase is represented differently from the surrounding text. Less common/standardized, but not tiring. EDIT: My bad on the bouten/dakuten confusion. Apologies.
  - chch 9y ago
    I believe GP is talking about boten/wakiten, not dakuten :) https://r12a.github.io/scripts/tutorial/images/misc.png https://r12a.github.io/scripts/tutorial/images/misc.png
  - cooper12 9y ago
    I think they're referring to bōten or wakiten: https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/1737/22682 https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/1737/22682
  - fenomas 9y ago
    GP was talking about 圏点/傍点, not dakuten. Their point about katakana was also correct - normally a word is either written in katakana or it isn't, regardless of emphasis. Using katakana for emphasis happens but it's not common, and would get tiresome very quickly.
  - 9y ago

TeMPOraL 9y ago

> 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?

fspear 9y ago
>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? Makes sense since Japanese culture is risk averse.
mrtksn 9y ago
>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.

scrimpton 9y ago

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"?

6t6t6t6 9y ago

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.

e_b 9y ago
>Of course, I am exaggerating.... But not a lot. More like making it all up.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
whoisjuan 9y ago
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.
- 6t6t6t6 9y ago
  > no smart person regardless of culture would be impressed or fooled with density as a proof of hard work I am far from being a person who has deeply studied Japanese culture (I just happen to live here) but my impression is that it is so ingrained in the mentality that it works at a subconscious level.

cooper12 9y ago

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.

aikinai 9y ago
Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted; this is all true.
freehunter 9y ago
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.
bootlooped 9y ago
Based on this, I can say I think that Korea may be worse: * Many websites, especially government ones, require Active X. You might need to dust off that IE6 installation file. * In lieu of Active X, some sites require you to download and install their own proprietary "security" program; what it does, I don't think anybody really knows * Like you describe Japan, lots of Korean text is embedded in an image * Many sites try to prevent users from right clicking or copying text, for "security" of course * The eCommerce site I used had quality issues similar to Ali Express. Listings could be anything, a seller could list a baseball bat, a cell phone and a watermelon on the same page. Sellers would play this trick of having at least 2 variations of a product, one being a very low price and also conveniently out of stock all the time, this would ensure it showed up when you sort products by lowest price first, but it was impossible to ever get it for that price. When I was there a year or so ago it was getting better. Hopefully it's mostly fixed by now. On the bright side the internet is really fast and cheap.

subhrm 9y ago

HN traffic effect : This site is currently unavailable If you are the account holder, please contact customer service. Our customer service center is available 24x7 via phone, chat, or email: Email: support@inmotionhosting.com Phone: 888-321-4678 (757-416-6575 Int'l) We cannot disclose any information regarding this account if you are not its owner or authorized party. For the security and privacy of our customers, all account requests are verified prior to the disclosure of account information

cooper12 9y ago

Mirror: https://archive.is/bboAK https://archive.is/bboAK

manigandham 9y ago
Better to link to the original source article: https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/ https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-differe...
- dang 9y ago
  Thanks! Changed from http://designmadeinjapan.com/magazine/web-design/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/ http://designmadeinjapan.com/magazine/web-design/why-japanes...

lerie82 9y ago

couldnt read it. ran out of bandwidth?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

kunle 9y ago

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.

Double_a_92 9y ago
I think we westeners also do that. Words are symbols to us too, we don't really read the words letter by letter... Thats why the "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch…" text is still readable ( http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/aoccdrnig-to-rscheearch http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/aoccdrnig-to-rscheearch ).
- baconizer 9y ago
  I think he meant more in the fundamental difference between phonetic vs logographic. For the latter, when speaker can't read a new word but can have a good guess of what it means.
toyg 9y ago
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 9y ago
 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 instead of when you press the Enter key, Western semantics be damned. Extra space between paragraphs is implemented using two 's instead of margins on the 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.

maruhan2 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.

jesterson 9y ago

Site unavailable now.... HackerNews effect?

tuvistavie 9y ago

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

jtolmar 9y ago
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 9y ago

eurticket 9y ago

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.

manigandham 9y ago

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

ekianjo 9y ago

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

rspeer 9y ago

"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.

dang 9y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067

grose 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.

wigazemare 9y ago

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.

wyuenho 9y ago

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.

anitadig01 9y ago

Obviously, Most of Japanese websites look like a product base or advertising base website. May be they would to cover all necessary details within one website. By the way nice topic.

d--b 9y ago

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...

heavenlyblue 9y ago

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.

lerie82 9y ago

I think they are just making assumptions about Japanese people and comparing them to what they know about Americans.