19 ms·

Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

• odomojuli 6y ago
  I had to disable Adblock Plus for some reason to get the entire page to load. Ditto on the point where Japan is stuck in the 1980s future. Everything's optimized for tiny cellphone screens optimized for text. If I recall correctly iPhone adoption was slow, and many people lacked a desktop to provide updates. I still find wifi to be incredibly scarce in Tokyo. If people want a desktop, they go to a cafe. If they want a mobile connection, it's faster to just use your telecom plan. That seems to have changed under COVID.
  • busfahrer 6y ago
    I believe the reason for slow iPhone adoption was that they already had i-mode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode
    • canofbars 6y ago
      The most incredible thing is they are still supporting the service till 2026 despite its usage being in decline since 2008
    • howlgarnish 6y ago
      The primary reason for slow iPhone adoption in Japan was that both NTT Docomo and au/KDDI, the largest carriers, initially refused to stock it. (Japan has a strange model where the telcos basically control what handsets can be sold.) SoftBank was the first to start selling it, and this propelled them from being a bit player into a top-tier telco. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N2cMeNoQcjk/XGGrX-OBnbI/AAAAAAAAWok/HYATvRkB4s8nrark_0LTSJsUHJ2tdrjnACLcBGAs/s1600/Japan_Subscriber_MarketShare_2018.jpg https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N2cMeNoQcjk/XGGrX-OBnbI/AAAAAAAAW...
  • kaybe 6y ago
    I've seen a lot of pocket wifi routers also for locals, which is really neat when you travel and your accomodation comes with one of these since you can carry it around all day for wifi and don't need a simcard.
  • busterarm 6y ago
    > I still find wifi to be incredibly scarce in Tokyo. Train stations, 7-11, Family Mart, Starbucks, Gasuto, McD's. Plus all of the locations in the Japan Connected-free wifi app.
    • Larrikin 6y ago
      Wifi WAS extremely scarce in Japan. When I lived there a few years ago the phone plans were great for me but it was very difficult for friends visiting to have internet even in Tokyo. When I was there last year there seemed to have been a pretty big push in preparation for the Olympics, most stations did not have WiFi in 2015 when I moved away as an example
      • 3np 6y ago
        If by “a few” you mean more than 5 then maybe. Free WiFi in all convenience stores, most train stations (almost all in bigger cities Tokyo, around half in bumfuck countryside where I live), many major public spots and department stores, expressway buses, and many cafes and restaurants all have free WiFi. I was without a SIM card for several months recently and rarely had to go far finding connectivity.
        • Larrikin 6y ago
          I put the exact year I moved away.
      • ekianjo 6y ago
        It is still very scarce outside of the Tokyo bubble. Japan is not Tokyo.
  • Krasnol 6y ago
    FYI: "ublock original" is the better and independend ad-blocker.
    • switch007 6y ago
      uBlock Origin* https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/ https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/ Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa... Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
    • benhurmarcel 6y ago
      I had to disable uBlock Origin to get the entire page to load, so in this case it has more to do with some filter.
  • verisimilidude 6y ago
    The bit about scarce WiFi is surprising. Back in 2005, I did a lot of warbiking in Tokyo, and signals were easy to find.
    • Wohlf 6y ago
      That was 15 years ago, everyone has high speed mobile plans now so there's no demand for public Wi-Fi.
  • nshepperd 6y ago
    > Everything's optimized for tiny cellphone screens optimized for text. That sounds great tbh. Not everything needs to be a 4MB bootstrap.js webshit that doesn't even load with adblockers enabled.
  • stevewillows 6y ago
    for me, wp.com was being blocked.
  • rangibaby 6y ago
    > If I recall correctly iPhone adoption was slow No way. It's hard to exaggerate what a smash hit the iPhone was in Japan. It immediately changed the mobile landscape, and continues to have an outsized market share: ~57% compared to 45% in the US
    • howlgarnish 6y ago
      Yes, once it was available, but dominant players NTT Docomo and KDDI refused to sell it for years. It was SoftBank who took a punt, and it paid off big time. https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/29/15892640/iphone-anniversary-japan-success-emoji-history https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/29/15892640/iphone-anniversa...
  • chrismorgan 6y ago
    Fanboy’s Annoyance list contains a filter ##.headersocial, which is triggered by the headersocial class on the body element, and so it nukes the whole page. I’ve reported this upstream; I believe changing it to ##:not(body).headersocial should fix this site, or maybe they’ll make an exception for this domain instead. Edit: that was quick! Fixed in https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/4bf4c04186f4a7d9978b5f5b4b8f516e9bdd30e7 https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/4bf4c04186f4a7d9....
• grenoire 6y ago
  Regarding advertising, the article states: "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 find this quite ironic, especially given how unusable most websites are due to third party advertising resources being loaded into them these days. HN users in particular will agree I bet, ad blocking seems prevalent here because of that exact reason. I think Japanese websites are better in this sense because their ad technology is usually 'outdated' banner ads and internally served sponsorship content. They're luckily stuck in the era of static and freshly-baked server-side content.
  • Wohlf 6y ago
    I agree with you but unfortunately these sites almost always have poor usability too.
    • grenoire 6y ago
      Well, it's one single component of the problem, there are many other factors involved in bad UX. Resources wasted on advertising are unequivocally the hardest to justify out of them all.
      • presentation 6y ago
        Isn’t it the easiest to justify? As in, you justify putting ads on your site because you get money for it.
    • _nosewings_ 6y ago
      IMO, the Web could stand to be a little bit harder to use.
      • krapp 6y ago
        Why?
• Karawebnetwork 6y ago
  [2013] This has made the rounds on HN several times already. 153 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254569 129 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067
  • mekkkkkk 6y ago
    How does it matter? If it gets rediscovered and is found interesting today, why is that bad? It's clearly dated, and if it was uninteresting it would simply die.
    • Raphmedia 6y ago
      Not necessarily bad other than the fact that the 2020 web is quite different to the 2013 one. It can also be worth looking at the top comments of the previous posts.
  • WhoIsSatoshi 6y ago
    I was thinking something similar - these days really valuable contents seem to resurface from a few years back. Two days ago I was reading a blog post from 2012 which I though was worthwhile. Walden's Thoreau states that 'Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.' => I believe that we are lacking the commitment that one had to put into a project such intent as a book then with the current fastfood social medial / article generation. I also believe that in its place, a hybrid of sorts will come and surface softly back multiple time to underline the impact it left on the collective unconscious. This sounds like what we're seeing.
• busterarm 6y ago
  tl;dr: i-Mode. Any answer to this question that doesn't include a mention of this is grossly misinformed to the point of being wrong.
  • Naac 6y ago
    Can you link to something or explain what that is for those of us not familiar?
    • busterarm 6y ago
      https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/before-there-were-smartphones-there-was-i-mode/ https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/before-there-were-smartphones... https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-7908-1746-5_17 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-7908-1746-5_17 https://www.zdnet.com/article/where-are-they-now-i-mode/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/where-are-they-now-i-mode/
    • resoluteteeth 6y ago
      It was basically the Japanese equivalent of WAP before smartphones but it's completely irrelevant now and even when it was a thing, I'm not sure it was relevant to desktop sites like this article is talking about.
      • busterarm 6y ago
        i-mode usage peaked in 2008. While it has been falling since, it probably only became irrelevant around the time this was written. A lot of the Japanese sites that I visit(ed) were designed for i-Mode first/only as late as 2011.
        • resoluteteeth 6y ago
          My understanding that i-mode markup was very limited and didn't include tables or css, so I don't think it would be possible for desktop sites from 2011 to have been designed for i-mode first. Common Japanese sites for desktop browsers from this period as described in the original article were extremely cluttered in a way that would have been completely impossible to read on a feature phone with i-mode. I believe that as with WAP, it was necessary to have completely separate i-mode sites, so I don't think the front end rendering of one would necessarily affect the other even if companies like Yahoo Japan were serving similar content over both.
• Jasper_ 6y ago
  The Japanese site I use most frequently, which is a high quality store that sells FLAC downloads, has a relatively modern design. https://ototoy.jp/ https://ototoy.jp/
• appleiigs 6y ago
  The crammed design is also seen in their electronics and other household items. Things that seemingly that have 1 function such as rice cookers and toilets are jam packed with buttons, lights and beeping. I also avoided Toyotas because of the crammed dashboard/consoles and all the beeping. Unlock door, closing hatch door, starting the car is just beep, beep, beep. Instead of toggles like BMW, they would have an individual buttons for AM, FM, CD, Bluetooth, Aux.
  • forgotmypw17 6y ago
    This "crammed" design allows for button-function coupling, which makes buttons stateless and predictable.
    • sjg007 6y ago
      I don’t know about anyone else but the move to touch screens has been awful. I don’t need 2 menu layers to adjust the air temp or seat heater. All I really want is apple carplay.
      • kindatrue 6y ago
        +1000 It's one thing to have a touch screen to control your phone - where your attention is the phone. It's another to have a touch screen to control the accessories of your car - where your attention is driving.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • canofbars 6y ago
      Yep, When you want FM you can press the FM button rather than press the mode switch an unknown number of times requiring you to watch the display. My car has a rotary selector for air con mode and I usually just turn it all the way to one side and move it the number of clicks I know are needed. That way no looking is required.
• Dirlewanger 6y ago
  Let’s hope the rest learn from them and catch up soon. Aside from the security implications of using IE/XP, um, no, how about we don't and let them do what they want? How dare the author maintain that they should follow the West's path of bloated web design practices. Get out of here with that shit.
  • slater 6y ago
    Wow, what's with the username?
  • tenryuu 6y ago
    The article is 7 years old, the technical aspects of this no longer have any valid representation
• uniqueid 6y ago
  This is because each font requires thousands of characters to be individually designed which is prohibitively expensive, time-consuming, and would take longer to download. Presumably a coherent hand-designed Japanese font reuses the same style strokes in different combinations. Are there tools to reduce the full set of glyphs to a subset of component elements?
  • GloriousKoji 6y ago
    Even if you don't go down to the individual stroke level you can break kanji up into a set of radicals. If you mix that up with the katakana, hiragana, roman letters, and punctuation it's maybe something like 500 characters. Given the affluence of emoji's and various Unicode symbols these days it weakens that argument even further.
    • innocenat 6y ago
      > Given the affluence of emoji's and various Unicode symbols these days it weakens that argument even further. Most of the time these symbols and emoji are using fallback font though. It's not included in every font.
  • sirn 6y ago
    Not really a tool per-se, Japanese has standardized subset of kanji suitable for computer use. This is the JIS X 0208 (Kanji 1 and Kanji 2 containing 6,879 characters) and JIS X 0213 (Kanji 3 and Kanji 4 containing 11,233 characters). There are several tricks font designer can utilizes, such as reusing radicals (component of a kanji) and combine them. This technique only works for certain type of fonts and still requires hand-tuning.
  • lmm 6y ago
    There are starting to be tools aimed at generating a font file from a more compact representation that would let you e.g. reuse radicals between characters, but the font file formats are pretty wedded to each glyph's entry being independent AIUI.
• huangc10 6y ago
  Don't want to light a fire here but I'd like to note that there is inherently something about Japanese culture (or Asian culture for that matter) that inhibits software development growth. Everything in Asia screams of respect for elders. In this case, the elders are the old design patterns and the older programming languages. It's the thought of why do something when it's not broken? As we move forward globally, we are all now realizing that it takes disruption to really create change. Something cultures in Asia are strongly against but are now slowly grasping. I believe this will all change within the next decade or so. Just to add to this, I am Asian myself so I have experienced this and seen this first hand.
  • nullifidian 6y ago
    As if the "change" we have in UX currently is a good thing. Radical minimalism and the prioritization of clean design and simplicity over functionality doesn't necessarily look like progress to me.
    • huangc10 6y ago
      Do you mind giving me an example of this in 2020? I do remember reading a lot about this in the last couple of years but it seems designers have been quickly to rectify it. Out of all the websites and apps I use commonly, I'm seeing less and less examples of this.
      • nomad543 6y ago
        Try using the Facebook ads and Google Adwords interface for more than one week. Those are the worst interface I've ever seen. Slow and disfunctional, every click you get a spinner, I'm surprised it went to production, using that for more than a week is torture. As if the spinners were not bad enough, now western web design created the animated grayed out text, which I particularly find an aberration. Youtube interface is another example. You click on the "videos" tab and you get infinite scrolling without pagination. Killing pagination is a huge usability issue. Comments section with the "Load more" approach, another annoying feature, just load me all the comments in one go please.
• nullifidian 6y ago
  The better question would be why Japan in general maintains its differences/idiosyncrasies from the west? Web design is not the only thing that differs.
  • ducttapecrown 6y ago
    Homogeneous island nation! Like 97% of people in Japan are Japanese. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_of_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_of_Japan
  • lemax 6y ago
    Until recently Japan had very few foreign nationals, on the order of 1% even in 2005 [1]. Compare that to 10-12% in the US. That has recently been changing as Japan tries to bring in more foreigners to address its shrinking workforce [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#Foreign_residents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#Foreign_... [2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/23/japan-immigration-policy-xenophobia-migration/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/23/japan-immigration-polic...
    • sundarurfriend 6y ago
      Having not seen the numbers, I'd guess that US is the outlier there, not Japan.
  • rangibaby 6y ago
    Japanese call it "Galapagos syndrome"
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• namuol 6y ago
  (Disclaimer: IANAL - I am not a linguist) The Japanese language itself has very low "information density" - it takes many more syllables to convey the same thing in Japanese than it does in most languages. This is the result of the language having much tighter phonotactic constraints; literally there are fewer "legal" phonemes (and combinations of them) in Japanese than in most other languages. [1] This isn't a criticism of the language of course - just an interesting tradeoff: A Japanese speaker has fewer sounds to learn, but must learn to speak them faster in order to convey their ideas. As a result, Japanese speakers are some of the fastest speakers in terms of syllables/second, out of necessity. Therefore it's no surprise that the typography is going to appear more "densely packed" on a Japanese website. With the exception of Kanji which is a pictographic (logographic? I'm not really a linguist) writing system consisting of many, many characters (and thus can be quite information-dense) - Japanese's other writing systems are purely phonetic - each character representing a single syllable. Take a look at the front page of a Japanese newspaper and show it to an English speaker, they will think it's "crowded", but I bet if you translated it to English you'd see something that resembles a typical English paper. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics
  • sizt 6y ago
    Kanji is efficient precisely because it is dense.
    • cambalache 6y ago
      Yeah, what a weird comment.How can you argue that you need more length and characters when comparing 2000-3000 Kanji vs 26 letters (I am ignoring the "kanas" to simplify the argument) It is like saying Hexadecimal is more verbose than binary.
      • japgolly 6y ago
        That's not how Japanese works. Yes Japanese uses Chinese characters that's only a subset of Japanese. Japanese sentences are typically a bit longer than English in terms of syllables and written length - their main reduction technique at the language level is omission, rarely efficiency improvement. - Why's it so hot today? = 6 syllables - Nande konna ni atsui no kyou? = 10 syllables (spoken colloquially) What about written length? You can see the Japanese sentence is a little longer here (when the English uses a non-monospaced font). It's also enough to demonstrates the why using kanji doesn't always provide the huge reduction/compression that you're expecting. - Why's it so hot today? - なんでこんなに暑いの今日？
• supernova87a 6y ago
  Also interesting how, when Japanese fonts are used to write English, you can always tell that it winds the clock back about 20 years and turns to an inelegant pixelated dot-matrix level appearance.
• blackbrokkoli 6y ago
  I am pretty sure you could write the same article with the roles reversed. That in itself does of course not take away from the article, but I am catching some negative undertones how Japan is "behind" or "unable to change" because of their society. I guess you could even open the bottomless barell of a discussion about racism, but my point is just this: Seeing "them" as "behind" is a bad way to think about it and prevents true understanding. Family staffed restaurants which revenues are 90% regulars remake their website and the agency slabs a 4MB hero image on their "landing page". They of course don't need any of that. Only clicks the website gets are people checking the opening times or showing their friends how grass-roots it is. To literally quote the article "Once a precedent has been set for things looking or behaving a certain way then everybody follows it, regardless of whether there is a better solution." Consider the memes about the weird distorted discolored vector graphics everything tech now has [0]. Consider JIRA managers talking about a 4 second loading target for web pages. We are actually subconsciously aware that "our way" is just as random, weird and wrong, we just like to default to "ours=the way". Fun article - definitely made me think - but IMO the real takeaway is: The Overton window of design is arbitrary and way more influenced by what $IMPORTANT_PERSON said in 2003 than by logic or sense, and we are not there yet. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/starterpacks/comments/jwsagt/big_tech_corporate_artstyle_starter_pack/ https://old.reddit.com/r/starterpacks/comments/jwsagt/big_te...
  • bourgoin 6y ago
    It's funny to me that one could look at these webpages and think they're "behind": https://www.yomiuri.co.jp https://www.yomiuri.co.jp https://okwave.jp https://okwave.jp They load pretty much instantaneously, run few scripts, have no swooshing animations or scroll behavior overriding, elements don't jumble around and rearrange themselves as the page is loading... they are basically just plain text and hyperlinks on a plain background. From my perspective they're lightyears ahead of the state of English-language webpage design. I guess they're behind in the sense that they have declined to incorporate many new bad practices. They're behind like a farmer who doesn't use pesticides, a candy-maker that doesn't use artificial coloring and flavoring, or a gas station that doesn't play ads on a screen at the pump.
    • 6y ago
• cwwc 6y ago
  Hmmm I definitely disagree with the “lacking emphasis”part. One of the Japanese alphabets is literally used to draw attention to words
• pugworthy 6y ago
  Visually this website design reminds me a lot of Dekochari [1] and Dekotora [2]. Dekochari are highly decorated bicycles, and Dekotora highly decorated trucks. All of them have this very bright, visually busy style that is, as the website says, very different than some imagine the Japanese aesthetics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekochari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekochari [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekotora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekotora
• cpeterso 6y ago
  Picking a random example, the google.com home pages for English and Japanese are not very different: https://www.google.com/?hl=en https://www.google.com/?hl=en https://www.google.com/?hl=ja https://www.google.com/?hl=ja They're almost identical except the English page includes links to Google Store and information about "Carbon neutral since 2007". The English page's "About" link is in the upper left corner of the page. The Japanese page's "About" link is in the page footer.
  • howlgarnish 6y ago
    Google is an American company and the Google home page is pretty much the same in any language.
• squarefoot 6y ago
  I believe it's not just a Japanese thing but Asian in general, but I fail to understand the reasons. Some 16 years ago at a company I worked with we were testing some mini industrial PC and embedded boards for a project, so we had to download lots of documentation from the manufacturers site which was located in Taiwan. Those weren't home or business PC boards, their site target audience would be mostly engineers and technicians but it was anyway ridden with Flash blinking buttons and heavy (albeit minimalistic, still awful) graphics for everything where a highlighted text link would suffice. That site was a nightmare to use, and the slow bandwidth when connecting there from the EU certainly didn't help. But there weren't lots of ads, quite the opposite, they used Flash and blinky objects extensively like their page had to draw more attention on a multi screen wall against other pages, just like a billboard. They weren't alone however as I recall having seen in the past other Asian manufacturers technical sites doing essentially the same thing.
  • brabel 6y ago
    The reason why people from a certain region like a certain kind of aesthetics? Well, why do people have cultures might be the same question.
• skee0083 6y ago
  I dislike how the author talks about 1998 style web design like it's a bad thing. What we have today is absolute garbage.
• Jach 6y ago
  It's nice that the year is in the title, I remember seeing this before... In the current year though, I think a lot of JP web design is just as modern as western design. The main difference is that there are still a lot of JP sites that just don't really update their designs so you find them in the mix without having to dive. It's rather refreshing that you can see each of the "eras" of web design with JP sites, and when you visit a rather antiquated one it's often still active rather than relegated to a nostalgia piece. The "just don't update" thing does get taken a bit far in places though -- at my last job obsolete IE support was basically due to pressure from JP customers. One example of a "web 2.0" era site (and it needs JS to work, so you know it's modern): https://maidragon.jp/2nd/ https://maidragon.jp/2nd/ Flashy intro, bold non-box outlines of content sections and non-straight (i.e. it's slanted) text, animated background, static background element. News link button has character to it, it's not just a <button> with default browser styling nor with the standard bootstrap CSS and calling it a day. Clicking it goes to https://maidragon.jp/news/ https://maidragon.jp/news/ which has a nice vertical column of main content, though again that so nostalgic (to me) slanted design shows at the top. Viewing the source (direct payload) you can actually read the HTML. It might be wordpress based? For contrast one fully modern, including the "why does it need to be" part, is a site like https://sephira-su.fensi.plus/ https://sephira-su.fensi.plus/ Non-standard TLD, google translate doesn't even work -- I think because of shadow dom shenanigans. There's a dev blog about that site's tech that is readable with google translate though: https://cam-inc.co.jp/p/techblog/405653224037549201 https://cam-inc.co.jp/p/techblog/405653224037549201 (The dev blog and the company's home page itself is another modern site, it's even updated significantly since I saw it last in March, and they blog about other modern tech.) The backend of Fensi is microservices, content served in a "headless CMS" style, the front-end is built as a re-usable theme with web components (LitElement framework) making use of shadow dom... In summary, there's plenty of modern web design going on in Japan, and just like here there's probably too much.
• scott_russell 6y ago
  The last japanese website I used was Mt. Gox... That ended well.
• bastawhiz 6y ago
  It's worth noting that most of the websites listed as examples no longer feature the sort of design patterns in the article.
• timoth3y 6y ago
  I started my first tech startup in Japan in 1998 and have built several since them. For the last 20 years there has been a steady stream of articles on how Japanese web design is "broken", or "behind", or "cluttered". There is also a steady steam of UI experts arriving from the US telling Japanese companies they need to modernize their look and feel. The thing is, e-commerce sites like Rakuten are already heavily A/B tested and optimized. That graphic experience is common because it is most effective. Any analysis that does not focus on actual, observed user behavior is simply navel-gazing. That said, the ubiquity of iPhone and Android UI is causing a shift in Japanese UI/UX design. People are becoming used to that as the primary interface.
  • dheera 6y ago
    For that matter Amazon and eBay are both pretty goddamn cluttered to. As long as you're comparing e-commerce sites there isn't that much difference.
    • numpad0 6y ago
      Rakuten is special https://cdn-ak.f.st-hatena.com/images/fotolife/o/orangeitems/20181104/20181104183739.png https://cdn-ak.f.st-hatena.com/images/fotolife/o/orangeitems... https://d2l930y2yx77uc.cloudfront.net/production/uploads/images/13118594/picture_pc_de93d34cadabcd2dc82e09c4d1eeb86c.jpg https://d2l930y2yx77uc.cloudfront.net/production/uploads/ima... https://www.naenote.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/45b33593ee734c0f70b847cc62ecb5c2.png https://www.naenote.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/45b33593e...
      • knolax 6y ago
        Scroll down on certain Amazon listings and you'll find similar graphics from the seller. The difference here is that atleast the Japanese ones look nice.
      • innocenat 6y ago
        That's all created by the seller, not by Rakuten though. You can do the same on Amazon (at least in Japan, idk about other Amazon)
• hardstyle 6y ago
  Not to mention, storing credit card details in plaintext.
• wisty 6y ago
  Japanese just naturally has a smaller natural column-width due to the density. Everything gets broken into smaller chunks, and those chunks get put into small columns. The pictures are small because a big picture will throw things off. I'm not sure, but I think Japanese people (and Asians in general) have very different rules for negative space - they either don't use it at all (and pack the design like blocks of tofu) or will use it in a very intentional way. It's rarer (as far as I can tell) for negative space to just relaxing filler, it's more a bold statement similar to an attention-grabbing graphic.
• unabst 6y ago
  Rakuten is the original Japanese Amazon. It has everything and is just as cluttered as Amazon. Pages are optimized for maximum spam. Might as well call it the spam UI paradigm. Here are sites that don't spam. https://www.au.com/ https://www.au.com/ https://www.playstation.com/ja-jp/ https://www.playstation.com/ja-jp/ https://kiminitou.com/ https://kiminitou.com/ And here is a web design aggregator. Here you can see more of the Japanese aesthetic at work. https://81-web.com/ https://81-web.com/
• mupuff123 6y ago
  This might be coming from my very short exposure to japanese culture. But can some explain how come it seems like japanese stylistic choices come down to two extreme opposites? either very minimalistic or extreme Insanity (or at least that's how my brain registers it :)
• n_f 6y ago
  Big fan of the Muji website actually
• nitwit005 6y ago
  This misses that some pre-internet content looked different in Asia as well. You can see the high column count and small adverts with fancy text graphics on things like newspapers. What's optimum has a lot to do with what people are already used to. No newspaper reader is going to be confused by a news website with the same layout as the print edition.
• tjpnz 6y ago
  In my experience Rakuten represents a more extreme example and isn't representative of "modern" Japanese UI/UX as a whole. Companies started in the last 10 years are abandoning what we might deem as a cluttered aesthetic and moving towards something which wouldn't look out of place in the west. In fact my current company ended up going with the same UI when they launched in the US with minimal modifications.
• enz 6y ago
  When I was living in Tokyo, I asked Japanese people why their design was the way it is and if they liked it. Answer I got: "I don't know. I don't like that, personally".
  • fomine3 6y ago
    It is explained: People want healthy McDonald's but they won't buy it.
  • andi999 6y ago
    Maybe because of tradition?
    • enz 6y ago
      I think. Maybe some "We always did it this way, so we'll continue" thinking. (I think it's very Japanese)
      • andi999 6y ago
        I remember talking to a japanese (unfortunately I forgot the subject) but one sentence stuck 'if it were a rule(or law) it could have been changed, but it is tradition'
• wortelefant 6y ago
  A while ago I saw a post about text-heavy websites in Japan, explaining it as a result of higher literacy rates and the expectation to see all relevant information at once, sadly I can't find it anymore. If you happen to stumble over it, much oblidged.
  • T-zex 6y ago
    Not a Japanese, but this is exactly what I would like to get from the websites instead of huge pictures/videos and endless scrolling to get basic info.
• auganov 6y ago
  The author correctly notes that Japan had wide adoption of the mobile web way before the rest of the world but doesn't explore why. And therein lies the answer. SE Asian countries have a pattern of widely adopting technologies before others do. Despite not having any obvious technological edge. They just seem to catch on easier. It would seem to me people are simply more willing or more able to deal with them. Patterns that may be a huge usability issue in one place might not be elsewhere. Wechat in China is a good present-day example. It's not impressive in its tech or design. Would probably be considered a mess in most places. What's impressive is the adoption.