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I’ve come to prefer Japanese web design over western design in general. It can be messy at times, but you don’t have endless pop ups asking you to sign up for t

I’ve come to prefer Japanese web design over western design in general. It can be messy at times, but you don’t have endless pop ups asking you to sign up for their “newsletter” ad spam that is sold off to third parties(nobody reads those—your stats are fraudulent and people only register because they think it’ll end the pop ups), endless cookie pop ups, random bot support chats for things that would never need it, “Take me to the new design!” pop ups that lead away from a functional page to absolute garbage, h u g e white space for zero reason, random “login with Google!” pop ups for a basic-ass text page, social media buttons, and so on. Japanese web design feels like walking into a casino, but western design feels like having a dump truck emptied on you.

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
>Japanese web design feels like walking into a casino, but western design feels like having a dump truck emptied on you. perfect analogy i think in general they have more of a "if its not broken dont fix it" mentality whereas in the west we seem to be "move fast and break things"
tsss 5y ago
As someone who works on newsletter popups I can tell you that they do, unfortunately, work quite well. Hardly any other measure translates so easily to increased sales.
- astura 5y ago
  Same with asking for upvotes and subscriptions on YouTube. It's so annoying but it works so well.
granshaw 5y ago
Umm, those things have nothing to do with web _design_, but are rather a function of market dynamics
- friedturkey 5y ago
  White space and pop ups aren’t part of design? That’s a very strict definition. Design is also merely a function of market dynamics, hence why it changes with trends and not to improve function.
unscaled 5y ago
Almost 10 years have passed since this article was posted, and things are quite different now. Most of the popular web pages have cleaned up, and new startups are mostly following modern international design trends. Even sites that remained dense in terms of color (like the Rakuten top page), have more white-space around text, less columns, larger hi-res images, and carousel banners. Oh, and Flash is gone for good now. The Japanese web became a great deal more usable, and in the same time popups are still less trendy here than abroad (although coupon and campaign popups are all over the place in e-commerce sites). But I still shudder when I encounter an oldskool site. I don't care about the minimalist design, and if done correctly it can be quite fast and fun to use. But usually it comes with hefty price tag: - These sites are rarely ever responsive. If you're lucky, there's a mobile version that works based on user agent sniffing, and often suffers from feature parity issues. - You can expect a regular monthly maintenance window where the site will be shut down for multiple hours during midnight. You should keep an eye for this announcement. - There are no cookie banners popping up, but nobody said anything about blinking gifs or bleeding red text. - Forms are complicated and have weird validation rules. You usually enter your name which must be in Kanji (or Full Width latin alphabet characters if you don't have a Kanji name), and then a phonetic name which would be either Hiragana or Katakana - but there is no standard for that, and the site doesn't try to be nice and help you with auto-converting these things (although it's quite easy to do). - Entering your address is also generally painful, since you have to first enter your zip code, and then choose your prefecture (usually on a tiny drop-down list which is arranged from north to south!) and street address. This address is then verified against your zip code, although it could have been auto-generated from your zip code. - Lots of complex web apps are still written in circa-2000 frameworks that try to keep all the presentational state in a cookie or a URL parameter and won't let you use the back button or open multiple tabs. - Worst of all, these text-heavy sites are not necessarily as fast as they should be some times, owing to poor hardware, or perhaps log files that haven't been cleaned up for the last 10 years and are now clogging up the disk on the poor host machine. If you want an example for an old skool site that suffers most of this problem, take the registration site for the ETC mileage club (this is the point rewards club for the nationwide automated highway toll gate payment card). Top page: https://www.smile-etc.jp/ https://www.smile-etc.jp/ Registration form: https://www2.smile-etc.jp/NASApp/etcmlg/MlgReq?gvlddpef=1011100000&mdwsetmb=1011110000 https://www2.smile-etc.jp/NASApp/etcmlg/MlgReq?gvlddpef=1011...
jiggawatts 5y ago
> western design feels like having a dump truck emptied on you. To me it feels like when you walk into a whitegoods store and a sales guy with a fake smile immediately makes a beeline for you. Look... sigh... I'm "just browsing". Or when there's that insufferable person in the meeting (possibly called Karen) that literally puts her hand in your face to shut you up mid-sentence. Like... we're adults here. I'm talking. You just shoved your hand in my face like that's normal! What... the... #%@(9$? That's what modern web feels like. They see you reading the content, scrolling through it and... STOP! Read the hand! NOW!
- dotancohen 5y ago
  I immediately hit D (Tridactyl, close page) the instant a popup happens when scrolling or reading. It is so instinctive now that I don't miss the content at all. I think maybe once or twice I've had to reopen the page (also easy in Tridactyl, U) to read content that was critical but not available elsewhere. I just hope that there is some Google Analytics event that is triggered on page closes within a few hundred miliseconds of the popup interruption.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - annadane 5y ago
    Hello, fellow Tridactyl user :D
  - picsao 5y ago
- biztos 5y ago
  Fascinating, I don't think I ever heard "whitegoods" before. In case I'm not alone: refrigerators, washing machines and the like, in UK English. I think. So like this: https://www.ukwhitegoods.co.uk https://www.ukwhitegoods.co.uk But maybe not this: https://www.whitegoods.com https://www.whitegoods.com
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nirui 5y ago
I don't think the newsletter pop ups is a layout design problem, it's more like an idea contributed by the marketing department. Layout wise... you can totally have a website designed like a whole casino of dump truck emptied on you. I'm not talking about Japanese websites or even pointing my figures, but it's a simple fact that you absolutely and unmistakably can have the worst of the both worlds, and everybody who visits taobao.com can experience that first hand.
- 3np 5y ago
  Also Rakuten. Unfortunately an increasing amount of Japanese sites are bringing over the bad part of “modern” Western web design.

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago

>Japanese web design feels like walking into a casino, but western design feels like having a dump truck emptied on you. perfect analogy i think in general they have more of a "if its not broken dont fix it" mentality whereas in the west we seem to be "move fast and break things"

tsss 5y ago

As someone who works on newsletter popups I can tell you that they do, unfortunately, work quite well. Hardly any other measure translates so easily to increased sales.

astura 5y ago
Same with asking for upvotes and subscriptions on YouTube. It's so annoying but it works so well.

granshaw 5y ago

Umm, those things have nothing to do with web _design_, but are rather a function of market dynamics

friedturkey 5y ago
White space and pop ups aren’t part of design? That’s a very strict definition. Design is also merely a function of market dynamics, hence why it changes with trends and not to improve function.

unscaled 5y ago

Almost 10 years have passed since this article was posted, and things are quite different now. Most of the popular web pages have cleaned up, and new startups are mostly following modern international design trends. Even sites that remained dense in terms of color (like the Rakuten top page), have more white-space around text, less columns, larger hi-res images, and carousel banners. Oh, and Flash is gone for good now. The Japanese web became a great deal more usable, and in the same time popups are still less trendy here than abroad (although coupon and campaign popups are all over the place in e-commerce sites). But I still shudder when I encounter an oldskool site. I don't care about the minimalist design, and if done correctly it can be quite fast and fun to use. But usually it comes with hefty price tag: - These sites are rarely ever responsive. If you're lucky, there's a mobile version that works based on user agent sniffing, and often suffers from feature parity issues. - You can expect a regular monthly maintenance window where the site will be shut down for multiple hours during midnight. You should keep an eye for this announcement. - There are no cookie banners popping up, but nobody said anything about blinking gifs or bleeding red text. - Forms are complicated and have weird validation rules. You usually enter your name which must be in Kanji (or Full Width latin alphabet characters if you don't have a Kanji name), and then a phonetic name which would be either Hiragana or Katakana - but there is no standard for that, and the site doesn't try to be nice and help you with auto-converting these things (although it's quite easy to do). - Entering your address is also generally painful, since you have to first enter your zip code, and then choose your prefecture (usually on a tiny drop-down list which is arranged from north to south!) and street address. This address is then verified against your zip code, although it could have been auto-generated from your zip code. - Lots of complex web apps are still written in circa-2000 frameworks that try to keep all the presentational state in a cookie or a URL parameter and won't let you use the back button or open multiple tabs. - Worst of all, these text-heavy sites are not necessarily as fast as they should be some times, owing to poor hardware, or perhaps log files that haven't been cleaned up for the last 10 years and are now clogging up the disk on the poor host machine. If you want an example for an old skool site that suffers most of this problem, take the registration site for the ETC mileage club (this is the point rewards club for the nationwide automated highway toll gate payment card). Top page: https://www.smile-etc.jp/ https://www.smile-etc.jp/ Registration form: https://www2.smile-etc.jp/NASApp/etcmlg/MlgReq?gvlddpef=1011100000&mdwsetmb=1011110000 https://www2.smile-etc.jp/NASApp/etcmlg/MlgReq?gvlddpef=1011...

jiggawatts 5y ago

> western design feels like having a dump truck emptied on you. To me it feels like when you walk into a whitegoods store and a sales guy with a fake smile immediately makes a beeline for you. Look... sigh... I'm "just browsing". Or when there's that insufferable person in the meeting (possibly called Karen) that literally puts her hand in your face to shut you up mid-sentence. Like... we're adults here. I'm talking. You just shoved your hand in my face like that's normal! What... the... #%@(9$? That's what modern web feels like. They see you reading the content, scrolling through it and... STOP! Read the hand! NOW!

dotancohen 5y ago
I immediately hit D (Tridactyl, close page) the instant a popup happens when scrolling or reading. It is so instinctive now that I don't miss the content at all. I think maybe once or twice I've had to reopen the page (also easy in Tridactyl, U) to read content that was critical but not available elsewhere. I just hope that there is some Google Analytics event that is triggered on page closes within a few hundred miliseconds of the popup interruption.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- annadane 5y ago
  Hello, fellow Tridactyl user :D
- picsao 5y ago
biztos 5y ago
Fascinating, I don't think I ever heard "whitegoods" before. In case I'm not alone: refrigerators, washing machines and the like, in UK English. I think. So like this: https://www.ukwhitegoods.co.uk https://www.ukwhitegoods.co.uk But maybe not this: https://www.whitegoods.com https://www.whitegoods.com

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nirui 5y ago

I don't think the newsletter pop ups is a layout design problem, it's more like an idea contributed by the marketing department. Layout wise... you can totally have a website designed like a whole casino of dump truck emptied on you. I'm not talking about Japanese websites or even pointing my figures, but it's a simple fact that you absolutely and unmistakably can have the worst of the both worlds, and everybody who visits taobao.com can experience that first hand.

3np 5y ago
Also Rakuten. Unfortunately an increasing amount of Japanese sites are bringing over the bad part of “modern” Western web design.