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A few more points: - Compared to English, Japanese text can cram more information into an easily-skimmable space, but typing is slower, so cluttered, link-rich
by Pitarou 13y ago
A few more points:
- Compared to English, Japanese text can cram more information into an easily-skimmable space, but typing is slower, so cluttered, link-rich interfaces have an advantage. This may well explain why Yahoo! Japan's portal is so much more popular than Google's.
- I can well imagine that, in the minds of the staid gerontocrats who maintain an iron grip on Japanese corporate life, a website is merely a modern version of those "me! me! me!" brochures that get shoved in my mailbox every day. So it's natural that they would expect it to look like one.
- Japanese culture is not nearly as minimalist as its made out to be in the West. Minimalism has its place, of course, but in commercial spaces its all about competing for attention, to the point of sensory overload.
- yiransheng 13y ago- Compared to English, Japanese text can cram more information into an easily-skimmable spaaaaaace, but typing is slower, so cluttered, link-rich interfaces have an advantage. This may well explain why Yahoo! Japan's portal is so much more popular than Google's. I second this theory. A similar version of this happened in China too. A few years back, when Baidu was still copying Google's minimal design pixel by pixel, they suddenly discovered that it was losing traffic to a random site with only one static html page setup: hao123, which also fit into the 'cluttered, link-rich' interface category. Baidu ended up acquiring hao123, spending close to a million dollars on a few lines of html. Note that Chinese language bears quite some similarities to Japanese, they are both character based and typically a hassle to type in large chunks.
- ics 13y agoSomewhere I have a text file with links to several studies on information density and reading characteristics, but for now this might be interesting (unfortunately some of the pages before are cut): http://books.google.com/books?id=BdrgETRVl74C&pg=PA99&lpg=PA99 http://books.google.com/books?id=BdrgETRVl74C&pg=PA99&lpg=PA...