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Comment by timoth3y | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I don’t understand the aversion to information density that designers have. In my experience, old school server-rendered sites tended to be jam packed with more information and richer tooling than most of the SPA-type sites you interact with these days.

They might be “ugly” from some bauhaus art school designer’s standard but I’d way rather use an old school but feature rich interface like eBay than the sleek-looking but totally UX deprived site like FB marketplace. I recently liquidated a bunch of my belongings to move, and I can’t deny that it’s probably the best tool to do something like that because of the eye balls, but god damn. The mobile first design, gobs of white pace, the annoying “blurred copy of your picture behind your picture” effect that local news sites seem to love, completely re-created React component replacements for every standard UI element like a select drop down. It was usually easier to just use my phone than their website.

My guess is that tech nerds generally have way higher than normal tolerance for information density. For example, people always balk when I have quick looks at unpretty JSON to see if it kinds looks like it should, often even other devs. My impresssion is that for a lot of "normies" high information density equals unparseable unless they are already familiar with the information structure.

I guess. I mean, it’s not like I want things to be a big spreadsheet of information or something. A simple example is the semi-recent redesign of Strava. It used to be more of the old school Rails server-generated HTML variety and then they redesigned it to have huge buttons, rounded corners, infiniscrolls, etc. some things are nice like the training calendar, but in the past it was a lot easier for me to load a page of my historic activities to quickly estimate for myself something like “how many rides did I go on between thanksgiving and Christmas?” It was more about the data that I used the site for.

Now I have to enjoy the “experience” that some designer put together which doubtlessly enhanced their engagement. More often than not I’m not looking to “experience” anything. I just want to load a page of data and quickly review it. Over designing things and and hearing PMs drone about “experiences” for everything has made that word chafe for me lol. It’s like they think logging into their website should be like going to Disneyland or something.

I think (but I'm also someone who likes more densely packed interfaces) that it boils down to "discoverability" and friends: a sparse interface with a few well chosen controls can be easier to explore and navigate, precisely because there is less information. So on the one hand it eases the task of the user (cognitive load, if you want), and on the other it forces the builder to prioritize.

If that leads to difficulties for complex and infrequent tasks, it's only a disadvantage for the more technically oriented user.

I see what you mean. I always get this feeling that all the changes are better for people in general, but power users get screwed in the move. I used to love how difficult power powerful UIs were. Back in the 90s and 00s, tools like photoshop and Office used to be complex, but felt so crisp that once your learned them, it was like playing a piano. Muscle memory and keyboard shortcuts made things feel so fast. Now it feels like everything tried to “learn” my preference or suggest shit to me.

Dialing numbers and texting on my old flip phone used to be easy. Now, using google voice on my iPhone to dial a number is horrendous because it’s trying to “suggest” someone for me to call with every digit that I dial.

I also like to do as much as possible via the keyboard, but that rarely works on websites anyway. They don't have to be incompatible: quite a few shortcuts in MS Word still work, even though they've change the UI model several times, and (at least in Office) they're customizable.

I agree that suggesting a contact based on digits is a very odd feature, one of the type "because we can". I can't imagine it being helpful at all, really: almost all users know how to operate the contact list.

If you rely too much on A/B testing it is easy though to get stuck in a local minimum defined by users' expectations... Or to build a site that generates a lot of revenue but that's not optimal for users, and when a competitor breaks out of the local minimum by changing the paradigm, all the users go there.

Shouldn't it be a local maximum ?

It's just as often that one optimizes for minima than for maxima (eg. latency or revenue). When there isn't a natural orden it's a coin flip (eg compounding latency and revenue in a single function). And anyways both are functionally equivalent by means of order invertion.

Personally, when speaking in abstract I stick to saying "local extremum" just to avoid this nagging question.

This is true in general, but in this specific case looking at the biggest online marketplaces (e.g. amazon, aliexpress, ...) they come from completely different places and have converged to the same kind of conclusion.

There might be other paradigms looming out there, but the current situation is not just people lazily relying on A/B testing.

The same kind of conclusion? Amazon and AliExpress have wildly different design philosophies. One has pointless, hard to use coupons and mini games, and the other is Amazon.

I use AliExpress _in spite of_ their UI, not because of it.

Aren’t both at the same level ? Amazon is horrible in many many ways.

You’d think a bookstore would have a good way to show books of the same series in order, and make it easy to find any specific issue. Or help you follow random authors, and not just some handpicked ones, or notify you of a new book coming out in the future. All of these use cases are mildly (wildly) broken and it was the core of their business for a long time.

When I say they are similar, I’m thinking mostly about how they’re ignoring “pretty” and “logical” design trends and stick to very basic while chaotic page designs.

They say that Bezos has strong opinions on how Amazon's UI looks and intervenes to stop them changing it, even though it's bad.

Amazon has idiosyncracies, but Aliexpress is outright trash. It's the worst of the West-facing Chinese ecommerce sites (with the worst support too).

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.

Rakuten is special

https://cdn-ak.f.st-hatena.com/images/fotolife/o/orangeitems...

https://d2l930y2yx77uc.cloudfront.net/production/uploads/ima...

https://www.naenote.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/45b33593e...

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)

According to some accounts I've seen, Rakuten sales/support not just encourage but instruct sellers to do this until they oblige

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.

Honestly, I think Amazon and eBay look terrible.

Yeah, they're not designed to look good, they're designed to sell.

He doesn’t understand the culture and instead of trying to learn he throws it in a bonfire. For some reason the “clutter” is seen as professional, both serious and that you have content. Western culture is being very playful instead with big videos and pictures, which is as fitting for children as adults.

Shouldn’t a designer be able to put themselves into the mindset of the customer?

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