Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different (2013)

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/

Registration form: https://www2.smile-etc.jp/NASApp/etcmlg/MlgReq?gvlddpef=1011...

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!

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.

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"

It’s a mess dealing with orders from Rakuten. I’m often searching for where I’m supposed to even buy the item. Amazon always has that link right at the top.

I prefer old “data dump” websites even in English - much better than whatever the current “hero image” design we have now where we do about five words per ten inches it seems.

Do you know of any other sites like this you'd recommend?

Space isn't just about advertisement but also presenting information in a form that reflects the structure of the content. Dumping everything, as the word suggests makes it harder to figure out what is important, the order of what's being presented, and so on.

Compare for example the debian download page (https://www.debian.org/distrib/) to the new Fedora site (https://getfedora.org/). I find the latter much, much easier to navigate.

Example: try comparing https://hulu.com to https://hulu.jp.

If a thing worked, Japanese culture seemed to allow for and respect retaining it, even in the face of newer alternatives.

Text works.

The modern web is a bloody mess, and it’s ridiculous how far backwards we’ve gone.

https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%9C%84%ED%82%A4%EB%B0%B1%EA...

Japanese also has monospaced numbers but maybe they’re not super common.

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%E3...

As a foreign traveler, Japan makes everything uniform and easy; even if things are different (and they often are) they're very approachable. China and Korea do not have the same approachable-ness for a random Westerner.

Technical Limitations → Skeuomorphism → Current "flat" design trends

Art Nouveau → Bauhaus and Contemporary → Postmodernism

Perhaps we are due for a maximalist wave in five years' time.

I think you meant 70s androgyny, surely - don't make Baby Bowie cry...

But there are many huge Japanese internet based companies, like Zozotown, that are extremely savvy at their UX experience and are extremely metrics driven. Not to mention the recent surge of internet based cellular providers that don’t have a brick and mortar storefront.

Meanwhile the fax machine anecdote is about ten years old at this point. Most Japanese purely rely on mobile devices these days.

That's a weird way to put that. American newsletters have an unsubscribe link because our Congress passed a law in 2003. But Americans lets prescription drugs advertise on television, which is an indefensible barbarism. So it goes. Every country has a different vision of what nuisances are and are not worth of regulation.