Comment by shioyama | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shioyama | Hacker News Reader

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The malaise comes not from the absolute position of Japanese companies in the world, but from the direction they're headed in.

There was a great article in the Economist a while back about this:

http://www.economist.com/node/14793432

Since this article was published, the situation has gotten worse. The earthquake sure didn't help, but the situation wasn't good even before that. Sure, 10% or something of the parts that go into the iPhone are developed by Japanese specialized parts manufacturers, who have skills that no-one else in the world can match. But if you look more closely, you'll see that these industries are hollowing out -- there isn't enough interest from younger generations to keep the mom&pop shops going in the long run.

The problem which many have mentioned here and elsewhere is that while Japan is unrivalled in craftsmanship ("monozukuri") -- making physical things -- exactly the opposite is true when it comes to "unphysical" things like software. That's why Japanese mobile phones have such utterly terrible interfaces, as someone else pointed out here. There is very little respect given to that side of the design process, and that's not going to change without a major shift of consciousness.

>The problem which many have mentioned here and elsewhere is that while Japan is unrivalled in craftsmanship ("monozukuri") -- making physical things -- exactly the opposite is true when it comes to "unphysical" things like software.

This is something I do not understand. Why is there a cultural aversion to creating beautiful software? As an example, Honda has some of the most beautifully designed interiors in the automotive world. Simple, elegant, functional, with quality materials. The design is often very Apple-like (at least relative to other manufacturers, though they are improving). I would think that the culture that gave us wonderful interaction with a vehicle would be able to provide a similar sort of experience with a phone. What's bizarre is that most pre-iPhone Japanese phones have the UX of a mid-90s Buick: lots of buttons, nothing really arranged properly.

To me it's just strange that they were unable to produce it, but I am not surprised at all that the iPhone is so popular. I feel like the iPhone should have come out of Japan, but didn't.

Have you looked at Japanese websites? Most of them have pretty terrible design/UI. It's the same thing.

My take on this is that you have to look more broadly to understand the tendency for cluttered design in Japanese interfaces. Walk around a small neighbourhood in Tokyo and you'll see how cluttered the layout is. On small "roji" (back alleyways), Japanese like to stack potted plants outside their front doors in a pretty disorganized arrangement. Streets are generally not straight, neighbourhoods rarely follow a grid layout.

(Shimokitazawa is probably the best example in Tokyo of this: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/11/04/japan-debating-the-... )

It's the same thing with cluttered interface design, except that whereas in urban layout it produces something amazingly complex, intricate and fascinating to explore, in UI design it just results in frustration and inefficiency. But I'm convinced the two come from the same source, and that you can't entirely separate them.

The beautifully designed interiors you mention come from a completely different place (mentally, not physically). I don't quite know how to reconcile the fact that the two come from the same country/culture, but I do believe they have both been here for a long long time. It's just that software somehow tends to bring out the former, whereas monozukuri brings out the latter.

I'm baffled because historically, Japan is all about using limitation to great effect. In terms of food, art, language (is there a more contextual language?), and engineering, Japan very much has an island-nation use-limited-resources-and-achieve-great-things approach.

The website thing that you mentioned is true. .jp websites are TERRIBLE in UX. I wonder if there is some part of Japanese culture that wants to embrace complexity for it's own sake.

And, let's be honest, the US/EU/Everywhere-Else designs for phones weren't very good pre-iPhone either. It had the same complexity problems and close to the same UX ridiculousness that the Japanese phones had. Perhaps it's a human thing, to marvel at too much to comprehend and consider it a good thing.

That being said, if any company were to come up with an iPhone, I would think it would be a Japanese one. But Japan is very traditional and Apple is unique in that it disregards a lot of conventions. I think this might be to Japan's detriment. I don't feel that they've embraced the current approach to UX, they are still stuck in the "complexity = more features = better" days of the Web during the dot-com-boom days (aka ancient history).

I hope there are some Japanese entrepreneurs out there ready to shake things up, the cultural seeds are already there for beautiful and elegant products.

The thing with the winding streets is that they came out organically---nobody planned them that way. You can't really fix that without doing something horribly draconian.

The newspaper inserts, magazines and websites, though...you'd think someone could just say, "Wow, this is an incredible eyesore that's impossible to navigate," and, you know, just not do that anymore.

I've got a Panasonic TV with an HDD recorder(can't remember the model, I'm at work) that is incredibly simple and intuitive to use. Want to record a show? Click one button on the remote, and you're given a grid of the upcoming TV listings. Click on the show you want, and it's done. Even my 6-year-old son knows how to use it. I can't imagine Apple doing better. Good UI can certainly be done in Japan.

Concerning websites, when you compare rakuten Japan and say UK, you see a stark difference in how things are presented. This may just be due to the UK site being done outside Japan/by foreigners, but this would hint at a some preference toward clutter for Japanese customers ?

The classic case of this is Google vs Yahoo in Japan. Yahoo is more popular, and if you look at the layout, you'll see that it's much more cluttered (or at least, that there's loads more information). At one point Google caved in (in Japan) and added more buttons to their top page, but I see they've switched back to the basic logo + search bar.

Another thing to consider is that the cluttered thing is not only Japan: I've heard that other Asian countries also have a preference for clutter. I can't vouch for whether that's true, but it sounds pretty believable.

Yahoo Japan is a pretty Japanese company (dunno about the proportion of Japanese workers there). I only got a very small look at it during interview there, but google Japan seems much more westernized as far as the workforce is concerned.

It would really interesting to know who is responsible for rakuten UK (or any other country). Since prices are in JPY, I am quite confused about the meaning of rakuten UK...

"Have you looked at Japanese websites? Most of them have pretty terrible design/UI. It's the same thing."

There are some pretty well designed ones.

http://bm.straightline.jp/

My own hypothesis about failure of Japanese companies in software is the "pursuit to perfection". This is pervasive in the Japanese work ethic and culture in general.

I still vividly remember the first comment of a small prototype aimed at automating a tedious task: "this is not perfect". If you aim at perfection at every step for software production, especially internally, non customer-facing ones, you can't go very far IMO. OTOH, that's probably one of the reason why Japanese companies can be so good for video games (where a screw up costs a lot of money given the market constraints), and hardware in general. The business oportunity cost is just different.

If you have any other comments or links about why Japanese websites are so cluttered, I would be really interested. While I am not in Japan anymore, this has always facinated me, and I have never been satisfied with the explanations I have seen so far.

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