How is Japanese web design different?

I live in Japan and personally I think it's cultural and has more to do with the aversion to change and also the critical shortage of competent IT professionals and foreign-language speakers in this country. Often times websites aren't just designed differently, they are lacking basic functionality. Any foreign resident has a story about how some important website like their bank or a government site wouldn't let them in because their name was too many characters to enter into a text field or something. The government released this contact tracing app for covid and it didn't come out until like 5 months later that the app was broken on android and just literally didn't do anything. Japan's former cyber-security minister was outed as having never used a computer in his life after admitting in front of some committee that he didn't know what a USB drive is. Just look at the difference between Amazon jp and the local version, Rakuten, and it's clear how dated and non-functional Japanese sites are.

The problem is these companies are all headed by septuagenarian nepotism hires who can never be told they're wrong, staffed by programmers who have no idea of industry best-practices because they've been trained by these old guys who don't have a clue either and just want to keep doing what they've been doing since they learned to code in the 90s and can't read non-Japanese documentation, and the consumers also are tech illiterate enough not to notice or care that the websites are dogshit because they're used to it and again never access any non-japanese content because of no foreign language skills. And also old tech is rampant in major companies for the same reasons, which means often times these ancient devices are too slow to run modern websites well.

Is it possible designers have some principles that don't necessarily match real life usability? Only 3 colors is incredibly boring to me.

I see that hacker news also only has 3 colors, it's fine in this case because there's not much reason to have more. That doesn't apply to, say e.g., photoshop (and gimp following this too now for unknown reasons) only having 2-color icons, while multicolor ones are faster to distinguish visually

1. Japan's information-dense design pre-dates the Internet. If you look at commercial fliers from the 80s (and probably before) until today, they have similar information-dense designs.

2. This design is not a result of a "critical shortage of competent IT professionals." Just because something is different doesn't mean it is wrong or the makers are incompetent. Some of these e-commerce firms have thousands of good developers. Designs are extensively A/B tested. They are common because they work.

3. Hacker News is also very info-dense and has changed little over past decade. It's not due to incompetence, but because we users like it this way. Now, imagine we had a steady steam of designers posting about how backwards we are and how they needed to "fix" the site to improve our experience. That's what it often feels like reading these articles from Japan.

China has another system. Many things are applets within the WeChat environment. This is a whole different world, using MINA, WXML, and WXSS. It's kind of like XML with an external XSS style sheet. Here's the official repo.[1]

It's interesting to see where that division leads. The XSS approach separates content and look much more strongly than HTML/CSS does. (At least as HTML/CSS is typically used. It's possible to have an HTML document with just the data, and use a single separate style sheet in CSs. There are people who argue for that, and some elegant examples.[2] But they are voices in the wilderness.)

The funny thing is, despite a different underlying technology, WeChat applets seem to look a lot like HTML/CSS web pages. The difference may be that the WeChat system was efficient enough to eliminate the demand for "native" smartphone apps.

[1] https://github.com/Tencent/weui-wxss

[2] https://every-layout.dev/blog/css-components/

[1] I made a comment before regarding how HN works, and usually when one certain issue piques interest there's an influx of related posts.

why Japan's internet is weirdly designed

https://youtube.com/watch?v=z6ep308goxQ

Edit: curl https://sabrinas.space/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/goo-1024x5... --output 'test.png' took 0:04:22

Um. That did what? How were the images processed?

I ran the images through an AI feels oddly nonspecific. Perhaps it is specified better somewhere the page didn't entirely load for me. I see some images of clustering that I presume was the output from the AI.

The only thing that really stands out to me about Rakuten is that the Japanese UI strings are bit longer and more visually dense than the English ones. But that's a far cry from Yahoo Japan's early 2000s aesthetic.

How many times have you heard English speakers complain about type experiments with dark backgrounds or gray type?

The difference is readability versus legibility. Bad color choices can made type difficult to read, or can make something impossible to read.

And with Japanese there is a great diversity of significant marks in various signs which must be legible in order for a reader to understand the message.

I would expect Japanese sites to have a design sensibility that separates text and image/illustrations to a greater extent then designs using an alphabet of 26

Seems like a case of "as you can see from this completely random graph there is a clear correlation..."

I wonder how much was informed by i-mode.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode

It was an alternative to the other content delivery offerings at the time, like WAP. Japanese handset manufacturers created devices that catered to the needs of that format. Japan is an interesting case study as always because they were always in tight coordination with software and hardware before it was widely popular.

I'm confused. The American examples don't really show any remarkable change in terms of overall design language either. Also, if we are talking about smartphones should we not look at smartphone layouts?

1. Japan pretty much missed the desktop internet phase in the 90s and early 00s. Services like Compuserve and AOL (or Japanese equivalents) were not often utilized. ISPs, while often quite good (shout out to TWICS), were used mostly by tech folks, who have never been in high demand or had high prestige in Japan. A consequence of this is that desktop-based web design in Japan did not have a robust or competitive forcing function for optimization or usability in the 90s or the 00s, and then was just able to be skipped by the smart phone revolution.

2. That said, and as mentioned by the OP, Japan was way ahead in cell phone tech. In the early to mid 00s, I used the web as a critical info dump for some folks with whom I was working. They all accessed via phone, and I quickly learned that I needed to design accordingly (light and clean) if I wanted the info to be accessed and used. Most commercial websites were not designed this way, and they also were not accessed by users regularly — the data charges would have been insane.

3. Class signals 1 - I read something about minimalist design in Japan many years ago that jibes with my anecdotal experiences. Basically, if you see something with a simple and clean design with a lot of empty space, it’s usually a signal of high class and/or high quality and almost certainly high cost. This holds for a wide range of things like magazines, restaurants, menus, hotels, etc. Most Japanese folks see these types of designs as either expensive things to avoid (due to budget) and/or possible conspicuous displays of affluence that are frequently avoided by those who have the means (there are some folks who like to virtue signal while pretending to be something that they are not, but that’s a different issue). So a default reaction for many Japanese people to an empty design, especially empty dark, would be “I am not their target market”, even if they actually are.

2. Class signals 2 - The following is my opinion based on my experiences living in Japan for 8 years and working with things Japanese for many more, and I have no citations, but… Japanese people across the whole country (i.e., not just people in Tokyo) can mostly be grouped into the category of middle class income with working class tastes. This can be seen across a wide range of categories including food, clothing, housing, media consumption, etc. The exceptions outside of this large group (e.g., people who were raised with and embrace a classical and traditional upbringing) are easily noticed once some amount of time is spent with them.

As a simple example, compare the design of this sports newspaper (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_Hochi) with that of its mainstream parent company counterpart (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yomiuri_Shimbun). The “everyday man” magazines and newspapers with the bold and garish design are abundant and ubiquitous (easily seen in convenience stores), while the relatively gray and conservative mainstream paper is pretty much only seen in salaryman-world. Japanese websites look quite a bit like the sports newspaper (to my mildly trained eye), and I think websites mimic this design because it works with their target audience. I think that this is comparable to sites in the US that lean heavily on ad networks like Taboola and Outbrain as their primary revenue sources — it works for their target market.

CONCLUSION

Internet use in Japan has always been an enigma to me. Japan has been so far ahead in some ways (e.g., I had screaming fast fiber optic to the home for less than $100 a month in the mid-00s), while being so far behind in so many other areas.

I think that there is a lot of room for disruption for companies that can take the reality of Japanese web use and tailor a better design around that reality. It seems like there is a lot of design inertia that is very sub-optimal. I’m not sure if the best way to attack this is by segmenting aggressively and targeting a lot of small accessible markets, or if the only way to changes things will be via a big mover that dictates online design taste (e.g., a domestic, Japan-grown Apple type of company). Perhaps both are possible.

Anyway, I hope that others who actually live and work in Japan can add some additional insights to my comments.