Why Japanese web design is so different (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

designmadeinjapan.com

Japanese people seem more tolerant of reading information, I noticed this when watching streamers and was very surprised when I saw Japanese streamers actually reading the text popups and tooltips you tend to see in Japanese games. Western streamers however tend to just click those away and try to wing things.

Not sure why or if it is just the people I watched, but if your users are fine with reading text information then you would probably put more information on your site. If your users get frustrated when you provide them with information then you will probably use larger font size, more whitespace, put less buttons/things on the page at once etc.

From a google search:

Most Japanese don't perceive the rules a restricting them. They "follow the rule, think afterwards" mentality is deeply ingrained into Japanese.

When Arin Hanson/Egoraptor released his Sequelitis Zelda rant eight... freakin'... years ago (God, I'm old, and so is the internet I loved):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOC3vixnj_0

I thought: All the things he complains about in Ocarina of Time are things Japanese gamers would love. There's always only one path forward and it's always SUPER clear what you need to do. Back in those days, Western game companies preferred open world for RPGs and RPG-like games, and open world was one of the reasons for the "yoge kusoge" (Western game, shitty game) meme in Japan. Japanese players suffered from a "where do I go? what do I do?" problem in Western open world games that a more linear structure like in Ocarina helps to alleviate.

That's a funny anecdote thanks for sharing, wild how different cultures recieve differently media because of it

Omg... Maybe I'm Japanese then! Thanks for sharing

On the contrary, aren't sparse websites actually a more regimented experience? You end up with information that's given to you as you follow a designer's flow rather than a more active and thoughtful user involvement in navigating a sige's resources.

Also in games, because the games that I play are heavy on the reading side and there's always someone that needs help in a Facebook group.

Honestly, I wish websites here were more information-dense. Many sites seem to have gone all-in on adding as much whitespace as possible, making them much harder to use on (say) smaller laptops.

Current design fashion tends toward whitespace, a lot of iconography, less text, and often thinner and lighter typography.

Yeah, and it sucks - and I think any web designer who does this is not deserving of the term "designer"

There is a lot more to "design" in web than some stupid visual trendiness ; its the entire reason we have two different phrases: UI & UX...

UX is how we experience the content, UI being how content is presented to us.

Good UI builds a good UX. Good UX builds understanding and relationship to the user's mind to the content.

One of the things you're fighting against is that a lot of people just don't engage if there's a lot of text. I write a fair bit for our marketing department and we basically never publish the 3000-4000 word whitepapers that were routine when I joined the company any longer. Even reports I write based on survey data are fairly light on the word count because people just don't read the longer pieces.

The problem isn't that websites should have more text; it's that they should have more content, using things other than whitespace to establish a visual hierarchy.

Exactly ; the real sublime is that the human mind, in its current iteration is a Pattern Recognignation Engine With Amnesia

but the key skill that the Human has is the speed between visual correlation to cognition of the library of thoughts available.

So obviously a person who does not have that connect, will fail to real-ize the scenario visualized.

+1!!!!

This is what killed Digg, and is killing Reddit, under Reddit's new design. I have posted quite a bit about how old.reddit is so much more important because with the +RES you can tweak the overall information density, as well as visual guides to where you are in the thread (the border highlighters to nesting comments: https://i.imgur.com/oWiweis.png

And when coupled with hover zoom (or whatever extension you like) allows you to not even click on an image: https://i.imgur.com/nkvPUb4.jpg)

And then, either turn off thumbnails in titles and you get a great density that allows one to consume more info -- this is why Digg died, and Reddit is "Diggifying" them selves with their lame new layout -- which Ironically is how reddit had a huge spike in users after digg 2.0 --> Also whatever happened to Kevin whatever from Digg who was on a bunch of magazine for being some web visionary, and now he has dissipated...

> Also whatever happened to Kevin whatever from Digg

He went on to become a crypto bro

https://www.axios.com/2023/01/27/kevin-rose-nfts-cyber-crime...

There's an expression "I would have written a shorter letter but I didn't have time." - that's what websites are ideally trying to get at.

Information dense is the goal but a poem can be very short and very information dense while a poorly written novel can take 80,000 words and still not convey the same information as that poem.

The fact that this article didn't mention some of the design choices that Japanese bloggers make is kind of disappointing to say the least.

One of the things I personally find interesting is the use of callouts that are typically conversational in their tone[0] - these range from simple important notes, to more first-person comments where the author is being engaged with the reader.

Likewise, I have seen a lot of technical Japanese blogs be relatively simple in their design, but with a very high emphasis on content presentation. Furthermore, I have observed that many Japanese bloggers will often introduce their content with, "Hey it's me {name} and today I will teach you about {topic}" - which is not something we see in the West.

I think it ties in with the general approach of respectful culture of Japan.

So, in this context, I think the article is very thin and shows a small glimpse of how the Japanese design and structure their websites.

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/EfDEWNO.png

> "Hey it's me {name} and today I will teach you about {topic}"

This is all over the tech-squee portion of the west though. Twitter, Mastodon, etc. Filter by tweet threads starting with "So, " and you'll find the most egregious IMO...

(Some very informational, but still)

Well, it's not what I am talking about. TechFeed[0] is the site I use to keep up with what devs are doing in places like Japan, so that's where I get my perspective from. I was most definitely not talking about Twitter gurus or whatever you're thinking.

[0]: https://techfeed.io/

This article is from 2014. Looks like there is a 2013 version here:

https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-differe...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148942

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254569

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523955 - March 2022 (106 comments)

Why Japanese web design is so different (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148942 - Nov 2020 (207 comments)

Why Japanese web design is so different (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254569 - Jan 2018 (153 comments)

Why Japanese web design is so different - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8975735 - Jan 2015 (6 comments)

Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067 - Nov 2013 (129 comments)

Dang, do you do this manually, or do you have a tool to make these, and if so, ~~buy a dozen~~, I mean - can you make it a button?

It would be cool if HN had some better handling of links in the comment box (meaning parsing the title of certain TLD links)

You can probably make it into a bookmarklet from the HN search since that is what is being used to search the results.

This is only true of the websites made by big established companies.

A lot of startups follow the general trend of using large fonts and empty spaces.

Examples:

https://tunagate.com/

https://paypay.ne.jp/

https://aw-anotherworks.com/

https://findy-code.io/

This article/podcast from Tim Romero ( Head of Google for Startups Japan) provides good insights on the topic: The lies, myths, and secrets of Japanese UI design https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-lies-myths-and-secrets-o...

A cool video on the topic I found a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6ep308goxQ

how much of a variation is there in web design between different cultures?

It would seem weird if only Japanese Web Design looked different than the normal designs prevalent in western culture.

What other cultures have significant web design differences from the ones that predominate in American and Western Europe contexts?

I would say that what this article says is at least true in broad strokes for a fair bit of east Asia. I'd add that it's not just web design. Look at signage for events and so forth and many of the same things discussed in the article apply; to a Westerner they look incredibly amateurish.

In general, Japan has this very weird mix of sedate traditional design and extremely kitschy pop culture which permeates a lot of things.

I prefer this.

I recently created two screen shots to show what different applications were displaying from the same database. A old school windows app with a dense UI vs a "modern" app. The image from the newer app was three times the height and there was no way to change it to any other view.

I prefer apps that wouldn't look out of place running on Windows 3.11. There was a certain sense of efficiency that's been lost.

This article is from an entire decade ago, and a decade in UX is enough time for all the things to change.

Does anyone have insight as to how much of this still holds true? Or is the Japanese web a totally different place now?

Well yahoo.jp hasn’t changed that’s for sure! On my iPad it’s a wall of text.

However i googled a list of Japanese startups and a lot of them had websites like this:

Ovice.com (established in 2020)

https://www.sonire-therapeutics.com/ (established in 2020)

So, more convergence happening perhaps.

I wonder if it's because they never had a Steve Jobs-like icon deeply defining the importance of design. Although he was a worldwide icon, language and cultural barriers are real.

To some extent, a culture entrains itself, even with things like design. Since I moved to Portugal, from the US, I realized that companies tend to have better logos in the US... even the small brick and mortar shops. They go out of their way and spend $500 on a nice logo. Here in PT, probably a lot less, if not anything. The bar is just not as high.

Why should everything be uniformised? Once tamed some of those websites are actually nicer to use than some of the Western counterparts (or apps) with very low content density.

Here you are. The most famous unreadable shopping website design in Japan. Make sire you go the desktop version.

https://item.rakuten.co.jp/kaguin/285232/

I've also heard there might be cultural differences in other ways...

There is no tipping in japan. If there is bad service at a restaurant, people... just don't ever come back. I suspect that folks might treat 404's as a similar type of "bad server"... and not return.

Most countries I know of don't have a strong tipping culture either. It's the US who is one of the outliers.

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