Why Japanese Websites Look So Different | Hacker News Reader

Why Japanese Websites Look So Different

medium.com

56 pointsmy12parsecs22 comments

> "utterly obsolete technology"

this annoys me a bit. if something is still functional and provides value it's not obsolete.

as a web dev for 16 years, japanese design seems like a nice antidote.

the web used to be closer to publishing and documents and now it's more advertising and marketing oriented.

nowadays i can't even save a jpeg without it appearing as a webp in my downloads folder. everything has become so annoying.

Obligatory Hank Hill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwucZK1BCj4

nice :D - huge fan of the show

I think you meant this version ;) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jmaUIyvy8E8

I guess non-obsolete is publishing on medium which has 3/4 of the screen taken by sign-in nagscreens; a real masterclass of modern web design

It seems to me that all WEBP’s problems stem from extremely delayed or still nonexistent support from various programs and platforms. Does anybody know if there’s a good reason for this?

If you read the following sentence you'll see the author is referencing fax machines and floppy disks.

Pokemon Center (which is the merchandise storefront for Pokemon—trading cards, plush, t-shirts, etc.) has an American site and a Japanese site, and the design differences between them are totally in line with what OP describes:

https://www.pokemoncenter.com/ (US)

https://www.pokemoncenter-online.com/sp/ (JPN)

The Japanese site gets way more/cooler merch, so I like to lurk and see what we're missing out on.

> Starbucks Japan — what might look like more of the same at a first glance, is actually all images. Fonts are not selectable...

Just experienced this while booking a hotel. This makes it tricky because it breaks the Google Translate functionality in Chrome.

Luckily Yandex Translate supports OCR.

I've had emails about a blindness awareness event where the text was all in a screenshot of text. I don't know the state of the art of screen readers, but I have to assume that text is at least _better_. :)

"Interestingly, there’s also a considerable body of research about how different American and Chinese/Japanese perceive information."

There's an interesting point here. Stephen Toulmin once mentioned (unfortunately without giving a reference I know of) a difference in visual perception between Anglophones and those who live in huts. (I unfortunately can't remember the exact difference he pointed out, but I think it had something to do with how Anglophones live around rectangular buildings and identify something rectangular as a disinct group of information?)

There was also a recent study indicating that people who grew up with different languages hear music and melodies differently too. https://twitter.com/courtneybhilton/status/16513251906962104...

It’s how people perceive optical illusions. -https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/are-optical-illusi... People who live in cities have brains that take shortcuts for cubes.

Thank you for the reference! Appreciate it. Will try to use that as a reference from now on when I want to bring te point up.

the one insight missing from this otherwise decent piece was that "the look" that almost all Japanese TV has had, basically from the 1980s. large swaths of bitmapped text in garish colours and fonts splashed across many TV programmes, very often you'll see the heads of commentators superimposed, also with text. i'd say the "common" graphic design style of much of 1980s+ JP TV has a large bearing on how JP sites are used, perceived and "expected" to be now.

[edit: i work for a JP co in USA that deals with a lot of JP lang sites]

TV has been (or at least had been) at the center of Japanese media and culture for decades so it must have influenced quite a lot. There's also all the other stuff in Japan from magazines to billboards and the signs you see out on the street that are just as wacky and crammed. Japanese design is super crammed in general, and I think some of it comes down to just having less space relative to the number of people and things around, so the design has to be crammed on stuff like billboards and advertisements.

German websites and UX in general differ from the English-speaking countries.

How? Genuine question, I'm curious. Unfortunately I don't speak German, pretty much the only German websites I visit regularly are dw and Hetzner, and they aren't too different from other European or American analogues.

Maybe you have something specific in mind?

Dont know what the author is babbling about, the old web is an improvement over the garbage design we have today.

Meta comment, but its ironic for an article about design to make horrible bold- and italics choices for words with no needed emphasis.

Meta-meta-comment, but "horrible" is your value judgement, which isn't shared by everybody. The comic-book bold style is useful in a certain way ("these sections would be emphasized if this was being read to you out loud") and I personally appreciate it for articles and posts I am just skimming while waiting for something else to finish.

But it's ironic, too, because this article (unlike a lot of the ones that pop up on the regular 3-6 month cadence of "why is the Japanese web so weird?" posts) does nail the point that the negative perception of what we "westerners" feel is "horrible" about Japan's seemingly insane attachment to the MySpace aesthetic isn't shared by a lot of Japanese people, who in turn find our modern web design bland, info-deficient, and simplistic to the point of simplemindedness.

(Which is definitely not a sentiment I personally share — I do feel Rakuten's website is "horrible" — but that's the point: design is about audiences; there is no truth to be had.)

> Meta-meta-comment, but "horrible" is your value judgement, which isn't shared by everybod

> I do feel Rakuten's website is "horrible"

Someone is allowed to say that they feel something is horrible while acknowledging that other people may feel differently and while not asserting that their feeling is an objective judgement overriding other perspectives.

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