One key difference about web design in Japan versus the US is that Japanese consumers feel more secure with a lot of text on a page.
Here is a good example of how you need to have different designs based on your target audience:
Here is a good example of how you need to have different designs based on your target audience:
There's a good reason for this: A LOT of mobile users in Japan who prefer to interact via text, email and/or short form message board, uploading photos/vids as needed, than through their desktops/laptops (although plenty of those as well). Because it's so mobile heavy, you'll often find a lot of sites, usually personal ones, with barely enough HTML to render a usable page in Shift-JIS and that's good enough for them.
I wonder how dense the actual verbage is, in the original. For example, I know that localization to German from English can be a real pain; as an example, game developers will find UI elements for menus no longer can contain the long words that their old titles translate into.
For anyone that reads Japanese, is this page actually saying a lot, or is the language just taking that long to encode a word/concept?
The Japanese page describes the product's features a bit more succinctly, as they forego the tabs (Group Chat/Mobile/Files/Tasks) for a flat layout with a single paragraph describing each.
If I was to offer a theory on why the Japanese tolerate more text, I would say it's related to higher "skimability". It's easier to pick out symbols within a block of text and get a general feel for what's there vs. words in western alphabets. If this is the case, we would also expect Chinese websites to be similar, and I think that's the case.
Or, it could just be a design trend. For instance, usage of the color pink is much more prevalent in Japanese design.
However, this page isn't really the best example of that because nearly half the text is actually English loanwords written in katakana (the Japanese syllabary), which is only slightly more dense per character than English, since each character usually represents a consonant and vowel together. So in this case I'd say the Japanese page carries a little more information, but not drastically so. The copy itself is also quite different, though.
In general, however, I think Japanese tends to be a fair bit more information-dense than English for a given amount of space/characters. It can vary greatly, depending, for instance, how polite you're trying to be, how many foreign words you use, etc, but the ideographic core is very, very, dense compared to English.
[A point driven home by trying to write text messages in Japanese versus English... my experience is that it's much harder to cram in what you want to say into the given limits (~160 bytes) in English, despite Japanese characters using multiple bytes each...]
My observation is that English tweets tend to be a single sentence or at most two, maybe with some tags on the end, but Japanese tweets are often complete paragraphs with 4 or more sentences, sometimes more like little mini-essays—and I hear Chinese tweets can border on the epic...