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Comment by iambateman | Hacker News Reader

Ok, there's some truth to this article, I'm not going to say the author is all wrong, but look at Amazon.com's home page and imagine you couldn't read English.

http://cl.ly/image/2i0r0G091U0P

It would look really jumbled, incoherent, and poorly architected. Given that you can speak English, it's relatively easy to digest the nav, suggested books, ads, etc.

My guess is that there are cultural expectations driving their design choices (particularly in color scheme). But the biggest difference is probably the fact that their type appears impossibly complicated. Nothing more.

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I can read Japanese fluently, and Amazon.jp is no problem to navigate (it's a dream compared to Rakuten), but I still find many Japanese sites to be a cluttered mess. I've noticed some nicer ones recently that seem to be on the Bootstrap bandwagon, but overall the browsing experience is terrible for me.

I have a retina screen now, but the effect of cheap Windows laptops on the aesthetics of Japanese text shouldn't be underestimated either.

You don't need to imagine: http://www.amazon.cn/

You're assuming that Amazon doesn't design things any differently for their Chinese site vs. their US site.

I don't think so. Even people who can read both languages seem to notice the difference.

Not a good example. Amazon.com is famously a jumbled mess.

I think it is a good example. Amazon is a powerhouse in the US and Naver, one of the South Korean sites the author linked to that resembles almost all the other sites he posted, is on similar footing in Korea.

It's an excellent example; it's directly comparable with the Japanese sites which are also big legacy companies with a lot of content competing for attention. It's not as if Amazon is an outlier in design terms amongst major Western ecommerce or portal sites. Most Yahoo regional sites look a bit like the Japanese one, although some got round to updating the logo quicker. The US top sites list boasts portals that are even more text-heavy ike Reddit (and of course the infamous Craigslist) or noisy like the Huffington Post

Japanese startups, on the other hand, appear to enjoy their SV-style big stock photos, large bold text and colourful calls to action: http://thebridge.jp/en/2013/06/top-50-japanese-startups

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