I’ve come to prefer Japanese web design over western design in general. It can be messy at times, but you don’t have endless pop ups asking you to sign up for their “newsletter” ad spam that is sold off to third parties(nobody reads those—your stats are fraudulent and people only register because they think it’ll end the pop ups), endless cookie pop ups, random bot support chats for things that would never need it, “Take me to the new design!” pop ups that lead away from a functional page to absolute garbage, h u g e white space for zero reason, random “login with Google!” pop ups for a basic-ass text page, social media buttons, and so on.
Japanese web design feels like walking into a casino, but western design feels like having a dump truck emptied on you.
> western design feels like having a dump truck emptied on you.
To me it feels like when you walk into a whitegoods store and a sales guy with a fake smile immediately makes a beeline for you. Look... sigh... I'm "just browsing".
Or when there's that insufferable person in the meeting (possibly called Karen) that literally puts her hand in your face to shut you up mid-sentence.
Like... we're adults here. I'm talking. You just shoved your hand in my face like that's normal! What... the... #%@(9$?
That's what modern web feels like. They see you reading the content, scrolling through it and... STOP! Read the hand! NOW!
Fascinating, I don't think I ever heard "whitegoods" before. In case I'm not alone: refrigerators, washing machines and the like, in UK English. I think.
That's right, basically kitchen appliances, although fancy lads have separate utility rooms for washing machines and tumble dryers, and they often come in white so I guess the term stuck.
I immediately hit D (Tridactyl, close page) the instant a popup happens when scrolling or reading. It is so instinctive now that I don't miss the content at all. I think maybe once or twice I've had to reopen the page (also easy in Tridactyl, U) to read content that was critical but not available elsewhere.
I just hope that there is some Google Analytics event that is triggered on page closes within a few hundred miliseconds of the popup interruption.
I don't think the newsletter pop ups is a layout design problem, it's more like an idea contributed by the marketing department.
Layout wise... you can totally have a website designed like a whole casino of dump truck emptied on you. I'm not talking about Japanese websites or even pointing my figures, but it's a simple fact that you absolutely and unmistakably can have the worst of the both worlds, and everybody who visits taobao.com can experience that first hand.
Almost 10 years have passed since this article was posted, and things are quite different now. Most of the popular web pages have cleaned up, and new startups are mostly following modern international design trends.
Even sites that remained dense in terms of color (like the Rakuten top page), have more white-space around text, less columns, larger hi-res images, and carousel banners. Oh, and Flash is gone for good now.
The Japanese web became a great deal more usable, and in the same time popups are still less trendy here than abroad (although coupon and campaign popups are all over the place in e-commerce sites).
But I still shudder when I encounter an oldskool site. I don't care about the minimalist design, and if done correctly it can be quite fast and fun to use. But usually it comes with hefty price tag:
- These sites are rarely ever responsive. If you're lucky, there's a mobile version that works based on user agent sniffing, and often suffers from feature parity issues.
- You can expect a regular monthly maintenance window where the site will be shut down for multiple hours during midnight. You should keep an eye for this announcement.
- There are no cookie banners popping up, but nobody said anything about blinking gifs or bleeding red text.
- Forms are complicated and have weird validation rules. You usually enter your name which must be in Kanji (or Full Width latin alphabet characters if you don't have a Kanji name), and then a phonetic name which would be either Hiragana or Katakana - but there is no standard for that, and the site doesn't try to be nice and help you with auto-converting these things (although it's quite easy to do).
- Entering your address is also generally painful, since you have to first enter your zip code, and then choose your prefecture (usually on a tiny drop-down list which is arranged from north to south!) and street address. This address is then verified against your zip code, although it could have been auto-generated from your zip code.
- Lots of complex web apps are still written in circa-2000 frameworks that try to keep all the presentational state in a cookie or a URL parameter and won't let you use the back button or open multiple tabs.
- Worst of all, these text-heavy sites are not necessarily as fast as they should be some times, owing to poor hardware, or perhaps log files that haven't been cleaned up for the last 10 years and are now clogging up the disk on the poor host machine.
If you want an example for an old skool site that suffers most of this problem, take the registration site for the ETC mileage club (this is the point rewards club for the nationwide automated highway toll gate payment card).
Registration forms in Japan are definitely worse than anywhere else on earth. Strict text length limits (last name can’t fit in 4 characters? Sucks for you), randomly flip flopping between characters being full width and half width, having to enter your foreign name only in kanji and wondering whether it’ll accept katakana, full width letters, or hiragana instead (and it only ever accepts one of those and you’ll never know which), data being lost when it inevitably fails to accept your input. It’s hell.
I’ve always wondered why registration and checkout pages in Japan like to be 3-4 pages long with another confirmation page after each one. It’s like they don’t want you to finish filling it out.
Ah, full width and half width.. I don't mind Japanese web pages in general, in fact I like a lot about them, but when it comes to filling out forms it can be horrible. Just last month my wife tried to book a hotel room in the only hotel available near a particular airport in Japan, and the online form required her to create an account and a password (the first question is, of course, "why?", just for booking a hotel room?).
The problem was that the site rejected all her attempts for passwords, insisting on "half width ASCII". My wife is Japanese and her iPad is Japanese, and she has lived most of her life in Japan, but she had no idea how to get that to work. We tried absolutely everything we could think of, all attempts rejected. In the end she had to phone the hotel and book that way, which they grudgingly accepted (at a higher price).
I still haven't figured out what "half width ASCII" is supposed to mean. Not visibly, I think I get that, but technically. What kind of charset was she supposed to use, and how to get the iPad to output it?
> having to enter your foreign name only in kanji and wondering whether it’ll accept katakana, full width letters, or hiragana instead
Never have any problem whatsoever filling full-width romaji (as written on my Zairyu card) in Kanji section and katakana/hiragana in the reading section (depend on what is requested).
Thanks, that does make some sense. 2013 and flash made enough sense, I was wondering how old this article was when it was still talking about Window XP legacy support (which ended in.. .2014,5 at the latest?). .
>These sites are rarely ever responsive. If you're lucky, there's a mobile version that works based on user agent sniffing, and often suffers from feature parity issues.
It does suck, but responsive design as a paradigm didn't really exist in the mid 2000's , even in the west (and as the article noted, tech takes time to cross the language barrier). These were the days where you had two web domains with one specifically designed for mobile and one for desktop. But I'm not quite sure how those pre-smartphone mobile sites scale to today's smartphone/tablet screens. Probably not well.
White space and pop ups aren’t part of design? That’s a very strict definition. Design is also merely a function of market dynamics, hence why it changes with trends and not to improve function.
As someone who works on newsletter popups I can tell you that they do, unfortunately, work quite well. Hardly any other measure translates so easily to increased sales.
Japanese design can be wild and very different, but for anything with a very clear purpose, it will usually end up looking a lot like any other European or US page serving the same purpose.
France would be on par with the JP, and I actually kinda like the Italian trade-off of high info density upfront and more spacing and pictures coming way below the fold.
I think I like the German design the best, by a pretty wide margin. The french design is terrible. Busy and hard to parse. The Italian is 2nd best to the German but has some advantages over the German design: Chiefly, links are clearly differentiated from text. Somehow though, the German design still manages to mostly differentiate the links from text by context with a couple of exceptions. The big advantage the German design has going for it, is that it's so clean and easy to parse. I can get into the correct pipeline in about 2 seconds. That's just not quite true for either of the others.
Funny that the Italian site is having trouble loading. The Italians are masters of design and attention to detail, yet are infamous for unreliable machinery. The tax website embodies the Italian essence right into the digital age.
Yeah, while some designs have softened a bit seems like in a lot of the great sites the classic Japanese design remains.
In the C2C second hand market, Mercari is a somewhat modernized design: https://jp.mercari.com/ while the classic Kakaku is a great info dump that I love specially because it isn't banner heavy: https://kakaku.com/
The thing I hated from a lot of Japanese web sites is they relied a lot in images for formatting and lay out, and put a lot of text in those images, difficulting the reading or translation of those sites for foreigns and people with visual impairment.
Amazon item product pages are standardized. Rakuten item pages are basically all their own unique geocities webpage and even the ordering procedure isn’t fully standardized.
It’s a mess dealing with orders from Rakuten. I’m often searching for where I’m supposed to even buy the item. Amazon always has that link right at the top.
I think the site is a good reflection of the service itself, as in the end you're really going through the order with the individual shop, and not much with Rakuten itself in my experience.
Last time I ordered something I was on the phone with the guy preparing it, making sure everything was right and I didn't need any specific adjustments. There might be stuff that actually go through Rakuten, but I didn't come across any of them yet.
It was a city bike, and the seller contacted me to check my height (I suppose he wanted to roughly adjust the seat position, or if I'd be out of range ?), as well as the options I was planning to add, if I knew where to go buy an insurance etc.
Very friendly and helpful overall, we could have dealt with all the details by mail but he went straight to the phone.
Previous to that I had a vendor request more details about my street to know if they could deliver directly from their truck.
I freakin' love Japanese web design. I think the Japanese just favor the old "info dump" style of web page, as opposed to here where web pages are supposed to function as either advertisements or substrates for advertisements.
For an example of what this looks like in English, check out Hitoshi Doi's web pages, which are still up in more or less their original form from the mid-late 90s. I learned basically everything I know about Sailor Moon from him back in the day: http://www.usagi.org/doi/
Another thing I saw is that, for a subscription service, Japanese website tend to just put the pricing info first thing on the landing page, while English website tend to try to hide it.
I wonder if prolonged experience with a written language that can condense quite well (and go in other directions that just left to right) is a factor.
I prefer old “data dump” websites even in English - much better than whatever the current “hero image” design we have now where we do about five words per ten inches it seems.
Gosh I hate hero images so much. Wasting anywhere between 30%-100% of the above-the-fold space on an often completely meaningless stock photo or illustration with a loose connection to a keyword — who the fuck likes that?
Users do. I spent a whole summer A/B testing an app's landing page to get 10+% more conversions. Over 50 experiments, the biggest win was having a hero image. Its actual content didn't matter as long as it was a photo and featured humans. And the more screen space it took the better. Probably different for different markets and apps, but yeah from my experience users love em.
I don't see why it would be different. The only difference between anadvertising page and a news site nowadays is how quickly the hero image needs to change.
Reddit's old vs. current design is probably one of the biggest examples of the user philosophy changing overtime. Not really a "hero image", but the focus of presenting text with small thumbnails to huge thumbnails and a small header likely follows a similar philosophy.
I also find it easier to ctrl/cmd-f what I’m looking for on a data-dump page than try to parse their information architecture (navigation) or use the search box, which rarely seem to return useful results.
I don't really like it for the simple reason that a digital canvas is infinite. There's no need to dump everything onto as little space as possible. It reminds me of a billboard.
Space isn't just about advertisement but also presenting information in a form that reflects the structure of the content. Dumping everything, as the word suggests makes it harder to figure out what is important, the order of what's being presented, and so on.
Yeah I’m with you. I miss the days when websites were about actually giving you the information you want, and not the playground of an overpaid design firm more interested in winning awards and impressing their peers.
The modern web is a bloody mess, and it’s ridiculous how far backwards we’ve gone.
It occasionally makes me think that the only thing holding back trends are overarching cultural norms, rather than a small, devoted group of people willing to fight to take back the "old ways". It's very hard to change Japanese society unless everyone is moved into action at once (as the continued use of paper forms would show). I think from this resistance to change, we people from other cultures are able to view this alternate version of some other Internet where people don't care or don't want to use the latest tech all the time.
I once read in a Japanese economics newspaper that the general sentiment is: if you ask your boss if you can use shiny new technique 'X' to solve a problem, you're going to be told "no." As a result, nobody bothers to ask.
Sometimes, I wonder if nothing short of that kind of deep-rooted hesitance at a societal level would have been necessary to stop today's Corporate Memphis web.
The only time "info dump" type sites are bad in my experience is if they've been written in such a way that text doesn't reflow well or navigation is cumbersome/nonexistant. As long as those two things aren't problems they're generally not unpleasant to use.
It makes me think of when i visited Japan, just so many shops that carry every single possible different piece of inventory possible. While in the US, if it's not selling, they'll just stop stocking it, so you're left with a way less variety of things you can buy.
An interesting distinction is that all Japanese (and Chinese, and Korean) fonts are monospace. Unlike western writing, all Japanese characters are exactly the same width.
This is the reason for the so-called "full width" characters, to fit western writing into the same character boxes as Japanese characters.
Not all fonts are monospace. For example, on Windows you have MS PGothic and MS PMincho, which are the proportional versions of MS Gothic and MS Mincho.
I came here just to talk about how much Chinese and Korean fonts are not nearly as uniform as Japanese. Go into a 7-11 in China or Korea, and the prices are often written by hand. In Japan, they're the same printed font everywhere. In China and Korea, there may be those "On Sale! Only 5 yuan this week!" kind of add-on signs with different colors and fonts/sizes. In Japan, it's just the item name and price, black and white, one size.
As a foreign traveler, Japan makes everything uniform and easy; even if things are different (and they often are) they're very approachable. China and Korea do not have the same approachable-ness for a random Westerner.
> Go into a 7-11 in China or Korea, and the prices are often written by hand. In Japan, they're the same printed font everywhere.
Definitely not. I don't know if you live in Japan or not but the stuff I see walking around my neighborhood has plenty of stylized, varied, and even handwritten fonts and signs.
> Walking around Tokyo, I often get the feeling of being stuck in a 1980’s vision of the future
Osaka is probably where you'll feel most like you're in an 80s cyberpunk movie.
Try Doutonbori in Osaka or Shin Sekai at night. There is an outdoor from a Blade Runner scene that's still there intact in Doutonbori (Glico). The atmosphere is very Willian Gibson-y.
> I think it is also hard to be aware that you are in a trend when you are living it. Many of the things that pass as "clean design" at the moment are just a trend, and I promise you that they will look dated soon. This always happens. It happened with 80s hair, with 90s androgyny and it will happen again big text, extreme minimalist, big poetic photo backgrounds and so on.
Man, this didn't age well. Or rather, I really hope that it comes true sooner rather than later.
We do appear to be in a quite long-lived moment for graphic design. Looking at past trends, a common theme appears to be alternating between the maximalist and minimalist
Technical Limitations → Skeuomorphism → Current "flat" design trends
Art Nouveau → Bauhaus and Contemporary → Postmodernism
Perhaps we are due for a maximalist wave in five years' time.
Some of their examples have changed since this was written in 2013, for example Niconico is effectively a bunch of flexbox now[0], the only remnant possibly being the search bar being separate from the navigation bar. Rakuten[1] is arguably less cluttered than Amazon's front page. Yomiuri[2] looks like msn.com but in Japanese.
> People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision
I'd say it's astounding that this is not considered normal and people put up with this extremely low standard of inconsistent product descriptions that apparently made multiple passes through translation software and are riddled with errors. I don't think it's unreasonable that I want to know what I'm buying.
My translation here may not be super great - it's backed up by looking up and seeing that the Shimadzu Corporation has always made instruments for educational scientific measurement and was founded in the Meiji, 1875, which is only in the decade after the end of the Edo period.
Ah, I misrecognized the Kanji 「科」as「料」, sorry. Editing now. Makes a lot more sense this way. 「料学」gets translated to "fees" which I took to be "tuition".
You're right, 学費 is a better word than the one I mis-recognized. In my defense, there is a book titled "やさしい料学", and I found a small handful of other instances through a search.
It seems like that's also a typo or scanno of 科学. Aside from the one letter, everything else about that book matches the bibliographic information of another book whose alternative title (or subtitle) is "やさしい科学": http://webcatplus.nii.ac.jp/webcatplus/details/book/isbn/978...
>*Consumer Behaviour* – People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision – they are not going to be easily swayed by a catchy headline or a pretty image. The adage of “less is more” doesn’t really apply here.
>*Advertising* – Rather than being seen as a tool to enable people Japanese companies often see the web as just another advertising platform to push their message across as loudly as possible. Websites ends up being about the maximal concentration of information into the smallest space akin to a pamphlet rather than an interactive tool.
I think these cultural differences (if true) are a very interesting a -> b situation. adverts seem to work almost too well in western cultures so the focus revolved around removing them from view (adblock), and the battle became about ways to go around these technologies. If this is truly a trend, it sounds like asian cultures just create a natural filter, and their language allows ads to just... advertise their entire pitch instead. Get straight to the punch instead of clickbaiting.
Completely tangential, but this does explain the phenomenon of media in japan where the title just seems to be a plot summary instead of a title. If you can fit the synopsis on the spine of a book or on a ticker board, why not?
Compared to the over-crufted, over engineered, designed-for-phone, low-information-density, cr4p I get served on many "western" websites, where I am happily invited to download a gazilion MiB of adware and feel my phones battery running hot just to access a website, I prefer the asian design philosophy.
I'm reading a few Japanese newspapers online these days (their English sections, mostly), and it's so much easier to read than nearly all of the online newspapers in my own country. No narrow fixed-size space in the middle of the page (is this meant to be read only on phones, portrait mode, by youngsters able to read with their nose pressed into the screen?). Proper pages, no endless scrolling. Flows nicely to fill out my browser window. No clutter. Easy to read, and easy to come back to and re-read something. In Europe a lot of the online news web pages makes me feel I'm reading a low-quality low-cost dirty mag from the seventies sold from under the counter, as far as design is concerned.
Where exactly do you see "Asian design philosophy" on Japanese major websites?
Also, what exactly do you think of as "Asian design philosophy" in the first place?
My impression is also that the American web design trends from the late 00s~early 10s are a lot more prevalent in Japan these days than they were in 2013, look at note.com for example: https://note.com/
That first image reminds me of a lot of ecommerce sites in 2004. And even so I think I can find lots today that probably still look like that, although with some Western language and not Japanese. Maybe color scheme a bit different.
What I'm saying is, the first image covering the screen when reading why Japanese web design is so different looks like a lot of web design I have seen that was not Japanese.
Let's not beat around the bush: In Japan, "UX" as a discipline is almost non-existent.
In Japan, marketing emails are not even required to have an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom.
Which all has to do with Japan being barely post-feudal. No Japanese consumer would dare to question or criticise a famous Japanese corporation for their website design or practices. It's only OK for foreign companies like Amazon.
It's all top-down, basically. The gerontocratic leadership of these corporations barely think of internet sales as a necessity, they just budgetize it minimally against their will.
There are a few exceptions like Uniqlo, Muji, etc. but those are only possible because they also want to do business outside of Japan and therefore are forced to adopt "unjapanese" concepts.
Meanwhile the most important device in Japanese households still is not a laptop, but a fax machine.
> In Japan, marketing emails are not even required to have an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom. Which all has to do with Japan being barely post-feudal.
That's a weird way to put that. American newsletters have an unsubscribe link because our Congress passed a law in 2003. But Americans lets prescription drugs advertise on television, which is an indefensible barbarism. So it goes. Every country has a different vision of what nuisances are and are not worth of regulation.
Yea, that seems to go back to what the article describes:
>Urban Landscape – Walk around one of Tokyo’s main hubs like Shibuya and you’re constantly bombarded with bright neon advertisements, noisy pachinko parlours (game arcades), and crowds of rambunctious salary men or school kids
The only American analogues to such a design would be some parts of New York City and Las Vegas. Not even Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Chicago as mega metropolitan areas have this kind of "density". Japan has a third of the population crammed into less than 5% of the land area. So adverts have a lot more incentive to just cram everything into a city block compared to any american city
There are kernels of truth in here, like the unsubscribe link not required by law.
But there are many huge Japanese internet based companies, like Zozotown, that are extremely savvy at their UX experience and are extremely metrics driven. Not to mention the recent surge of internet based cellular providers that don’t have a brick and mortar storefront.
Meanwhile the fax machine anecdote is about ten years old at this point. Most Japanese purely rely on mobile devices these days.
> Meanwhile the fax machine anecdote is about ten years old at this point. Most Japanese purely rely on mobile devices these days.
My wife's small business included a fax, but it didn't get much use after around 2014-2015 or so, I think. The next couple of years you could occasionally hear a call to the fax machine but it was always just some random ad spam. We let it all go to /dev/null. Nowadays her work space is rented out to a small service firm and they don't use a fax at all as far as I know. Internet and phone services were super important to get set up though.
Densely packed text, a busy layout, tiny low-resolution images, cute characters, and the use of flash animation are some of the distinguishing features of a Japanese web page. These features that distinguish Japanese websites are due to a variety of factors that are linguistic, cultural, and technical in nature.
I think UIUX is culture & context & device dependent. For example, Japanese had smartphones long before iPhone/Android phones got any significant market share.
Japanese web design feels like walking into a casino, but western design feels like having a dump truck emptied on you.