I live in Japan and personally I think it's cultural and has more to do with the aversion to change and also the critical shortage of competent IT professionals and foreign-language speakers in this country. Often times websites aren't just designed differently, they are lacking basic functionality. Any foreign resident has a story about how some important website like their bank or a government site wouldn't let them in because their name was too many characters to enter into a text field or something. The government released this contact tracing app for covid and it didn't come out until like 5 months later that the app was broken on android and just literally didn't do anything. Japan's former cyber-security minister was outed as having never used a computer in his life after admitting in front of some committee that he didn't know what a USB drive is. Just look at the difference between Amazon jp and the local version, Rakuten, and it's clear how dated and non-functional Japanese sites are.
The problem is these companies are all headed by septuagenarian nepotism hires who can never be told they're wrong, staffed by programmers who have no idea of industry best-practices because they've been trained by these old guys who don't have a clue either and just want to keep doing what they've been doing since they learned to code in the 90s and can't read non-Japanese documentation, and the consumers also are tech illiterate enough not to notice or care that the websites are dogshit because they're used to it and again never access any non-japanese content because of no foreign language skills. And also old tech is rampant in major companies for the same reasons, which means often times these ancient devices are too slow to run modern websites well.
This is basically what I thought a while back (front-end dev living and working in Japan) but it cannot be the whole true because we foreigners have been saying this for a decade, and the obvious conclusion is that foreign websites that are "better" would come in and sweep the local competition. If Japanese were also horrified with these local designs, they'd JUMP as soon as a decent design comes, right?
But that just doesn't happen, and except in a few cases (so little that could be attributed to luck or natural competition, a big example being Twitter) what usually happens is the opposite, foreign companies come in blazing and get smashed into the ground. See Uber or Airbnb, the former disappeared and the latter is used almost exclusively by foreigners.
So I have two/three extra possible points that might happen, could also be a combination:
- Japanese are used and expect the density of websites here. As others said, look around Tokyo city and it's all hyper-dense, menus in restaurants have multiple layers of information within a page, the TV looks actually like the websites and we foreigners also meme about it[1]. So it might be the cultural norm and expectation, even if we foreigners find it ugly. And saying "consumers also are tech illiterate" about Japan is ignorant at best, condescending at worst.
- It is just a dinosaur thing, and those same dinosaurs use anti-competitive measures to stifle competition. A big one I've been waiting and I'm sure 99% of my friends and I would jump is a BANK with a decent UI. I cannot make international transfers (in EU it's literally like a national transfer) without signing for a different company which is a subsidiary (I believe) and cannot make recurrent payments, which are my two main complains, but it also just sucks in general. Laws based on a strong nationalistic feeling get passed to make e.g. Airbnb or financial companies harder.
- Companies entering Japan don't treat it with respect as a big market, but just as a "let's slap a bad translation on top and expect numbers as strong as in the USA", which is an issue I've seen first hand multiple times as well. For very similar cultures this might work, but for vastly different ones like USA vs Japan you'll need to do i18n besides just translation.
- Uber Eats is super popular, what do you mean with disappeared?
- TeamLab’s design of the Resona Bank app is modern, lovely, functional, and full of features. All done by locals, for a local bank, to be used by locals. Don’t confuse lack of investment with a cultural effect.
- International transfers are difficult in any non European country, that’s why Wise became so popular. Shinsei makes a lot of their money on their antiquated but easy to use transfer system, for example. But Wise is the most popular international transfer app in Japan. Which also has a modern, easy to use UI. Both support recurrent scheduled payments.
- A lot of well designed UIs were jumped at, including iPhones, Apple TVs, Balmuda appliances, the new touch screen 7-11 ATMs, Uber Eats, etc.
It seems to me that you got trapped in the “I can’t criticise my host country and need to assent to every one of its quirks” attitude that plagues most foreigners in Japan. Most Japanese people find those websites fucking ugly, they just don’t care. I believe that this is the cultural effect at hand here - a lot of locals really don’t care if the design is good or not.
How do I make recurrent payments in Shinsei? There's no option from what I've searched. For transfers yes a transfer from Spain to the USA or UK is a bit harder than intra-EU, but it's trivial compared to Japan where you need to apply to some gvmt card to even qualify to apply to the int transfer service, which of course I got denied 4 times because of my name.
Your whole comment seems trying to find the worst interpretation of what I said on purpose... I mean Uber taxi of course. I said some modern UIs were adopted, but still IMHO not enough to clearly show it was a huge pain point as we think (saying people "jumped" to the iPhone in Japan because of the UI also doesn't make sense, considering how long it took to be adopted and how high Android was for a very long time). Etc.
It's your responsibility to maintain a consistent katakana transliteration of your name. I don't think many banks would accept documents if your name was misspelt, no matter the country.
MyNumber's purpose is precisely to curtail white collar crime. Of course there would be tight regulations around that. But it's something that you make only once.
EU countries are economically and legally integrated to very high levels. Banking regulation is simplified for intra EU transfers. Japan is an isolate that is not part of any economic unions. Banking regulation focus on the domestic market and crime prevention. Different countries, different needs.
I agree that bad UIs are not a huge pain point. As I said, nobody cares. But that doesn't mean that bad UIs are liked or appreciated. They are tolerated.
Learn Japanese and get yourself a Resona bank account.
There is nothing in the regulations that would have the bank deny someone's application for international remittance, except lack of MyNumber or invalid documentation.
I worked for a bank in the remittance area for two decades. I know the process really well, including the application part.
Anyone has the legal right to send a remittance. So it is an automatic yes, unless there is a compelling no. Most compelling nos would affect locals only (involvement with antisocial groups, certain criminal convictions), and the only compelling nos for foreigners are either invalid documentation or being a politically important person.
OP is doing it all himself, so they are not a PIP. Most foreigners (more than 97%) who have their application rejected, is because they didn't send the correct documents, or the documents contained misspellings.
You seem to be a bit bothered by the fact that I know remittances? But it's my job to know.
Then you’ve just contradicted yourself here. You said the only reason an application would be denied is if the name is misspelled (and assumed that’s why the OP was rejected), yet it could also be due to missing documents, so it feels a bit presumptuous when you said they misspelled their name.
For context, look at how ridiculous application processes are in Japan and why even when writing my name "right" it might be rejected (different people):
> "Just keep sending that again and again. Japanese bureaucracy is just really dense sometimes (always)."
> "A woman working at my bank told me she always tells people to apply more than once because whether they get approved or not depends entirely on who happens to get their application that day."
> "I’ve done similar with credit card applications. Fill in form, get it returned with errors marked. Fill in exactly the same again, get it returned with different errors marked. Fill in exactly the same again, success."
> "Same for when I was switching the name oh a phone plan. Returned it with errors. Had a Japanese person fill it out just in case, came back again. Told them "no". Worked."
> "Literally this. It’s infuriatingly dumb. Embarrassingly. You’ll get different answers for the same thing at different city halls and even different requirements in the SAME fucking city hall by different staff. My friend tried to get married recently and his girlfriends city hall demanded a document he didnt have which he was going to need to spend weeks waiting for. I tokd him to go again and ask a different staff or try his city hall instead. He went to his own and they accepted no problem and allowed the marriage."
> "I had something similar happen but stood my ground. They waffled around for an hour or so and decided to just accept the marriage request and process it. I think they wanted me gone."
That's what it is. The other guy was terribly triggered by it, for reasons I don't understand, but Japanese office workers will ocasionally choke on katakana names. The kicker here is that when you are sending a remittance, the bank will profit from it without risk or extra expenses, so it is on the bank's interest to get your application through.
MyNumber is managed by your local city office. Just like any other governmental agency, it has no incentives for nothing.
If all of your documents match perfectly, the bank will approve your application for remittance. But you should be using Wise - it has much better deals than Shinsei.
> Companies entering Japan don't treat it with respect as a big market, but just as a "let's slap a bad translation on top and expect numbers as strong as in the USA", which is an issue I've seen first hand multiple times as well. For very similar cultures this might work, but for vastly different ones like USA vs Japan you'll need to do i18n besides just translation.
While I can’t speak for software going into Japan, I can absolutely believe it having seen this exact thing in reverse for a game coming out of Japan. You could give yourself a banner with a customisable name, but there was only room for one character on that banner. Great if your language has “狐”, not so much if 20% of your users pick “E” and another 10% pick “T”.
Even with much smaller cultural divides, I’ve faced “Knopf” being incorrect placed on a German naughty words filter because someone literally translated “knob” without asking a native speaker. (And you might be surprised how often IRL Germans ask me, in English, if I drove the train to work, though I do also appreciate that in reverse I probably sound like Crabtree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilhJvFngWcY)
On the unwillingness of Japanese to change- I think its actually Americans who are more unique because we are willing to upend large institutions and our whole social fabric when new technology comes along. Faith in progress and willingness to replace old systems to try something new is historically part of our national DNA, for better or worse. Japan values stability and generally only wants to use technology in a way that fits into the existing heirarchical social structure.
What hasn’t? USA has been transforming itself with technology for the last 200 years on an amazing pace. Cars, telephones, radios, television, airplanes, computers, Internet, smart phones, social media. The whole social fabric has been upended several times.
And yet, none of those are exclusive to the US. The original argument is that the US is more willing to incorporate large technological changes than Japan, so please show me a large technological change that the US has adopted that Japan hasn't.
Using technology broadly- first I was thinking of things like opioid painkillers- given out like candy in the 90s due to pharma marketing, then there was a huge backlash. Meanwhile I believe Japan has been pretty strict on medication. Amphetamines are strictly controlled there too while in parts of the US they are widely used as performance enhancers for studying.
Another change to the social fabric is due to globalism, shareholder capitalism and roboticization taking away US manufacturing jobs. Also big box replacing locally owned retail, and possibly internet shopping replacing bix box stores. Of course these are present in Japan too, but not allowed to dramatically change society quite so fast.
> Amphetamines are strictly controlled there too while in parts of the US they are widely used as performance enhancers for studying.
In the US, amphetamines are strictly controlled too, it is a schedule II drug. You need to be prescribed by a doctor, and they cannot write a prescription for more than 30 days worth of prescription at once. You have to visit the doctor every 90 days to get re-validated that you need your prescription and all is good. If you are caught even once abusing drugs (not just this specific one, but any in general), including stuff like giving them out to other people, you are never getting prescribed amphetamines again in your life, and that will be the least of your worries in this scenario.
Iirc in Japan amphetamines are "controlled" in a sense that they cannot be prescribed at all. Hell, I was looking to travel to Japan soon, and turns out I cannot even bring my 30 days worth of prescription that I fully legally own in the US, no matter what kind of records or papers from my doctor or the hospital that I am willing to provide to their authorities.
So yeah, it is a bit easier to control abuse when no one can get the drug even legally in your country in the first place. I wouldn't call a full-on ban as "controlled" though. Not trying to make a claim that the US approach to this is better than that of Japan, that's not my intent. Just pointing out that using amphetamines as an example of "Japan controlling drugs" compared to the US is a bit of a bad example.
Its true that amphetamines are legally controlled drugs in the US but in many circles (ie undergraduate college) they are widely available. Its well known to the point that the Alameda CEO could tweet publicly about regular amphetamine use.
My point was that, whether you call Japanese law “ban” or “strict control” its much harder to get strong stimulants there. I believe you can even get in serious trouble for bringing sudafed decongestant from the US since its not legal there.
I think you are confusing internalization with localization. Internalization can be used for similar cultures, localization is required for different cultures.
I would love to work in Japan on their websites. I would take a pay cut if I could become a Citizen. But they don't want Hispanic people over there; which I understand their needs to be insular and homogeneous.
If you tried in earnest to go live in Japan and it didn't happen it's not because of racism. Yes there are some xenophobic tendencies, but they don't play into it. Money and "skills" on paper do.
If you don't tick the right boxes (e.g. graduated 4 years of university education, have demonstrable skills in a technical field, work experience, etc.) it's going to be difficult, of course. But that's the same anywhere.
If you do have those things it’s in fact easy to immigrate to Japan. For white collar jobs there is no “tried to hire a local first” test like most countries have.
Is it possible designers have some principles that don't necessarily match real life usability? Only 3 colors is incredibly boring to me.
I see that hacker news also only has 3 colors, it's fine in this case because there's not much reason to have more. That doesn't apply to, say e.g., photoshop (and gimp following this too now for unknown reasons) only having 2-color icons, while multicolor ones are faster to distinguish visually
Note that the "rule of 3 colors" is about three hues. The full design will incorporate variations of those colors: brighter and darker, more and less saturated. Your brain actually thinks of these as "the same color", though HTML and CSS don't.
It's a design principle which is safe: it's not going to clash in an ugly way, or make combinations that are hard to read. They can be used (in conjunction with other design principles) to draw the attention where it's needed, and have the eye flow through the page without distraction.
"Safe" and "boring" are two sides of the same coin. I personally don't mind boring, and easily get aggravated by choices that distract. A truly great design breaks the safe principles, though usually at a high cost. (Usually, having tried and rejected many combinations.)
Gimp takes strange turns now and then, does but gradually improve over time. It used to be that fuzzy-select would cause immense lag practically every time. Now my biggest complaint with selection is merely that the rectangle select tool defaults to centred.
If it helps, you can enable the old style icons in preferences.
I've lived in Japan for 30 years, and built several Internet based startups in that time. Three quick things the author does not seem to really consider.
1. Japan's information-dense design pre-dates the Internet. If you look at commercial fliers from the 80s (and probably before) until today, they have similar information-dense designs.
2. This design is not a result of a "critical shortage of competent IT professionals." Just because something is different doesn't mean it is wrong or the makers are incompetent. Some of these e-commerce firms have thousands of good developers. Designs are extensively A/B tested. They are common because they work.
3. Hacker News is also very info-dense and has changed little over past decade. It's not due to incompetence, but because we users like it this way. Now, imagine we had a steady steam of designers posting about how backwards we are and how they needed to "fix" the site to improve our experience. That's what it often feels like reading these articles from Japan.
> Just because something is different doesn't mean it is wrong or the makers are incompetent. Some of these e-commerce firms have thousands of good developers. Designs are extensively A/B tested. They are common because they work.
Everyone in Rakuten repeats this. It's not true. A/B testing between bad and bad still results in bad. You just get which bad works better.
If Japanese design was awesome, it would be pretty obvious to anyone how awesome it was. This sort of rationalization of bad quality is the mark of today's Japanese mediocre output.
Luckily there are strong local players, like Recruit or TeamLab, who refuse this idea of "it's good because I say so", and are actually pushing for better products.
1. The US also had information dense fliers / magazines / newspapers back in the day. The point is that the US moved away (at least in web design), while Japan didn't
2. Hard to comment on "competence", though I guess I'd like to see a minimalist redesign of a japanese website and see a survey on which one Japanese people prefer
3. Hacker News is extremely niche. And as much as HN people hate Reddit's new modern design, Reddit has orders of magnitude more users than HN. I would bet the vast majority of people prefer the UI of Reddit over HN
Maybe Japanese people have resisted the western degeneration in attention span and patience, and retain the ability to not have a seizure looking at a webpage with a modicum of information density. I've noticed this trend following very "busy" 1800s signs/newspapers/etc up to now. People back then weren't addicted to fast and easy dopamine and had the mental space to parse something with detail on it.
That's an interesting perspective. I've always seen it to be the opposite, particularly when playing many Japanese video games: signs everywhere, tons of over-emoting both verbal and physical, exaggerated everything, lots of noises, ridiculously large numbers that must be flashed all over, lots of visual flashing. Lots of particle/special effects. Just a ton of really inexpensive dopamine for retaining capture of low attention span.
Not that any of this is inherently wrong. I'm not judging it (and I often enjoy it). But I think there's a sufficiently strong example of the opposite in modern Japanese culture.
What's interesting is, I think, we're both describing "very high information density" but seeing it as a result of high attention span, or low attention span. Heh!
I'm not sure I agree with all of that: a notable difference between modern media and 1800s newsprint is the paper was very expensive then compared to more recently, so it was highly economical to cram everything onto fewer physical pages. Electronic media has essentially zero marginal costs for longer or less dense content.
The same goes for cheaper books (which still were not as cheap as modern mass-market books in PPP terms): narrow margins and crammed text. But as soon as you move up market to expensive books, the margins widen and the text lines open up. People still liked the aesthetic of open and airy, but it cost a lot.
Further more, for signs, you had to get everything on them. There was no Internet, no phones, no Yellow Pages, no CeeFax. Someone interested in your service would have to stand there and copy the relevant details into their pocket book.
On the other hand, I do very much detest the glossy websites where there are something like 20,000 vertical pixels of flashy content, but none of it useful. Just endless fluff, vagueries and calls-to-ill-defined-actions. 90% of people just want to know your opening hours, contact details and a price list (services) or menu (for food). And the delivery costs. Everything else is a waste of everyone's bandwidth until you have made those things front and centre.
I certainly don't get the feeling of a patient attention span whenever I've seen clips from Japanese TV where on top of the main action they have shining brightly-colored text and graphics popping up all over, scrolling banners, maybe a reaction cam cutting between multiple people hamming up their reactions to everything, etc.
Ah yes, the famous modern Japanese restrained design because they have longer attention span than ours. They wouldn't need flashy neon colours to keep engaged. That's some confirmation bias.
> I've noticed this trend following very "busy" 1800s signs/newspapers/etc up to now. People back then weren't addicted to fast and easy dopamine and had the mental space to parse something with detail on it.
I've recently been reading Amusing Ourselves to Death (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death), and it noted that in the 1800s America has a "literate" culture: people read a lot and had correspondingly longer attention spans. Apparently attending debates and lectures were a fairly common activity, and those went on for hours, with each side having plenty of time to express complete and complex thoughts, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Douglas_debate...:
> Each debate lasted about three hours; one candidate spoke for 60 minutes, followed by a 90-minute response and a final 30-minute rejoinder by the first candidate. The candidates alternated speaking first. As the incumbent, Douglas spoke first in four of the debates....
> The debates took place between August and October 1858. Newspapers reported 12,000 in attendance at Ottawa,[7] 16,000 to 18,000 in Galesburg,[4] 15,000 in Freeport,[8] 12,000 in Quincy, and at the last one, in Alton, 5,000 to 10,000.[6] The debates near Illinois's borders (Freeport, Quincy, and Alton) drew large numbers of people from neighboring states.[9][full citation needed][10] A number travelled within Illinois to follow the debates.[7]
I have already linked it ( https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790.amp ), but attention span itself didn’t decrease, it’s not even an existing concept. Media producers just got better at maximizing our engagement with their content, and comparatively a plain old book will be boring to our brains. This thought actually did help me in that I can’t fall victim of “learned helplessness” here, just put that phone down and work on the thing you want. Focus modes are also very beneficial.
Nonetheless, interesting historical fact, thanks for sharing!
I'm pretty sure this is indeed a significant part of it. While watching the relevant video she says she gets "overwhelmed" by the old reddit layout because of the "amount of text" (which isn't even that much) and I really do have to wonder how these people even managed to live their lives before the age of the smartphone without suffering regular mental breakdowns every time they saw a newspaper. The future does not look good.
It’s not ironic nor hypocritical unless they lambasted others who did the same. I can’t be bothered to do all sorts of things on a personal blog/project that I might do on a paid/commercial venture.
Their response is probably “yeah that’d be cool but meh”.
People nowadays can't handle information-dense websites anymore. I showed HN to a couple friends once and they were like “How can you read on this website?”. I'm glad HN kept the same design since 2007.
As someone who enjoys and prefers high-density of information, I generally agree.
I do, however, wish HN would add support for @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark). By now it's one of the few sites that are still unpleasantly bright to look at when in a dark environment. (When I don't forget, I visit https://darkhn.herokuapp.com/ instead, which helps but can't be used to upvote/comment.)
It turns most websites into a dark mode equivalent (mostly) correctly. Some websites it just doesn't work for and you need to disable it, but it's otherwise great. It also auto-detects (most of the time) when a site supports dark mode and shuts itself off for that site.
As long as you strip out the distractions: Pictures and videos which add nothing, ads, other visual cruft.
Clean design is nice, but I like being able to consume the relevant bits without having to scroll. I can move my eyes around.
Which brings me around to my point - not everyone has the same preferences with regard to presentation and parsing of information. The latest trends in web design aren't necessarily better - they are Western (and English) centric, and as well highly informed by an industry which likes to foist things on their users and hope they become trained to accept it as normal.
I don't see Japanese web design as backward, ancient, dated, just different. Possibly, in some ways, better.
I'd love to see an analysis of loadtimes, page size, tracking javascript, etc. When I have low signal on my phone (and thus not much bandwidth), these beautiful clean, minimal websites somehow take an age to load - because of all the largely invisible baggage they come along with.
It's part of why I love this site for news, as well as lite.cnn.io. (If anyone knows of more sites stripped of everything but text for news, I'm always looking for some)
I use compact layout in Reddit, mailbox and pretty much everywhere but still can't stand HN layout, I read it through Serializer.io much cleaner design and anyway I don't want curated home page but also don't wanna go through all New.
Japan had phones with lots of graphics well before smartphones. Those systems were not web-based. They were mobile-only, and for small screens.
China has another system. Many things are applets within the WeChat environment. This is a whole different world, using MINA, WXML, and WXSS. It's kind of like XML with an external XSS style sheet. Here's the official repo.[1]
It's interesting to see where that division leads. The XSS approach separates content and look much more strongly than HTML/CSS does. (At least as HTML/CSS is typically used. It's possible to have an HTML document with just the data, and use a single separate style sheet in CSs. There are people who argue for that, and some elegant examples.[2] But they are voices in the wilderness.)
The funny thing is, despite a different underlying technology, WeChat applets seem to look a lot like HTML/CSS web pages. The difference may be that the WeChat system was efficient enough to eliminate the demand for "native" smartphone apps.
Every one of these Japanese sites would conform to what the author calls "the 3 colour design principle" if they just removed the banner ads. In fact, I'd argue that the prevalence of first party ads is the only significant difference. Without them, the Japanese sites are no more cluttered than Wikipedia or NYT.
Anyone else having issues loading the images? They appear to be (not even large, dimensionally) pngs, but loading, line-by-line as if they are massive files—calculating ~10mins to download. Checked my download speed, no sign of an issue.
> after running 2,671 images of the most popular websites in every country through an AI
Um.
That did what?
How were the images processed?
I ran the images through an AI feels oddly nonspecific.
Perhaps it is specified better somewhere the page didn't entirely load for me.
I see some images of clustering that I presume was the output from the AI.
The methodology is described further down in the article. The author extracted features from the screenshots with OpenCV and then reduced the dimensionality of the feature set using t-SNE.
The Rakuten screenshot included in the first set of examples looks a bit out of place to me. It's a pretty normal, modern, flat-design shopping website? Amazon similarly features a big colorful carousel and a bunch of different images all competing for attention. (Well, if you visit Amazon today you'll get a more consistent-looking Black Friday takeover.)
The only thing that really stands out to me about Rakuten is that the Japanese UI strings are bit longer and more visually dense than the English ones. But that's a far cry from Yahoo Japan's early 2000s aesthetic.
I think that the design with a lot more text, and less pictures, is a better design. (Unfortunately, almost required them to use Unicode; although Shift-JIS is sometimes in use, TRON code is not.) (There are other problems with web design all over the world including Japanese, but I have seen many Japanese web pages with a better design than ones with English text.)
Writing system..
There’s over 1000 kanji for grade school and over 2000 in common use.
How many times have you heard English speakers complain about type experiments with dark backgrounds or gray type?
The difference is readability versus legibility. Bad color choices can made type difficult to read, or can make something impossible to read.
And with Japanese there is a great diversity of significant marks in various signs which must be legible in order for a reader to understand the message.
I would expect Japanese sites to have a design sensibility that separates text and image/illustrations to a greater extent then designs using an alphabet of 26
It was an alternative to the other content delivery offerings at the time, like WAP. Japanese handset manufacturers created devices that catered to the needs of that format. Japan is an interesting case study as always because they were always in tight coordination with software and hardware before it was widely popular.
> Instead, let’s look at websites over time. If Japan had been impacted by the global smart phone revolutiooon, we would expect its web design to shift around 2010. It didn’t – to an almost comical degree.
I'm confused. The American examples don't really show any remarkable change in terms of overall design language either. Also, if we are talking about smartphones should we not look at smartphone layouts?
Why all thumbnails seem to be loading full version of image? Haven't seen this in long time that as I scroll through article thumbnails are still just slowly loading while they should be loaded instantly. I mean it's hard to take seriously someone talking about other sites who can't design own site to load properly.
I love the style of analysis, but it doesn’t hit on some key things, imho.
1. Japan pretty much missed the desktop internet phase in the 90s and early 00s. Services like Compuserve and AOL (or Japanese equivalents) were not often utilized. ISPs, while often quite good (shout out to TWICS), were used mostly by tech folks, who have never been in high demand or had high prestige in Japan. A consequence of this is that desktop-based web design in Japan did not have a robust or competitive forcing function for optimization or usability in the 90s or the 00s, and then was just able to be skipped by the smart phone revolution.
2. That said, and as mentioned by the OP, Japan was way ahead in cell phone tech. In the early to mid 00s, I used the web as a critical info dump for some folks with whom I was working. They all accessed via phone, and I quickly learned that I needed to design accordingly (light and clean) if I wanted the info to be accessed and used. Most commercial websites were not designed this way, and they also were not accessed by users regularly — the data charges would have been insane.
3. Class signals 1 - I read something about minimalist design in Japan many years ago that jibes with my anecdotal experiences. Basically, if you see something with a simple and clean design with a lot of empty space, it’s usually a signal of high class and/or high quality and almost certainly high cost. This holds for a wide range of things like magazines, restaurants, menus, hotels, etc. Most Japanese folks see these types of designs as either expensive things to avoid (due to budget) and/or possible conspicuous displays of affluence that are frequently avoided by those who have the means (there are some folks who like to virtue signal while pretending to be something that they are not, but that’s a different issue). So a default reaction for many Japanese people to an empty design, especially empty dark, would be “I am not their target market”, even if they actually are.
2. Class signals 2 - The following is my opinion based on my experiences living in Japan for 8 years and working with things Japanese for many more, and I have no citations, but… Japanese people across the whole country (i.e., not just people in Tokyo) can mostly be grouped into the category of middle class income with working class tastes. This can be seen across a wide range of categories including food, clothing, housing, media consumption, etc. The exceptions outside of this large group (e.g., people who were raised with and embrace a classical and traditional upbringing) are easily noticed once some amount of time is spent with them.
As a simple example, compare the design of this sports newspaper (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_Hochi) with that of its mainstream parent company counterpart (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yomiuri_Shimbun). The “everyday man” magazines and newspapers with the bold and garish design are abundant and ubiquitous (easily seen in convenience stores), while the relatively gray and conservative mainstream paper is pretty much only seen in salaryman-world. Japanese websites look quite a bit like the sports newspaper (to my mildly trained eye), and I think websites mimic this design because it works with their target audience. I think that this is comparable to sites in the US that lean heavily on ad networks like Taboola and Outbrain as their primary revenue sources — it works for their target market.
CONCLUSION
Internet use in Japan has always been an enigma to me. Japan has been so far ahead in some ways (e.g., I had screaming fast fiber optic to the home for less than $100 a month in the mid-00s), while being so far behind in so many other areas.
I think that there is a lot of room for disruption for companies that can take the reality of Japanese web use and tailor a better design around that reality. It seems like there is a lot of design inertia that is very sub-optimal. I’m not sure if the best way to attack this is by segmenting aggressively and targeting a lot of small accessible markets, or if the only way to changes things will be via a big mover that dictates online design taste (e.g., a domestic, Japan-grown Apple type of company). Perhaps both are possible.
Anyway, I hope that others who actually live and work in Japan can add some additional insights to my comments.
It's not obvious that a social app should show UGC on the frontpage. If you do it wrong, it can be bad for your brand. It's hard to do it right in a way that draws people in, rather then turning them off. You want the app to be associated with content users like on the app, not necessarily with whatever is currently trending.
I know but everytime I had to relog I couldn't understand the wasted potential but it's with every social platform the only noteable exception is TikTok.
Did they change this? I just checked twitter.com (without having an account) it its an endless feed of random/popular posts. I opened tiktok.com and it looks similar.
And never seems to load on the first try, and/or rate-limits you if you lose your place in the stream and try to refresh the page to reset your proprioception.
From one of the YouTube comments:
I live in Japan and personally I think it's cultural and has more to do with the aversion to change and also the critical shortage of competent IT professionals and foreign-language speakers in this country. Often times websites aren't just designed differently, they are lacking basic functionality. Any foreign resident has a story about how some important website like their bank or a government site wouldn't let them in because their name was too many characters to enter into a text field or something. The government released this contact tracing app for covid and it didn't come out until like 5 months later that the app was broken on android and just literally didn't do anything. Japan's former cyber-security minister was outed as having never used a computer in his life after admitting in front of some committee that he didn't know what a USB drive is. Just look at the difference between Amazon jp and the local version, Rakuten, and it's clear how dated and non-functional Japanese sites are.
The problem is these companies are all headed by septuagenarian nepotism hires who can never be told they're wrong, staffed by programmers who have no idea of industry best-practices because they've been trained by these old guys who don't have a clue either and just want to keep doing what they've been doing since they learned to code in the 90s and can't read non-Japanese documentation, and the consumers also are tech illiterate enough not to notice or care that the websites are dogshit because they're used to it and again never access any non-japanese content because of no foreign language skills. And also old tech is rampant in major companies for the same reasons, which means often times these ancient devices are too slow to run modern websites well.
This is basically what I thought a while back (front-end dev living and working in Japan) but it cannot be the whole true because we foreigners have been saying this for a decade, and the obvious conclusion is that foreign websites that are "better" would come in and sweep the local competition. If Japanese were also horrified with these local designs, they'd JUMP as soon as a decent design comes, right?
But that just doesn't happen, and except in a few cases (so little that could be attributed to luck or natural competition, a big example being Twitter) what usually happens is the opposite, foreign companies come in blazing and get smashed into the ground. See Uber or Airbnb, the former disappeared and the latter is used almost exclusively by foreigners.
So I have two/three extra possible points that might happen, could also be a combination:
- Japanese are used and expect the density of websites here. As others said, look around Tokyo city and it's all hyper-dense, menus in restaurants have multiple layers of information within a page, the TV looks actually like the websites and we foreigners also meme about it[1]. So it might be the cultural norm and expectation, even if we foreigners find it ugly. And saying "consumers also are tech illiterate" about Japan is ignorant at best, condescending at worst.
- It is just a dinosaur thing, and those same dinosaurs use anti-competitive measures to stifle competition. A big one I've been waiting and I'm sure 99% of my friends and I would jump is a BANK with a decent UI. I cannot make international transfers (in EU it's literally like a national transfer) without signing for a different company which is a subsidiary (I believe) and cannot make recurrent payments, which are my two main complains, but it also just sucks in general. Laws based on a strong nationalistic feeling get passed to make e.g. Airbnb or financial companies harder.
- Companies entering Japan don't treat it with respect as a big market, but just as a "let's slap a bad translation on top and expect numbers as strong as in the USA", which is an issue I've seen first hand multiple times as well. For very similar cultures this might work, but for vastly different ones like USA vs Japan you'll need to do i18n besides just translation.
[1] this is really painfully brilliant: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/418/147/086...
- Uber Eats is super popular, what do you mean with disappeared?
- TeamLab’s design of the Resona Bank app is modern, lovely, functional, and full of features. All done by locals, for a local bank, to be used by locals. Don’t confuse lack of investment with a cultural effect.
- International transfers are difficult in any non European country, that’s why Wise became so popular. Shinsei makes a lot of their money on their antiquated but easy to use transfer system, for example. But Wise is the most popular international transfer app in Japan. Which also has a modern, easy to use UI. Both support recurrent scheduled payments.
- A lot of well designed UIs were jumped at, including iPhones, Apple TVs, Balmuda appliances, the new touch screen 7-11 ATMs, Uber Eats, etc.
It seems to me that you got trapped in the “I can’t criticise my host country and need to assent to every one of its quirks” attitude that plagues most foreigners in Japan. Most Japanese people find those websites fucking ugly, they just don’t care. I believe that this is the cultural effect at hand here - a lot of locals really don’t care if the design is good or not.
How do I make recurrent payments in Shinsei? There's no option from what I've searched. For transfers yes a transfer from Spain to the USA or UK is a bit harder than intra-EU, but it's trivial compared to Japan where you need to apply to some gvmt card to even qualify to apply to the int transfer service, which of course I got denied 4 times because of my name.
Your whole comment seems trying to find the worst interpretation of what I said on purpose... I mean Uber taxi of course. I said some modern UIs were adopted, but still IMHO not enough to clearly show it was a huge pain point as we think (saying people "jumped" to the iPhone in Japan because of the UI also doesn't make sense, considering how long it took to be adopted and how high Android was for a very long time). Etc.
You mean because of MyNumber?
It's your responsibility to maintain a consistent katakana transliteration of your name. I don't think many banks would accept documents if your name was misspelt, no matter the country.
MyNumber's purpose is precisely to curtail white collar crime. Of course there would be tight regulations around that. But it's something that you make only once.
EU countries are economically and legally integrated to very high levels. Banking regulation is simplified for intra EU transfers. Japan is an isolate that is not part of any economic unions. Banking regulation focus on the domestic market and crime prevention. Different countries, different needs.
I agree that bad UIs are not a huge pain point. As I said, nobody cares. But that doesn't mean that bad UIs are liked or appreciated. They are tolerated.
Learn Japanese and get yourself a Resona bank account.
Yeah I didn't misspell my own name, why would you assume so?
Because your application for remittance wouldn't be rejected otherwise.
Why are you being so flippant here? Misspelling the name is almost certainly _not_ the only reason something like this could be rejected.
It's the only one, really.
There is nothing in the regulations that would have the bank deny someone's application for international remittance, except lack of MyNumber or invalid documentation.
Are you a Japanese bank remittance application processor?
I worked for a bank in the remittance area for two decades. I know the process really well, including the application part.
Anyone has the legal right to send a remittance. So it is an automatic yes, unless there is a compelling no. Most compelling nos would affect locals only (involvement with antisocial groups, certain criminal convictions), and the only compelling nos for foreigners are either invalid documentation or being a politically important person.
OP is doing it all himself, so they are not a PIP. Most foreigners (more than 97%) who have their application rejected, is because they didn't send the correct documents, or the documents contained misspellings.
You seem to be a bit bothered by the fact that I know remittances? But it's my job to know.
Then you’ve just contradicted yourself here. You said the only reason an application would be denied is if the name is misspelled (and assumed that’s why the OP was rejected), yet it could also be due to missing documents, so it feels a bit presumptuous when you said they misspelled their name.
For context, look at how ridiculous application processes are in Japan and why even when writing my name "right" it might be rejected (different people):
https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/comments/z8mgxl/comment/i...
> "Just keep sending that again and again. Japanese bureaucracy is just really dense sometimes (always)."
> "A woman working at my bank told me she always tells people to apply more than once because whether they get approved or not depends entirely on who happens to get their application that day."
> "I’ve done similar with credit card applications. Fill in form, get it returned with errors marked. Fill in exactly the same again, get it returned with different errors marked. Fill in exactly the same again, success."
> "Same for when I was switching the name oh a phone plan. Returned it with errors. Had a Japanese person fill it out just in case, came back again. Told them "no". Worked."
> "Literally this. It’s infuriatingly dumb. Embarrassingly. You’ll get different answers for the same thing at different city halls and even different requirements in the SAME fucking city hall by different staff. My friend tried to get married recently and his girlfriends city hall demanded a document he didnt have which he was going to need to spend weeks waiting for. I tokd him to go again and ask a different staff or try his city hall instead. He went to his own and they accepted no problem and allowed the marriage."
> "I had something similar happen but stood my ground. They waffled around for an hour or so and decided to just accept the marriage request and process it. I think they wanted me gone."
That's what it is. The other guy was terribly triggered by it, for reasons I don't understand, but Japanese office workers will ocasionally choke on katakana names. The kicker here is that when you are sending a remittance, the bank will profit from it without risk or extra expenses, so it is on the bank's interest to get your application through.
MyNumber is managed by your local city office. Just like any other governmental agency, it has no incentives for nothing.
If all of your documents match perfectly, the bank will approve your application for remittance. But you should be using Wise - it has much better deals than Shinsei.
??
> Companies entering Japan don't treat it with respect as a big market, but just as a "let's slap a bad translation on top and expect numbers as strong as in the USA", which is an issue I've seen first hand multiple times as well. For very similar cultures this might work, but for vastly different ones like USA vs Japan you'll need to do i18n besides just translation.
While I can’t speak for software going into Japan, I can absolutely believe it having seen this exact thing in reverse for a game coming out of Japan. You could give yourself a banner with a customisable name, but there was only room for one character on that banner. Great if your language has “狐”, not so much if 20% of your users pick “E” and another 10% pick “T”.
Even with much smaller cultural divides, I’ve faced “Knopf” being incorrect placed on a German naughty words filter because someone literally translated “knob” without asking a native speaker. (And you might be surprised how often IRL Germans ask me, in English, if I drove the train to work, though I do also appreciate that in reverse I probably sound like Crabtree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilhJvFngWcY)
This is also true, another very famous and memeable case on the inverse of what I said are videogame translations, "All your base are belong to us" :)
On the unwillingness of Japanese to change- I think its actually Americans who are more unique because we are willing to upend large institutions and our whole social fabric when new technology comes along. Faith in progress and willingness to replace old systems to try something new is historically part of our national DNA, for better or worse. Japan values stability and generally only wants to use technology in a way that fits into the existing heirarchical social structure.
What new technology upended the whole social fabric?
What hasn’t? USA has been transforming itself with technology for the last 200 years on an amazing pace. Cars, telephones, radios, television, airplanes, computers, Internet, smart phones, social media. The whole social fabric has been upended several times.
I mean, many of those entered strong even to third-world countries, I honestly don’t know what you imagine goes on in other places.
I agree. OP was asking what upended. Many things did.
None of those is exclusive to the US.
They were created in the US. Where do you think America's money comes from?
And yet, none of those are exclusive to the US. The original argument is that the US is more willing to incorporate large technological changes than Japan, so please show me a large technological change that the US has adopted that Japan hasn't.
I'm not discussing that argument, I'm not OP. But I answered your question.
Using technology broadly- first I was thinking of things like opioid painkillers- given out like candy in the 90s due to pharma marketing, then there was a huge backlash. Meanwhile I believe Japan has been pretty strict on medication. Amphetamines are strictly controlled there too while in parts of the US they are widely used as performance enhancers for studying.
Another change to the social fabric is due to globalism, shareholder capitalism and roboticization taking away US manufacturing jobs. Also big box replacing locally owned retail, and possibly internet shopping replacing bix box stores. Of course these are present in Japan too, but not allowed to dramatically change society quite so fast.
> Amphetamines are strictly controlled there too while in parts of the US they are widely used as performance enhancers for studying.
In the US, amphetamines are strictly controlled too, it is a schedule II drug. You need to be prescribed by a doctor, and they cannot write a prescription for more than 30 days worth of prescription at once. You have to visit the doctor every 90 days to get re-validated that you need your prescription and all is good. If you are caught even once abusing drugs (not just this specific one, but any in general), including stuff like giving them out to other people, you are never getting prescribed amphetamines again in your life, and that will be the least of your worries in this scenario.
Iirc in Japan amphetamines are "controlled" in a sense that they cannot be prescribed at all. Hell, I was looking to travel to Japan soon, and turns out I cannot even bring my 30 days worth of prescription that I fully legally own in the US, no matter what kind of records or papers from my doctor or the hospital that I am willing to provide to their authorities.
So yeah, it is a bit easier to control abuse when no one can get the drug even legally in your country in the first place. I wouldn't call a full-on ban as "controlled" though. Not trying to make a claim that the US approach to this is better than that of Japan, that's not my intent. Just pointing out that using amphetamines as an example of "Japan controlling drugs" compared to the US is a bit of a bad example.
Its true that amphetamines are legally controlled drugs in the US but in many circles (ie undergraduate college) they are widely available. Its well known to the point that the Alameda CEO could tweet publicly about regular amphetamine use.
My point was that, whether you call Japanese law “ban” or “strict control” its much harder to get strong stimulants there. I believe you can even get in serious trouble for bringing sudafed decongestant from the US since its not legal there.
I see, that's a good point, thanks!
Television created the suburbs.
(not the OP)
Facebook and other social media?
I think you are confusing internalization with localization. Internalization can be used for similar cultures, localization is required for different cultures.
I would love to work in Japan on their websites. I would take a pay cut if I could become a Citizen. But they don't want Hispanic people over there; which I understand their needs to be insular and homogeneous.
Plenty of hispanics in Japan.
If you tried in earnest to go live in Japan and it didn't happen it's not because of racism. Yes there are some xenophobic tendencies, but they don't play into it. Money and "skills" on paper do.
If you don't tick the right boxes (e.g. graduated 4 years of university education, have demonstrable skills in a technical field, work experience, etc.) it's going to be difficult, of course. But that's the same anywhere.
If you do have those things it’s in fact easy to immigrate to Japan. For white collar jobs there is no “tried to hire a local first” test like most countries have.
You give me hope and a dream. Maybe when the kids are in college we can share a coffee in Osaka. See you there
Govt/traditional big corp related IT jobs are crappy. Generally competent IT professionals aren't happy to work for it.
Sounds like a lot of government signs in the US.
I wonder if their backend systems are also ancient and it's hard to bring that to the web.
Very interesting comment thank you
> breaking the 3 colour design principle
Is it possible designers have some principles that don't necessarily match real life usability? Only 3 colors is incredibly boring to me.
I see that hacker news also only has 3 colors, it's fine in this case because there's not much reason to have more. That doesn't apply to, say e.g., photoshop (and gimp following this too now for unknown reasons) only having 2-color icons, while multicolor ones are faster to distinguish visually
Note that the "rule of 3 colors" is about three hues. The full design will incorporate variations of those colors: brighter and darker, more and less saturated. Your brain actually thinks of these as "the same color", though HTML and CSS don't.
It's a design principle which is safe: it's not going to clash in an ugly way, or make combinations that are hard to read. They can be used (in conjunction with other design principles) to draw the attention where it's needed, and have the eye flow through the page without distraction.
"Safe" and "boring" are two sides of the same coin. I personally don't mind boring, and easily get aggravated by choices that distract. A truly great design breaks the safe principles, though usually at a high cost. (Usually, having tried and rejected many combinations.)
Gimp takes strange turns now and then, does but gradually improve over time. It used to be that fuzzy-select would cause immense lag practically every time. Now my biggest complaint with selection is merely that the rectangle select tool defaults to centred.
If it helps, you can enable the old style icons in preferences.
Let's not forget there must not be any contrast :)
Well, design principles aren't actually laws, but they follow trends so they change and evolve.
I've lived in Japan for 30 years, and built several Internet based startups in that time. Three quick things the author does not seem to really consider.
1. Japan's information-dense design pre-dates the Internet. If you look at commercial fliers from the 80s (and probably before) until today, they have similar information-dense designs.
2. This design is not a result of a "critical shortage of competent IT professionals." Just because something is different doesn't mean it is wrong or the makers are incompetent. Some of these e-commerce firms have thousands of good developers. Designs are extensively A/B tested. They are common because they work.
3. Hacker News is also very info-dense and has changed little over past decade. It's not due to incompetence, but because we users like it this way. Now, imagine we had a steady steam of designers posting about how backwards we are and how they needed to "fix" the site to improve our experience. That's what it often feels like reading these articles from Japan.
> Just because something is different doesn't mean it is wrong or the makers are incompetent. Some of these e-commerce firms have thousands of good developers. Designs are extensively A/B tested. They are common because they work.
Everyone in Rakuten repeats this. It's not true. A/B testing between bad and bad still results in bad. You just get which bad works better.
If Japanese design was awesome, it would be pretty obvious to anyone how awesome it was. This sort of rationalization of bad quality is the mark of today's Japanese mediocre output.
Luckily there are strong local players, like Recruit or TeamLab, who refuse this idea of "it's good because I say so", and are actually pushing for better products.
Speaking from a US perspective
1. The US also had information dense fliers / magazines / newspapers back in the day. The point is that the US moved away (at least in web design), while Japan didn't
2. Hard to comment on "competence", though I guess I'd like to see a minimalist redesign of a japanese website and see a survey on which one Japanese people prefer
3. Hacker News is extremely niche. And as much as HN people hate Reddit's new modern design, Reddit has orders of magnitude more users than HN. I would bet the vast majority of people prefer the UI of Reddit over HN
Maybe Japanese people have resisted the western degeneration in attention span and patience, and retain the ability to not have a seizure looking at a webpage with a modicum of information density. I've noticed this trend following very "busy" 1800s signs/newspapers/etc up to now. People back then weren't addicted to fast and easy dopamine and had the mental space to parse something with detail on it.
That's an interesting perspective. I've always seen it to be the opposite, particularly when playing many Japanese video games: signs everywhere, tons of over-emoting both verbal and physical, exaggerated everything, lots of noises, ridiculously large numbers that must be flashed all over, lots of visual flashing. Lots of particle/special effects. Just a ton of really inexpensive dopamine for retaining capture of low attention span.
Not that any of this is inherently wrong. I'm not judging it (and I often enjoy it). But I think there's a sufficiently strong example of the opposite in modern Japanese culture.
What's interesting is, I think, we're both describing "very high information density" but seeing it as a result of high attention span, or low attention span. Heh!
I'm not sure I agree with all of that: a notable difference between modern media and 1800s newsprint is the paper was very expensive then compared to more recently, so it was highly economical to cram everything onto fewer physical pages. Electronic media has essentially zero marginal costs for longer or less dense content.
The same goes for cheaper books (which still were not as cheap as modern mass-market books in PPP terms): narrow margins and crammed text. But as soon as you move up market to expensive books, the margins widen and the text lines open up. People still liked the aesthetic of open and airy, but it cost a lot.
Further more, for signs, you had to get everything on them. There was no Internet, no phones, no Yellow Pages, no CeeFax. Someone interested in your service would have to stand there and copy the relevant details into their pocket book.
On the other hand, I do very much detest the glossy websites where there are something like 20,000 vertical pixels of flashy content, but none of it useful. Just endless fluff, vagueries and calls-to-ill-defined-actions. 90% of people just want to know your opening hours, contact details and a price list (services) or menu (for food). And the delivery costs. Everything else is a waste of everyone's bandwidth until you have made those things front and centre.
I certainly don't get the feeling of a patient attention span whenever I've seen clips from Japanese TV where on top of the main action they have shining brightly-colored text and graphics popping up all over, scrolling banners, maybe a reaction cam cutting between multiple people hamming up their reactions to everything, etc.
And the websites look pretty similar in design.
Ah yes, the famous modern Japanese restrained design because they have longer attention span than ours. They wouldn't need flashy neon colours to keep engaged. That's some confirmation bias.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabukich%C5%8D#/media/File%3...
> I've noticed this trend following very "busy" 1800s signs/newspapers/etc up to now. People back then weren't addicted to fast and easy dopamine and had the mental space to parse something with detail on it.
I've recently been reading Amusing Ourselves to Death (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death), and it noted that in the 1800s America has a "literate" culture: people read a lot and had correspondingly longer attention spans. Apparently attending debates and lectures were a fairly common activity, and those went on for hours, with each side having plenty of time to express complete and complex thoughts, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Douglas_debate...:
> Each debate lasted about three hours; one candidate spoke for 60 minutes, followed by a 90-minute response and a final 30-minute rejoinder by the first candidate. The candidates alternated speaking first. As the incumbent, Douglas spoke first in four of the debates....
> The debates took place between August and October 1858. Newspapers reported 12,000 in attendance at Ottawa,[7] 16,000 to 18,000 in Galesburg,[4] 15,000 in Freeport,[8] 12,000 in Quincy, and at the last one, in Alton, 5,000 to 10,000.[6] The debates near Illinois's borders (Freeport, Quincy, and Alton) drew large numbers of people from neighboring states.[9][full citation needed][10] A number travelled within Illinois to follow the debates.[7]
I have already linked it ( https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790.amp ), but attention span itself didn’t decrease, it’s not even an existing concept. Media producers just got better at maximizing our engagement with their content, and comparatively a plain old book will be boring to our brains. This thought actually did help me in that I can’t fall victim of “learned helplessness” here, just put that phone down and work on the thing you want. Focus modes are also very beneficial.
Nonetheless, interesting historical fact, thanks for sharing!
I'm pretty sure this is indeed a significant part of it. While watching the relevant video she says she gets "overwhelmed" by the old reddit layout because of the "amount of text" (which isn't even that much) and I really do have to wonder how these people even managed to live their lives before the age of the smartphone without suffering regular mental breakdowns every time they saw a newspaper. The future does not look good.
> People back then weren't addicted to fast and easy dopamine and had the mental space to parse something with detail on it.
That's one serious assumption you're making. Has anyone actually proven that?
Attention span hasn’t decreased, hell, it is not even a thing. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790.amp
Loading much faster for me: https://web.archive.org/web/20221125181106/https://sabrinas....
Well found, images are so slow on original link
Author loads full size images which are just shrinked instead loading thumbnails and then writes article about website design.
It’s not ironic nor hypocritical unless they lambasted others who did the same. I can’t be bothered to do all sorts of things on a personal blog/project that I might do on a paid/commercial venture.
Their response is probably “yeah that’d be cool but meh”.
People nowadays can't handle information-dense websites anymore. I showed HN to a couple friends once and they were like “How can you read on this website?”. I'm glad HN kept the same design since 2007.
> I'm glad HN kept the same design since 2007.
As someone who enjoys and prefers high-density of information, I generally agree.
I do, however, wish HN would add support for @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark). By now it's one of the few sites that are still unpleasantly bright to look at when in a dark environment. (When I don't forget, I visit https://darkhn.herokuapp.com/ instead, which helps but can't be used to upvote/comment.)
Agreed. In the meantime, I use the following uBlockOrigin rules:
I'm not sure on your browser, but I've used this for quite a long time, since long before dark mode was available on most websites: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/darkreader/
It turns most websites into a dark mode equivalent (mostly) correctly. Some websites it just doesn't work for and you need to disable it, but it's otherwise great. It also auto-detects (most of the time) when a site supports dark mode and shuts itself off for that site.
If you're on iOS/macOS, "HN Dark Mode" extension adds a dark mode style sheet that works pretty well:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hn-dark-mode/id1611040838
I love information-dense websites.
As long as you strip out the distractions: Pictures and videos which add nothing, ads, other visual cruft.
Clean design is nice, but I like being able to consume the relevant bits without having to scroll. I can move my eyes around.
Which brings me around to my point - not everyone has the same preferences with regard to presentation and parsing of information. The latest trends in web design aren't necessarily better - they are Western (and English) centric, and as well highly informed by an industry which likes to foist things on their users and hope they become trained to accept it as normal.
I don't see Japanese web design as backward, ancient, dated, just different. Possibly, in some ways, better.
I'd love to see an analysis of loadtimes, page size, tracking javascript, etc. When I have low signal on my phone (and thus not much bandwidth), these beautiful clean, minimal websites somehow take an age to load - because of all the largely invisible baggage they come along with.
It's part of why I love this site for news, as well as lite.cnn.io. (If anyone knows of more sites stripped of everything but text for news, I'm always looking for some)
https://text.npr.org/
I use compact layout in Reddit, mailbox and pretty much everywhere but still can't stand HN layout, I read it through Serializer.io much cleaner design and anyway I don't want curated home page but also don't wanna go through all New.
Japan had phones with lots of graphics well before smartphones. Those systems were not web-based. They were mobile-only, and for small screens.
China has another system. Many things are applets within the WeChat environment. This is a whole different world, using MINA, WXML, and WXSS. It's kind of like XML with an external XSS style sheet. Here's the official repo.[1]
It's interesting to see where that division leads. The XSS approach separates content and look much more strongly than HTML/CSS does. (At least as HTML/CSS is typically used. It's possible to have an HTML document with just the data, and use a single separate style sheet in CSs. There are people who argue for that, and some elegant examples.[2] But they are voices in the wilderness.)
The funny thing is, despite a different underlying technology, WeChat applets seem to look a lot like HTML/CSS web pages. The difference may be that the WeChat system was efficient enough to eliminate the demand for "native" smartphone apps.
[1] https://github.com/Tencent/weui-wxss
[2] https://every-layout.dev/blog/css-components/
Just found [1] this in "newest" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6ep308goxQ "Why Japan’s Internet is weirdly designed [video]"
[1] I made a comment before regarding how HN works, and usually when one certain issue piques interest there's an influx of related posts.
I wonder why Sabrina didn't link to her video from her article
Related YouTube:
why Japan's internet is weirdly designed
https://youtube.com/watch?v=z6ep308goxQ
Every one of these Japanese sites would conform to what the author calls "the 3 colour design principle" if they just removed the banner ads. In fact, I'd argue that the prevalence of first party ads is the only significant difference. Without them, the Japanese sites are no more cluttered than Wikipedia or NYT.
Anyone else having issues loading the images? They appear to be (not even large, dimensionally) pngs, but loading, line-by-line as if they are massive files—calculating ~10mins to download. Checked my download speed, no sign of an issue.
Edit: curl https://sabrinas.space/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/goo-1024x5... --output 'test.png' took 0:04:22
> after running 2,671 images of the most popular websites in every country through an AI
Um. That did what? How were the images processed?
I ran the images through an AI feels oddly nonspecific. Perhaps it is specified better somewhere the page didn't entirely load for me. I see some images of clustering that I presume was the output from the AI.
> How were the images processed?
The methodology is described further down in the article. The author extracted features from the screenshots with OpenCV and then reduced the dimensionality of the feature set using t-SNE.
Have to use the word "AI" for SEO and clickbait purposes. If you can't relate to Current Thing then are you even worth reading?
It's not ! China is the same, and I bet my shirt India isnt far.
The Rakuten screenshot included in the first set of examples looks a bit out of place to me. It's a pretty normal, modern, flat-design shopping website? Amazon similarly features a big colorful carousel and a bunch of different images all competing for attention. (Well, if you visit Amazon today you'll get a more consistent-looking Black Friday takeover.)
The only thing that really stands out to me about Rakuten is that the Japanese UI strings are bit longer and more visually dense than the English ones. But that's a far cry from Yahoo Japan's early 2000s aesthetic.
I think that the design with a lot more text, and less pictures, is a better design. (Unfortunately, almost required them to use Unicode; although Shift-JIS is sometimes in use, TRON code is not.) (There are other problems with web design all over the world including Japanese, but I have seen many Japanese web pages with a better design than ones with English text.)
Writing system.. There’s over 1000 kanji for grade school and over 2000 in common use.
How many times have you heard English speakers complain about type experiments with dark backgrounds or gray type?
The difference is readability versus legibility. Bad color choices can made type difficult to read, or can make something impossible to read.
And with Japanese there is a great diversity of significant marks in various signs which must be legible in order for a reader to understand the message.
I would expect Japanese sites to have a design sensibility that separates text and image/illustrations to a greater extent then designs using an alphabet of 26
Is he drawing conclusions based on those 13 red dots, which appear to be as randomly distributed as all the other countries' dots?
Seems like a case of "as you can see from this completely random graph there is a clear correlation..."
She.
This is really fascinating.
I wonder how much was informed by i-mode.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode
It was an alternative to the other content delivery offerings at the time, like WAP. Japanese handset manufacturers created devices that catered to the needs of that format. Japan is an interesting case study as always because they were always in tight coordination with software and hardware before it was widely popular.
> Instead, let’s look at websites over time. If Japan had been impacted by the global smart phone revolutiooon, we would expect its web design to shift around 2010. It didn’t – to an almost comical degree.
I'm confused. The American examples don't really show any remarkable change in terms of overall design language either. Also, if we are talking about smartphones should we not look at smartphone layouts?
Why all thumbnails seem to be loading full version of image? Haven't seen this in long time that as I scroll through article thumbnails are still just slowly loading while they should be loaded instantly. I mean it's hard to take seriously someone talking about other sites who can't design own site to load properly.
I really liked the clustering of image screenshots, that was much more contentful and less biased due to relying on that than what I have expected.
Looking at the websites mentioned in the randomwire article, those popular websites are not like this article portrays them to be anymore, imho.
I find japanese web design refreshing in some ways.
I love the style of analysis, but it doesn’t hit on some key things, imho.
1. Japan pretty much missed the desktop internet phase in the 90s and early 00s. Services like Compuserve and AOL (or Japanese equivalents) were not often utilized. ISPs, while often quite good (shout out to TWICS), were used mostly by tech folks, who have never been in high demand or had high prestige in Japan. A consequence of this is that desktop-based web design in Japan did not have a robust or competitive forcing function for optimization or usability in the 90s or the 00s, and then was just able to be skipped by the smart phone revolution.
2. That said, and as mentioned by the OP, Japan was way ahead in cell phone tech. In the early to mid 00s, I used the web as a critical info dump for some folks with whom I was working. They all accessed via phone, and I quickly learned that I needed to design accordingly (light and clean) if I wanted the info to be accessed and used. Most commercial websites were not designed this way, and they also were not accessed by users regularly — the data charges would have been insane.
3. Class signals 1 - I read something about minimalist design in Japan many years ago that jibes with my anecdotal experiences. Basically, if you see something with a simple and clean design with a lot of empty space, it’s usually a signal of high class and/or high quality and almost certainly high cost. This holds for a wide range of things like magazines, restaurants, menus, hotels, etc. Most Japanese folks see these types of designs as either expensive things to avoid (due to budget) and/or possible conspicuous displays of affluence that are frequently avoided by those who have the means (there are some folks who like to virtue signal while pretending to be something that they are not, but that’s a different issue). So a default reaction for many Japanese people to an empty design, especially empty dark, would be “I am not their target market”, even if they actually are.
2. Class signals 2 - The following is my opinion based on my experiences living in Japan for 8 years and working with things Japanese for many more, and I have no citations, but… Japanese people across the whole country (i.e., not just people in Tokyo) can mostly be grouped into the category of middle class income with working class tastes. This can be seen across a wide range of categories including food, clothing, housing, media consumption, etc. The exceptions outside of this large group (e.g., people who were raised with and embrace a classical and traditional upbringing) are easily noticed once some amount of time is spent with them.
As a simple example, compare the design of this sports newspaper (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_Hochi) with that of its mainstream parent company counterpart (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yomiuri_Shimbun). The “everyday man” magazines and newspapers with the bold and garish design are abundant and ubiquitous (easily seen in convenience stores), while the relatively gray and conservative mainstream paper is pretty much only seen in salaryman-world. Japanese websites look quite a bit like the sports newspaper (to my mildly trained eye), and I think websites mimic this design because it works with their target audience. I think that this is comparable to sites in the US that lean heavily on ad networks like Taboola and Outbrain as their primary revenue sources — it works for their target market.
CONCLUSION
Internet use in Japan has always been an enigma to me. Japan has been so far ahead in some ways (e.g., I had screaming fast fiber optic to the home for less than $100 a month in the mid-00s), while being so far behind in so many other areas.
I think that there is a lot of room for disruption for companies that can take the reality of Japanese web use and tailor a better design around that reality. It seems like there is a lot of design inertia that is very sub-optimal. I’m not sure if the best way to attack this is by segmenting aggressively and targeting a lot of small accessible markets, or if the only way to changes things will be via a big mover that dictates online design taste (e.g., a domestic, Japan-grown Apple type of company). Perhaps both are possible.
Anyway, I hope that others who actually live and work in Japan can add some additional insights to my comments.
> 3. Class signals 1
This is good point. Rakuten style design is friendly in general.
Curiously, twitter, a beautiful minimalist website, is very popular in japan, has as much users there as in the US.
Twitter is an incredibly well designed app and website. Well, it was.
What? No. I mean, what? What??
First time I tried to get myself more into twitter I felt the same barrier as trying to use snapchat as a 30+ y.o.
It's beautiful and legible. It's also highly unusable.
Was it? They had an outdated "street art style" startpage with nothing but a login for over 4 years. No search, no trends nothing just a login.
It's not obvious that a social app should show UGC on the frontpage. If you do it wrong, it can be bad for your brand. It's hard to do it right in a way that draws people in, rather then turning them off. You want the app to be associated with content users like on the app, not necessarily with whatever is currently trending.
Yeah you are right it's easier to take the easy way.
You rarely see that page if you actually use twitter
I know but everytime I had to relog I couldn't understand the wasted potential but it's with every social platform the only noteable exception is TikTok.
Did they change this? I just checked twitter.com (without having an account) it its an endless feed of random/popular posts. I opened tiktok.com and it looks similar.
yes, was one of the first thing musk changed.
Random archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220201000154/https://twitter.c...
It's slow as hell and I'm afraid to click anywhere because I'm never sure if there's a way to return.
And never seems to load on the first try, and/or rate-limits you if you lose your place in the stream and try to refresh the page to reset your proprioception.
I think he just spelled Nitter wrong.
Possibly
What changed?
There have been a few broken designs recently, here for example https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1595389202878824448?...
It still is.
I have been looking for the linked 2013 post on density for years, thank you
What’s an example of a “Japanese web design” site that has global appeal?
Because KISS?