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.
I'm half convinced that we're seeing the result of a brilliant conspiracy by Getty Images, Shutterstock and Corbis to infiltrate the design landscape of Silicon Valley and sell more stock photography.
Also: the Golden Gate needs a better agent. Given how many times that bridge has appeared in photo backdrops, it should be rich enough by now to stretch further into Marin.
"clean design" has been around since the 20th century. It just went away, but came back, and it will go away again and will most likely come back again. So yes, design is in trends, just like any other field has trends, but "clean design" has pretty good odds to come back again. 90s grunge design.....not so likely.
I agree with this, but I guess many Asian websites do feel like they're stuck in a 1998 trend. Actually this also seems to apply to music too... when I hear my Taiwanese friends' music, it seems like it still hasn't escaped boy-band era (1998?).
One of these points is way off the mark. I'll add my own two cents.
Language Barrier - The web and most of the programming languages which drive it were designed by English speakers or western corporations and hence the majority of documentation and educational resources are also in English. Although much gets translated this still causes a delay in new technologies and trends being adopted.
1. Many of the Japanese coders I've met have put in the effort to learn English. They might not be able to carry fluent geopolitical conversations, but they do tend to have enough chops to read API docs and skim code. Most of the Japanese professionals I've met, in any trade, are ultra professional, and will do whatever it takes to stay on top of their craft, including learning English if needed.
2. It's easy to forget that some of these programming languages, notably Ruby, are actually from Japan. As recently as a few years ago, some of my favorite resources for Ruby were in Japanese, out in front of English.
3. Go to a Japanese bookstore and check out the section for programmers. More recent web languages/tech, like node.js, are not well represented. But then look to the next shelf and you'll see something like Unity stacked to the ceiling. It could be that Japanese coders would rather work on different kinds of projects, spend their time learning new tech in those domains instead of the web, and only see the web as a means to an end. I wouldn't consider this a "language barrier", but rather a difference in priorities.
>Many of the Japanese coders I've met have put in the effort to learn English.
I put a longer response addressing this point in a different thread, but you're interacting with the cohort that has already chosen to be a computer programmer. It's a biased sample group. I would expect people with no interest in learning English would be disinclined to even enter programming.
(This is still tertiary to actual cultural preferences in web design, mind you.)
Your last point is dead-on, and I think it's not just true for Japan but also for Germany and Russia. People from these countries tend to approach technology from a much more hardware or math centric view. The interest in UI stuff is nowhere as great as in the US and it doesn't garner the same level of reputation.
"Language Barrier [...] Many of the Japanese coders I've met have put in the effort to learn English."
If they have to put in an effort, there _is_ a barrier. Compare that with parts of Europe, where the first words kids learn to read are "OK", "Cancel", "Yes", "No", and "Level". And that's only a slight exaggeration. That's a barrier, too, but a lower one.
There are good points made here. I suspect there's also a bit of herding going on.
In Germany, for example, it's pretty easy to find major websites which are fixed-width, left aligned and looking dated. There's no real geographic or historical reason for how it is, other than the fact that their neighbours have a similar style.
In a similar vein, many startups have similar designs. Even on the Internet, where you can connect with anyone in the world, there's a lot of tending towards those who are closest to you.
Yeah, I suspect this is the major factor. Or maybe I'm just bitter after going to blender.org this morning and finding that they have ditched their orange-on-black color scheme for the "white minimalist + photo" style that's all the rage these days. Bleh.
If I look at these sites (picked because I have seen them in use, because I know they're 'important'), I'm having trouble understanding the design decisions as well
It's not just Japan or asian websites. The further away you get from the silicon valley bubble, the more sites look like they are from the late 90's. It's not really even location specific, more how tuned in developers are to the bay area style. You can look at local news papers in the US for example, or even government sites. I think part of the reason is that there's a lot of design talent in the bay area, and the further removed one is from being involved, the less people care about things like flat design and having lots of space and less content, etc.
That's a good thing. I am sick of lots of space and less content - I I go to websites to read things, not just look at them. A lot of minimalist websites are pretty in the abstract but unfriendly towards potential customers by withholding information or making users jump through hoops to get to it.
> "Walking around Tokyo, I often get the feeling of being stuck in a 1980′s vision of the future"
I'm British, living in the US, and I've always felt this way about America. I recently heard from an American friend that he felt exactly the same when visiting Britain.
Not sure what to make of it, but it's interesting!
I would assume that this comes from a general feeling of disengagement to the urban environment that person is living as the 1980's were a period of significant anxiety about the future. Science Fiction of this period tends to be quite dark.
After living in Honolulu, San Francisco, Berlin, Tokyo, and Singapore, I believe that only Singapore truly has a blue-print of the future laid out properly. A lot of green / smart housing developments. Deeply multi-cultural. Strong emphasis on education and personal development (plus world-class universities to support this). Of course living in an endless summer helps.
"I recently heard from an American friend that he felt exactly the same when visiting Britain."
The "same", meaning he felt like Britain was stuck in 1980's version of the future? Or the past? Strange, my experience and I think the usual experience of Americans visiting GB/Europe is of feeling like you've timewarped into the past. How far depends on where you visit. Paris/London may feel twenty years back, other places fifty or a hundred.
- Compared to English, Japanese text can cram more information into an easily-skimmable space, but typing is slower, so cluttered, link-rich interfaces have an advantage. This may well explain why Yahoo! Japan's portal is so much more popular than Google's.
- I can well imagine that, in the minds of the staid gerontocrats who maintain an iron grip on Japanese corporate life, a website is merely a modern version of those "me! me! me!" brochures that get shoved in my mailbox every day. So it's natural that they would expect it to look like one.
- Japanese culture is not nearly as minimalist as its made out to be in the West. Minimalism has its place, of course, but in commercial spaces its all about competing for attention, to the point of sensory overload.
- Compared to English, Japanese text can cram more information into an easily-skimmable spaaaaaace, but typing is slower, so cluttered, link-rich interfaces have an advantage. This may well explain why Yahoo! Japan's portal is so much more popular than Google's.
I second this theory. A similar version of this happened in China too. A few years back, when Baidu was still copying Google's minimal design pixel by pixel, they suddenly discovered that it was losing traffic to a random site with only one static html page setup: hao123, which also fit into the 'cluttered, link-rich' interface category. Baidu ended up acquiring hao123, spending close to a million dollars on a few lines of html. Note that Chinese language bears quite some similarities to Japanese, they are both character based and typically a hassle to type in large chunks.
Somewhere I have a text file with links to several studies on information density and reading characteristics, but for now this might be interesting (unfortunately some of the pages before are cut):
Good morning from Tokyo! Sites like Rakuten have more to do with in-house politics than Japanese design trends or a love for information density. http://bm.straightline.jp is a better guage of where he Japanese web design trends are headed. As you can see, there's a lot of echoes of flash heavy sites and flat one page designs, but little which represents the special kind of chaos large bottom up created sites like Yahoo or Rakuten. They're more akin to the million dollar website than anything else.
Is there a breakdown somewhere of two distinct groups of human activities:
Design where correctness is defined as optimizing some metric goal, like designing an electronic circuit for maximum performance at a fixed price, or the strongest bridge pylon for a fixed cost or perhaps for a fixed concrete volume.
vs
Design where correctness is defined as a large group of people trying to imitate each other at an optimum distance as close as possible without introducing legal difficulties with accusations of direct copying and not failing at user interaction much worse than anyone else.
Web design and most software UI is obviously almost entirely in the latter category.
A huge source of disaster and trouble is people using language and attitudes from one category in the other category.
I'm not sure what to google / wikipedia for... this must be well trodden ground after a couple millenia of ladies high fashion clothing design, for example.
The anecdotal cultural 'explanations' here are a little ridiculous without some real data to reference.
> Logographic-based languages... actually allow Japanese speakers to become comfortable with processing a lot of information in short period of time / space
> Japanese doesn’t have italics or capital letters which limits the opportunities for adding visual punch that you get with latin alphabets
Italics and capital letters have little or nothing to do with how 'Western' web layouts are generally created, and are far from the only way to create emphasis or hierarchy in text.
> Language Barrier... Although much gets translated this still causes a delay in new technologies and trends being adopted
Is the claim that the Japanese are technologically behind the rest of the world? Why would web development/design be different than almost every other technical industry? This sounds much more like surface intuition than considered insight
> Risk Avoidance
This might help explain why Japanese websites look similar to each other, but not why they look different from 'Western' websites. You could make a similar claim about big sites like Microsoft and Yahoo that have copied the look an feel of Google, or the mass of slightly-modified Bootstrap-based 'Western' sites. Risk avoidance/copying is universal - it does not explain the difference between Japanese and non-Japanese websites.
> Consumer Behaviour - People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision
Evidence, or is this just a personal observation?
> 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
Haven't Google, MS, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, everyone demonstrated that this is the goal of what they're doing? It's not culturally unique.
> Urban Landscape
This has some research to back it up - Nisbett, Masuda, Shah, others
Other claims also read as casual inductive observations that don't hold up to much scrutiny. There probably are very interesting reasons why web design appears to be so culturally influenced, but this article doesn't really elucidate much.
Ok, there's some truth to this article, I'm not going to say the author is all wrong, but look at Amazon.com's home page and imagine you couldn't read English.
It would look really jumbled, incoherent, and poorly architected. Given that you can speak English, it's relatively easy to digest the nav, suggested books, ads, etc.
My guess is that there are cultural expectations driving their design choices (particularly in color scheme). But the biggest difference is probably the fact that their type appears impossibly complicated. Nothing more.
I guess the cultural aspect is a big reason here. Everyone who has ever watched japanese television or has seen the nightlife of major japanese cities will be overwhelmed by the amound of screaming, blinking lights and information, it's quite different from the western point of view.. :)
I agree. The design may seem unusual from a Westerner's point of view but from a Japanese prospective, this may fit the bill as a clean, simple design. The same can be said in reverse.
Semi-related story. I was doing a fan site for Final Fantasy XIV (mmo from Square Enix). It's interesting to see how things have to behave differently when a tech company has to deal with Japanese and English.
For tweets from their marketing department, they would write a tweet in Japanese first which would fit into a single tweet, but would spill over between 3 tweets when translated to English.
Within the FFXIV game, they had a chat box (like chat in many MMOs). The input field for typing in text only allowed 80 or so characters. This was fine for Japanese, but for English it was extremely limited. They fixed it soon after release, but it was something the dev team didn't realize as they were all Japanese.
There was a blog post from James Fallows last year[1] which contained a English translation of a single Chinese tweet. 140 Chinese characters transformed into 115 English words with 676 characters.
In the first picture I saw border navigation panels and a main center content area. Why is that "too many columns"? 1998 was a good year, web pages contained more information, not just text boxes super sized freakishly, low content, just large massive items on screens which have shrunk vertically the past several years which is far more of a conundrum to me. Making use of columns seems to make more sense now than it did in 1998. If anything, the Japanese are ahead of the curve. If screen sizes start growing vertically again then I could see your point.
The Japonic devotion to craftmanship does not typically extend into the virtual world. The culture certainly places an emphasis on physical goods.
I disagree in general with his statement, but Nobel Prize winner in physics Hideki Yukawa said that "The Japanese mentality is, in most cases, unfit for abstract thinking, and takes interest merely in tangible things".
I feel like the author wrote this article with a bias that Western websites are better and more aesthetically pleasing because it's simpler.
But those are all subjective matters and Asian users probably prefer what they have.
I come from a Korean background and I visit many different Korean and American websites daily, including the ones mentioned in the article.
While some of the reasons given may seem plausible, non of them were actually convincing.
There isn't really a solid reason why Asian websites look like that.
That's just how it was and users are familiar with it.
Some people like Hacker News because it's simple, while some people don't like it because it's too simple.
There's no better or worse, it's just a preference.
Also, those patterns are not unique to Asian websites.
If you go to cnn.com or msn.com, they're not that different either.
I'm surprised this article got so many upvotes. It's a lot of anecdotal evidence, and even the anecdotes and websites they pointed out don't support the point that much.
http://youtube.com (view in incognito if you are signed into an account http://nicovideo.jp are very similarly information-dense. I'd say Youtube's layout is even more jumbled with all the different column widths as you go down the page.
- http://www.ameba.jp/ - Very common splash page style front page, and inside is a very busy social-network-like page, but not really that much different from Facebook, except the ads are a bit more tastefully done.
Do these sites really look that different to you? If your answer is yes, I'm going to guess that you probably don't read Japanese, and that it being an unfamiliar jumble of characters is what makes it look weird/different/intimidating. Look past that, though, and you'll see that the similar sites ended up at a similar conclusion, even if aren't mirror images.
Re: Yahoo!, I guess you must be in the A group and I must be in the B group, because on my browser they look very different.
About a year ago, yahoo.com and yahoo.co.jp looked rather different. Yahoo! Japan's portal was astonishingly cluttered. Then it seems that Yahoo! HQ cracked the whip and ordered everyone to get in line, so the Japanese site became more like the US one. Still pretty messy, but nowhere near the sensory overload levels it reached before.
Now, it looks like Yahoo! have cleaned up their site more, and turned it more into more of a "What's hot!" portal. But, on my browser, Yahoo! Japan hasn't changed yet.
Of course, the article is cherry-picking a bit, but I don't think it's being unfair. Popular Japanese sites, including big e-shops, are garish and cluttered to a degree that would be unacceptable in the West.
Even though there may be a cultural difference, it's not enough. Look at Modern Japanese architecture. There are tons of different styles. Some clean and minimal, others maximal and extremely busy.
Japan is a very pluralistic country and there are going to be all kinds of different styles and personalities there in any field you choose.
My feeling is that big companies take a long time to change design. In the US, sites like the new york times, Dell, yahoo, Ebay, Techcrunch, zappos all had, at one point recently, really old-looking or just plain bad websites.
Even amazon is busted. Try searching for something and navigating to the 10th page of your search results. amazon is a wasteland in terms of usability and design.
There's actually some truth to this that is missing in the article. I had lived in China for awhile and it was so incredibly difficult to navigate Chinese websites. I'm using China as an example because the web designs are similar.
There was some study done awhile ago within China that I can't find the link to that compared the designs of a complicated site like sina.com.cn with text and images all over the place and compared it with a much simpler design that practiced white space and minimalism. It showed that the Chinese actually preferred complicated designs over simple designs. Having lived in China, this makes sense to me because of the culture. Simplicity and white space is not very well practiced. The "East Meets West" graphic by Yang Liu is probably a good example of some of the cultural differences.
I had not heard of the East Meets West art by Yang Liu. Looked it up and found it very interest...if not spot on. Some made me quite sad about Western culture, such as grandpa walking the dog instead of his grandchild. Or the one on "self".
"Different" is a very diplomatic way of saying it. Probably better to just call it what it is: wrong. The link seems to be dead so I haven't even read the article but I do have some personal experience in the matter.
While there are a bunch of reasons for why it is the way it is, I think a big part of it is the goddamned Keitai. For a lot of Japanese, the only way they ever accessed the web was via their mobile phone. Until smartphones, this meant a very very dumbed down experience. Sadly, even now that smartphones are prevalent, there's still an attitude of "Let's wait and see if this smartphone fad keeps up for a while..."
Most of this simply has to do with lack of disruption. Almost all sites tend to add clutter over time because new things need to be added and some stakeholders don't want old things removed. Sometimes the only way to get clean new design is to start over. My guess is that competition has been less fierce and/or has been won (rigged?) by incumbents more often than it has been in the US, leading to slower iteration and acceptance of less-than-ideal design by consumers.
Enterprise versus consumer apps is the same story - lack of disruption and consumer choice leads to decisions that make sense only to the middlemen.
[+] [-] normalhuman|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonnathanson|12 years ago|reply
Also: the Golden Gate needs a better agent. Given how many times that bridge has appeared in photo backdrops, it should be rich enough by now to stretch further into Marin.
[+] [-] incision|12 years ago|reply
The author is conflating two things which don't necessarily have any bearing on each other - equating fickle trends in design to mastery.
Flat icons, low-contrast fonts, parallax scrolls or whatever else are not necessarily an evolution in, much less mastery of web design.
[+] [-] joyeuse6701|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spader725|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cclogg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msutherl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verisimilidude|12 years ago|reply
Language Barrier - The web and most of the programming languages which drive it were designed by English speakers or western corporations and hence the majority of documentation and educational resources are also in English. Although much gets translated this still causes a delay in new technologies and trends being adopted.
1. Many of the Japanese coders I've met have put in the effort to learn English. They might not be able to carry fluent geopolitical conversations, but they do tend to have enough chops to read API docs and skim code. Most of the Japanese professionals I've met, in any trade, are ultra professional, and will do whatever it takes to stay on top of their craft, including learning English if needed.
2. It's easy to forget that some of these programming languages, notably Ruby, are actually from Japan. As recently as a few years ago, some of my favorite resources for Ruby were in Japanese, out in front of English.
3. Go to a Japanese bookstore and check out the section for programmers. More recent web languages/tech, like node.js, are not well represented. But then look to the next shelf and you'll see something like Unity stacked to the ceiling. It could be that Japanese coders would rather work on different kinds of projects, spend their time learning new tech in those domains instead of the web, and only see the web as a means to an end. I wouldn't consider this a "language barrier", but rather a difference in priorities.
[+] [-] pflats|12 years ago|reply
I put a longer response addressing this point in a different thread, but you're interacting with the cohort that has already chosen to be a computer programmer. It's a biased sample group. I would expect people with no interest in learning English would be disinclined to even enter programming.
(This is still tertiary to actual cultural preferences in web design, mind you.)
[+] [-] fauigerzigerk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Someone|12 years ago|reply
If they have to put in an effort, there _is_ a barrier. Compare that with parts of Europe, where the first words kids learn to read are "OK", "Cancel", "Yes", "No", and "Level". And that's only a slight exaggeration. That's a barrier, too, but a lower one.
[+] [-] helipad|12 years ago|reply
In Germany, for example, it's pretty easy to find major websites which are fixed-width, left aligned and looking dated. There's no real geographic or historical reason for how it is, other than the fact that their neighbours have a similar style.
In a similar vein, many startups have similar designs. Even on the Internet, where you can connect with anyone in the world, there's a lot of tending towards those who are closest to you.
[+] [-] jjoonathan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darklajid|12 years ago|reply
If I look at these sites (picked because I have seen them in use, because I know they're 'important'), I'm having trouble understanding the design decisions as well
http://www.ynet.co.il/
http://hot.co.il/
So .. isn't this just these sites catering to their local culture? Who cares about people from overseas shaking their head?
[+] [-] erje|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leokun|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanI-S|12 years ago|reply
I'm British, living in the US, and I've always felt this way about America. I recently heard from an American friend that he felt exactly the same when visiting Britain.
Not sure what to make of it, but it's interesting!
[+] [-] pyre|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsemrau|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hsitz|12 years ago|reply
The "same", meaning he felt like Britain was stuck in 1980's version of the future? Or the past? Strange, my experience and I think the usual experience of Americans visiting GB/Europe is of feeling like you've timewarped into the past. How far depends on where you visit. Paris/London may feel twenty years back, other places fifty or a hundred.
[+] [-] Pitarou|12 years ago|reply
- Compared to English, Japanese text can cram more information into an easily-skimmable space, but typing is slower, so cluttered, link-rich interfaces have an advantage. This may well explain why Yahoo! Japan's portal is so much more popular than Google's.
- I can well imagine that, in the minds of the staid gerontocrats who maintain an iron grip on Japanese corporate life, a website is merely a modern version of those "me! me! me!" brochures that get shoved in my mailbox every day. So it's natural that they would expect it to look like one.
- Japanese culture is not nearly as minimalist as its made out to be in the West. Minimalism has its place, of course, but in commercial spaces its all about competing for attention, to the point of sensory overload.
[+] [-] yiransheng|12 years ago|reply
I second this theory. A similar version of this happened in China too. A few years back, when Baidu was still copying Google's minimal design pixel by pixel, they suddenly discovered that it was losing traffic to a random site with only one static html page setup: hao123, which also fit into the 'cluttered, link-rich' interface category. Baidu ended up acquiring hao123, spending close to a million dollars on a few lines of html. Note that Chinese language bears quite some similarities to Japanese, they are both character based and typically a hassle to type in large chunks.
[+] [-] ics|12 years ago|reply
http://books.google.com/books?id=BdrgETRVl74C&pg=PA99&lpg=PA...
[+] [-] minikomi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pitarou|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VLM|12 years ago|reply
Design where correctness is defined as optimizing some metric goal, like designing an electronic circuit for maximum performance at a fixed price, or the strongest bridge pylon for a fixed cost or perhaps for a fixed concrete volume.
vs
Design where correctness is defined as a large group of people trying to imitate each other at an optimum distance as close as possible without introducing legal difficulties with accusations of direct copying and not failing at user interaction much worse than anyone else.
Web design and most software UI is obviously almost entirely in the latter category.
A huge source of disaster and trouble is people using language and attitudes from one category in the other category.
I'm not sure what to google / wikipedia for... this must be well trodden ground after a couple millenia of ladies high fashion clothing design, for example.
[+] [-] CognitiveLens|12 years ago|reply
> Logographic-based languages... actually allow Japanese speakers to become comfortable with processing a lot of information in short period of time / space
not true - article with references: http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/21/which-reads-faster-chine...
> Japanese doesn’t have italics or capital letters which limits the opportunities for adding visual punch that you get with latin alphabets
Italics and capital letters have little or nothing to do with how 'Western' web layouts are generally created, and are far from the only way to create emphasis or hierarchy in text.
> Language Barrier... Although much gets translated this still causes a delay in new technologies and trends being adopted
Is the claim that the Japanese are technologically behind the rest of the world? Why would web development/design be different than almost every other technical industry? This sounds much more like surface intuition than considered insight
> Risk Avoidance
This might help explain why Japanese websites look similar to each other, but not why they look different from 'Western' websites. You could make a similar claim about big sites like Microsoft and Yahoo that have copied the look an feel of Google, or the mass of slightly-modified Bootstrap-based 'Western' sites. Risk avoidance/copying is universal - it does not explain the difference between Japanese and non-Japanese websites.
> Consumer Behaviour - People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision
Evidence, or is this just a personal observation?
> 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
Haven't Google, MS, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, everyone demonstrated that this is the goal of what they're doing? It's not culturally unique.
> Urban Landscape
This has some research to back it up - Nisbett, Masuda, Shah, others
Other claims also read as casual inductive observations that don't hold up to much scrutiny. There probably are very interesting reasons why web design appears to be so culturally influenced, but this article doesn't really elucidate much.
/end rant
[+] [-] iambateman|12 years ago|reply
http://cl.ly/image/2i0r0G091U0P
It would look really jumbled, incoherent, and poorly architected. Given that you can speak English, it's relatively easy to digest the nav, suggested books, ads, etc.
My guess is that there are cultural expectations driving their design choices (particularly in color scheme). But the biggest difference is probably the fact that their type appears impossibly complicated. Nothing more.
[+] [-] buster|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antonius|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ics|12 years ago|reply
http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_...
[+] [-] kyrra|12 years ago|reply
For tweets from their marketing department, they would write a tweet in Japanese first which would fit into a single tweet, but would spill over between 3 tweets when translated to English.
Within the FFXIV game, they had a chat box (like chat in many MMOs). The input field for typing in text only allowed 80 or so characters. This was fine for Japanese, but for English it was extremely limited. They fixed it soon after release, but it was something the dev team didn't realize as they were all Japanese.
[+] [-] hudibras|12 years ago|reply
[1]http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/chi...
[+] [-] jebblue|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doctorstupid|12 years ago|reply
I disagree in general with his statement, but Nobel Prize winner in physics Hideki Yukawa said that "The Japanese mentality is, in most cases, unfit for abstract thinking, and takes interest merely in tangible things".
[+] [-] sanskritabelt|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrs99|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterjlee|12 years ago|reply
Also, those patterns are not unique to Asian websites. If you go to cnn.com or msn.com, they're not that different either.
[+] [-] ericdykstra|12 years ago|reply
http://yahoo.com and http://yahoo.co.jp both have similar, tight aesthetic with a lot going on.
http://youtube.com (view in incognito if you are signed into an account http://nicovideo.jp are very similarly information-dense. I'd say Youtube's layout is even more jumbled with all the different column widths as you go down the page.
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/ and http://newyorktimes.com are both very information-dense, with a lot of text on the page.
And these are the cherry-picked examples that this very article chose.
Here are some other sites that are among the most popular in Japan:
- http://naver.jp - Clean, Google-like simplicity
- http://www.ameba.jp/ - Very common splash page style front page, and inside is a very busy social-network-like page, but not really that much different from Facebook, except the ads are a bit more tastefully done.
- http://www.nifty.com/ - Yahoo-like portal
Do these sites really look that different to you? If your answer is yes, I'm going to guess that you probably don't read Japanese, and that it being an unfamiliar jumble of characters is what makes it look weird/different/intimidating. Look past that, though, and you'll see that the similar sites ended up at a similar conclusion, even if aren't mirror images.
[+] [-] Pitarou|12 years ago|reply
About a year ago, yahoo.com and yahoo.co.jp looked rather different. Yahoo! Japan's portal was astonishingly cluttered. Then it seems that Yahoo! HQ cracked the whip and ordered everyone to get in line, so the Japanese site became more like the US one. Still pretty messy, but nowhere near the sensory overload levels it reached before.
Now, it looks like Yahoo! have cleaned up their site more, and turned it more into more of a "What's hot!" portal. But, on my browser, Yahoo! Japan hasn't changed yet.
Of course, the article is cherry-picking a bit, but I don't think it's being unfair. Popular Japanese sites, including big e-shops, are garish and cluttered to a degree that would be unacceptable in the West.
[+] [-] jrs99|12 years ago|reply
Japan is a very pluralistic country and there are going to be all kinds of different styles and personalities there in any field you choose.
My feeling is that big companies take a long time to change design. In the US, sites like the new york times, Dell, yahoo, Ebay, Techcrunch, zappos all had, at one point recently, really old-looking or just plain bad websites.
Even amazon is busted. Try searching for something and navigating to the 10th page of your search results. amazon is a wasteland in terms of usability and design.
[+] [-] MichaelTieso|12 years ago|reply
There was some study done awhile ago within China that I can't find the link to that compared the designs of a complicated site like sina.com.cn with text and images all over the place and compared it with a much simpler design that practiced white space and minimalism. It showed that the Chinese actually preferred complicated designs over simple designs. Having lived in China, this makes sense to me because of the culture. Simplicity and white space is not very well practiced. The "East Meets West" graphic by Yang Liu is probably a good example of some of the cultural differences.
[+] [-] thorin_2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] okonomiyaki3000|12 years ago|reply
While there are a bunch of reasons for why it is the way it is, I think a big part of it is the goddamned Keitai. For a lot of Japanese, the only way they ever accessed the web was via their mobile phone. Until smartphones, this meant a very very dumbed down experience. Sadly, even now that smartphones are prevalent, there's still an attitude of "Let's wait and see if this smartphone fad keeps up for a while..."
[+] [-] candybar|12 years ago|reply
Enterprise versus consumer apps is the same story - lack of disruption and consumer choice leads to decisions that make sense only to the middlemen.