I started my first tech startup in Japan in 1998 and have built several since them. For the last 20 years there has been a steady stream of articles on how Japanese web design is "broken", or "behind", or "cluttered". There is also a steady steam of UI experts arriving from the US telling Japanese companies they need to modernize their look and feel. The thing is, e-commerce sites like Rakuten are already heavily A/B…
For that matter Amazon and eBay are both pretty goddamn cluttered to. As long as you're comparing e-commerce sites there isn't that much difference.
Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
141–150 of 213 posts
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
For that matter Amazon and eBay are both pretty goddamn cluttered to. As long as you're comparing e-commerce sites there isn't that much difference.
Rakuten is special https://cdn-ak.f.st-hatena.com/images/fotolife/o/orangeitems... https://d2l930y2yx77uc.cloudfront.net/production/uploads/ima... https://www.naenote.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/45b33593e...
That's all created by the seller, not by Rakuten though. You can do the same on Amazon (at least in Japan, idk about other Amazon)
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#143Big fan of the Muji website actually
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#144This misses that some pre-internet content looked different in Asia as well. You can see the high column count and small adverts with fancy text graphics on things like newspapers.
What's optimum has a lot to do with what people are already used to. No newspaper reader is going to be confused by a news website with the same layout as the print edition.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#145Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Seeing "them" as "behind" is a bad way to think about it and prevents true understanding. So I guess still using Fax Machines to do business in 2020 is not "behind", it's just "different" right? Let's call a cat a cat when we see one.
Throughout the world it is often the case that early adopters of a technology build so much infrastructure around it that their cost of switching becomes much higher. Another case in point: The US just can't move away from credit cards and slow freight trains and cars, all due to infrastructure issues, while countries that have been historically behind have been able to jump ahead to mobile payments and high speed ra…
Arguably, freight trains in North America are more advanced than Europe. They’ve had automatic couplers for a long time, they have a huge loading gauge allowing double stack freight, they have trains that can be miles long (compared to Europe which is working on a sub-network allowing 700m).
The big difference is really the infrastructure and the ownership structure. Since the infrastructure is private and being competed on, it’s not shared across operators. It’s not a public utility and consequently in a sort of optimal state of minimal spending.
Anyway, the story is much more complicated than „early adopters“.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#147I started my first tech startup in Japan in 1998 and have built several since them. For the last 20 years there has been a steady stream of articles on how Japanese web design is "broken", or "behind", or "cluttered". There is also a steady steam of UI experts arriving from the US telling Japanese companies they need to modernize their look and feel. The thing is, e-commerce sites like Rakuten are already heavily A/B…
If you rely too much on A/B testing it is easy though to get stuck in a local minimum defined by users' expectations... Or to build a site that generates a lot of revenue but that's not optimal for users, and when a competitor breaks out of the local minimum by changing the paradigm, all the users go there.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#148I started my first tech startup in Japan in 1998 and have built several since them. For the last 20 years there has been a steady stream of articles on how Japanese web design is "broken", or "behind", or "cluttered". There is also a steady steam of UI experts arriving from the US telling Japanese companies they need to modernize their look and feel. The thing is, e-commerce sites like Rakuten are already heavily A/B…
I don’t understand the aversion to information density that designers have. In my experience, old school server-rendered sites tended to be jam packed with more information and richer tooling than most of the SPA-type sites you interact with these days. They might be “ugly” from some bauhaus art school designer’s standard but I’d way rather use an old school but feature rich interface like eBay than the sleek-looking…
My guess is that tech nerds generally have way higher than normal tolerance for information density. For example, people always balk when I have quick looks at unpretty JSON to see if it kinds looks like it should, often even other devs. My impresssion is that for a lot of "normies" high information density equals unparseable unless they are already familiar with the information structure.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#149I started my first tech startup in Japan in 1998 and have built several since them. For the last 20 years there has been a steady stream of articles on how Japanese web design is "broken", or "behind", or "cluttered". There is also a steady steam of UI experts arriving from the US telling Japanese companies they need to modernize their look and feel. The thing is, e-commerce sites like Rakuten are already heavily A/B…
For that matter Amazon and eBay are both pretty goddamn cluttered to. As long as you're comparing e-commerce sites there isn't that much difference.
Honestly, I think Amazon and eBay look terrible.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#150In my experience Rakuten represents a more extreme example and isn't representative of "modern" Japanese UI/UX as a whole.
Companies started in the last 10 years are abandoning what we might deem as a cluttered aesthetic and moving towards something which wouldn't look out of place in the west. In fact my current company ended up going with the same UI when they launched in the US with minimal modifications.