Why Japanese web design is so different (2013) • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#151

Post by lucasverra » Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 9:08 AM UTC

captainmuon wrote: post #147

timoth3y wrote: post #100

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…

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.

Shouldn't it be a local maximum ?

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#152

Post by astrobe_ » Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 9:22 AM UTC

antepodius wrote: post #108

krapp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

To filter out idiots and the lazy. 'Normies'.

Snobbism aside, I would gladly give up on some "usability" for a passive web (basically raw HTML or even Gopher or Gemini) and a separate active web (basically a proper virtual machine perhaps like Squeak/Pharo).

But as soon as you cut off ways to make the Web more "engaging", it makes it far less interesting for the ads market, so less contents. Even individual content producers (e.g. Youtubers, Twitchers) look for monetization these days.

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#153

Post by bluepizza » Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 9:22 AM UTC

brigandish wrote: post #132

bluepizza wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stating the differences, especially the poor quality of the websites is normal. There’s a bunch of terrible web developers here, and they get paid to make terrible websites. The racism starts whenever a foreigner starts explaining Japanese culture, and they will usually incorporate some old fashioned Japanese nationalism. Japanese people are just people. There is nothing inherent to our culture, genetics, or soil tha…

> There is nothing inherent to our culture The article states some reasons under Cultural Differences that are inherent (though not unique as the Update 1 note shows) to Japanese culture that would explain the proliferation of bad web design. Maybe they're wrong but they at least seem reasonable . Are we going to argue that Japanese culture generally is going to have no effect on work style and commerce on the web, w…

> we're also to believe it's just chance that led to 2 out of 71 (I checked) of the websites I looked at being adequate?

We all know it’s ugly. Nobody looks at those designs with approval and admiration.

> I'm not sure about the old fashioned Japanese nationalism, but have you considered the possibility that they've experienced a modern type of Japanese nationalism and it's going to be incorporated into their assessment of life in Japan?

There is no modern type. This is a country run by old men. They keep repeating their Japanese people propaganda, but you don’t have to believe it. In that sense, when I first arrived in Hawaii to study, my foster family felt very strongly about America being the best in everything, and they made sure I heard it all, but in the end, I never really believed what they said. It sounded too similar to what my family said back home.

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#154

Post by EmilioMartinez » Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 9:30 AM UTC

lucasverra wrote: post #151

captainmuon wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Shouldn't it be a local maximum ?

It's just as often that one optimizes for minima than for maxima (eg. latency or revenue). When there isn't a natural orden it's a coin flip (eg compounding latency and revenue in a single function). And anyways both are functionally equivalent by means of order invertion.

Personally, when speaking in abstract I stick to saying "local extremum" just to avoid this nagging question.

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#155

Post by brabel » Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 9:37 AM UTC

bourgoin wrote: post #66

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #48

I am pretty sure you could write the same article with the roles reversed. That in itself does of course not take away from the article, but I am catching some negative undertones how Japan is "behind" or "unable to change" because of their society. I guess you could even open the bottomless barell of a discussion about racism, but my point is just this: Seeing "them" as "behind" is a bad way to think about it and pr…

It's funny to me that one could look at these webpages and think they're "behind": https://www.yomiuri.co.jp https://okwave.jp They load pretty much instantaneously, run few scripts, have no swooshing animations or scroll behavior overriding, elements don't jumble around and rearrange themselves as the page is loading... they are basically just plain text and hyperlinks on a plain background. From my perspective they…

These websites look excellent... I think I will re-style my website in the same style.

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#156

Post by bluepizza » Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 9:43 AM UTC

huangc10 wrote: post #22

Don't want to light a fire here but I'd like to note that there is inherently something about Japanese culture (or Asian culture for that matter) that inhibits software development growth. Everything in Asia screams of respect for elders. In this case, the elders are the old design patterns and the older programming languages. It's the thought of why do something when it's not broken? As we move forward globally, we…

Some of the biggest technology companies in the planet are Chinese or South Korean.

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#157

Post by brabel » Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 9:47 AM UTC

akhilcacharya wrote: post #79

ekianjo wrote: post #69

Earlier 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.

I think for 40-something years Japan was held as a futuristic, technologically advanced country in America even after Japan's stagnation and the American consumer tech renaissance of the last 20 years. It's clear to me that people can't accept that America is the most technologically advanced nation on Earth, and has been.

Have you been to Eastern Asia recently? I've just recently travelled from the US to Singapore and I can say the USA is absolutely behind in public infrastructure.

Try a crazy modern place like Hong Kong or Shaghai (where I went several years ago, but already had the impression these places are ultramodern compared to US/Europe) and you'll quickly understand what you're saying is incredibly wrong.

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#158

Post by chrismorgan » Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 9:48 AM UTC

_5659 wrote: post #2

I had to disable Adblock Plus for some reason to get the entire page to load. Ditto on the point where Japan is stuck in the 1980s future. Everything's optimized for tiny cellphone screens optimized for text. If I recall correctly iPhone adoption was slow, and many people lacked a desktop to provide updates. I still find wifi to be incredibly scarce in Tokyo. If people want a desktop, they go to a cafe. If they want…

Fanboy’s Annoyance list contains a filter ##.headersocial, which is triggered by the headersocial class on the body element, and so it nukes the whole page. I’ve reported this upstream; I believe changing it to ##:not(body).headersocial should fix this site, or maybe they’ll make an exception for this domain instead.

Edit: that was quick! Fixed in https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/4bf4c04186f4a7d9....

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#159

Post by presentation » Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 9:49 AM UTC

grenoire wrote: post #33

Wohlf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you but unfortunately these sites almost always have poor usability too.

Well, it's one single component of the problem, there are many other factors involved in bad UX. Resources wasted on advertising are unequivocally the hardest to justify out of them all.

Isn’t it the easiest to justify? As in, you justify putting ads on your site because you get money for it.

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#160

Post by eloisius » Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 9:56 AM UTC

stefanfisk wrote: post #148

eloisius wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess. I mean, it’s not like I want things to be a big spreadsheet of information or something. A simple example is the semi-recent redesign of Strava. It used to be more of the old school Rails server-generated HTML variety and then they redesigned it to have huge buttons, rounded corners, infiniscrolls, etc. some things are nice like the training calendar, but in the past it was a lot easier for me to load a page of my historic activities to quickly estimate for myself something like “how many rides did I go on between thanksgiving and Christmas?” It was more about the data that I used the site for.

Now I have to enjoy the “experience” that some designer put together which doubtlessly enhanced their engagement. More often than not I’m not looking to “experience” anything. I just want to load a page of data and quickly review it. Over designing things and and hearing PMs drone about “experiences” for everything has made that word chafe for me lol. It’s like they think logging into their website should be like going to Disneyland or something.