One of my guess is that "applization"(I mean a web service becomes more and more like an app) has its role to play in current simple/clean/flat web design trend. A more app-like web service is more likely to require the app visual design. So this could be an interesting perspective to examine the development status of web design in different parts of the world.
Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
21–30 of 135 posts
Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
#22Ok, 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. 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 thei…
I don't think so. Even people who can read both languages seem to notice the difference.
Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
#23There'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.
Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
#24The 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 not true - article with references: http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/21/which-reads-faster-chine... > Japanese doesn’t have italics or capital letters which li…
Katakana can be used for emphasis much like italics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana#Usage
That's true, but it would feel very weird to use katakana as a way of denoting hierarchy.
You can bold, color, and shadow Japanese text just fine though, so I don't really see the author's point.
Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
#25Ok, 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. 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 thei…
Not a good example. Amazon.com is famously a jumbled mess.
Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
#26> "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!
Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
#27Ok, 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. 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 thei…
Not a good example. Amazon.com is famously a jumbled mess.
I think it is a good example. Amazon is a powerhouse in the US and Naver, one of the South Korean sites the author linked to that resembles almost all the other sites he posted, is on similar footing in Korea.
Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
#28Most 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.
Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
#29Semi-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.
Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different
#30There 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…
On the other hand, you might have a look at the state news broadcaster http://ard.de