Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#121

Post by Pitarou » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 5:35 AM UTC

ericdykstra wrote: post #119

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://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…

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.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#122

Post by Pitarou » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 5:38 AM UTC

minikomi wrote: post #85

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 Ya…

Thanks for that insightful perspective.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#123

Post by bitwize » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 5:55 AM UTC

Japanese web design tends to be broadly reflective of Japanese product packaging: cram as much textual info as will fit into limited space.

They have a U.S.-sized population and nearly U.S.-sized industrial base running inside a California-sized archipelago. They've gotten good at making the most of space.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#124

Post by ekianjo » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 6:17 AM UTC

rapind wrote: post #94

blah32497 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expand this to include the sciences. I did a 2 month industry internship in Japan a few years ago and I was blown away by the effects of the language barrier. They are incredibly disconnected from the rest of the world. While the rest of the world is publishing their results in English, they are publishing in their own Japanese trade journals. It's kind of ironic, b/c in a less developed country (China), or a…

Well Ruby came out of Japan. So in 1995 some of Japan's coders were programming like it was 2005.

Mouahaha you killed your argument with this example. Matz is not really a typical Japanese. He is a mormont, he's fluent in English, and lived extensively overseas. There's almost no Japanese like him. So let's forget about this case.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#125

Post by fauigerzigerk » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 7:47 AM UTC

andor wrote: post #92

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you give a few examples?

What would be interesting is actual data beyond anecdotal evidence and I think there is some. Just look at the size of various industries in these countries.

Japan and Germany export tons of complex high-tech machinery but not much end-user facing software. And it's not just software, it's also global ad agencies, the film industry or even music. There are of course exceptions like Sony and SAP.

Examples for the reputation of things are a little difficult to come by, because it's a feeling you get when you talk to people. But look at the names of contributors to open source software.

If you see a Russian name, the odds are high that they are working on some of the most challenging engineering parts far away from anything user facing. You'll see them work on garbage collectors (https://plus.google.com/113761107534428240799/posts/LjPnay7h...), web servers (http://sysoev.ru/en/), (http://cesanta.com/), that sort of thing.

Of course you see people from the US do these things too, but the distribution appears to be different.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#126

Post by ANTSANTS » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 7:57 AM UTC

na85 wrote: post #97

ANTSANTS wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=yang+liu+east+meets+west

Hey thanks for the link, and for not being a passive-aggressive prick.

Maybe I was a little rude (not quite as rude as calling someone a "passive-aggressive prick," mind you), but this behavior is annoying. I thought it was one of the "rules of the internet" or something that you make the bare minimum of effort to find something yourself before you bother people about it.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#127

Post by EdiX » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 8:27 AM UTC

cclogg wrote: post #61

normalhuman wrote: post #8

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 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?).

Two words: "One Direction". No one will ever escape the boy-band era.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#128

Post by alipang » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 3:22 PM UTC

estel wrote: post #82

incision wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. 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.

I'm not quite sure it's quite the same as saying that Western designers have "mastered" the web, but my memories of Japanese websites from ten years ago are remarkably similar to how they look today. It seems more relevant that web design in the East hasn't evolved or changed over that period, when western design has.

Yeah, and current trends aside, surely the current design landscape in the Western world has more in common with traditional Japanese art and architecture, than does Japanese web design as it looks today, just as this article suggests.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#129

Post by J_Darnley » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 4:50 PM UTC

From that one screen shot he provides it looks like the reason the Japanese do it differently is because they don't assume their visitors are driven off by masses of text. I wish more websites I use were stuffed full of information (or what I assume is information) like that.

Re: Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

#130

Post by goggles99 » Wed, Nov 13, 2013, 6:34 PM UTC

>Windows XP & IE 6 – although the number of people using ancient Microsoft software is rapidly decreasing there are still a fair number of people using these dinosaurs, especially in corporate environments. Enough said.

Wow, this is like saying their clothes look different from ours because their sowing machines are too old. Their hair styles are different because their scissors have longer blades, their food is different because they use chopsticks - ETC.

Their web design is different because they are different culturally. Their tastes and preferences are stylistically different. just because their gardens are liked in the west, does not mean we like all of their stylistic preferences. This blog post is completely wrong IMO. "Enough said".