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The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)

sabrinas.space

61–70 of 124 posts

Re: The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)

#61
I'm an American that has been living in Asia for a years.

I actually hated the web design at first but now I much prefer it and find it difficult to use American apps with the modern tech aesthetic now.

I noticed that I started to get annoyed doing things like filling forms. I feel like American apps tend to reduce complex flows into simpler decisions but requiring more steps. It feels like my brain is wired to want to see as much information at once now.

Re: The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)

#62

I prefer the Japanese style. Information dense, yet clean. It reminds me of the web before Apple-style minimalism took over. To contrast with a superficially similar style, Chinese web stores are also maximalist, but they tend to assault you with popup coupons, confetti effects, and other such things. Japanese style feels very efficient and utilitarian by comparison.

>"It reminds me of the web before Apple-style minimalism took over."

The loss of color and texture is my biggest gripe. So many webpages and user interfaces abandoned the idea of distinguishing components using different colors and just went with making the page as close to bleach white as possible. I suppose an upside of this is that it made dark-mode easier to adopt. That being said, good dark mode support seems relatively recent.

Re: The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)

#63
post #40
post #22

I read this piece when it came out in 2022. Maybe it should be marked with "(2022)". Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745146 I just want to add that in addition to peculiar web design, Japanese websites have a way of assuming architectures or usage patterns where servers need to sleep or do some kind of scheduled job, which is really weird for people used to sites that need to account for a…

Anyone who has attempted to play Final Fantasy XIV beyond the free trial has experienced this. Their subscription management web app is so incredibly bad it takes a significant amount of time and effort just to purchase a subscription. I wonder how much revenue they lose simply from people giving up.

I was bored and tried playing FF14 about a year ago. You need to do the usual download a launcher to download the game, fine. It asks you to log in before it'll download, fine. It crashes ~10% of the way through downloading the game. Not great but you can make it by restarting the launcher and trying again. And again and again, about a dozen times. It does eventually finish though, and I did almost successfully make a character. Except after making my character you have to choose a server instance - and every single instance in the NA server I could find was "full". I don't know if it was actually full or erroring but I gave up at that point.

The buttonology is cryptic. Like you asked tasked enterprise java devs to write frontend in jquery.

At least that's how I remember it. Game might be fun, but I'll never know.

Re: The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)

#64

> While the nation is known abroad for minimalist lifestyles, their websites are oddly maximalist. I’m not aware of this stereotype of Japanese minimalism. I guess there’s Marie Kondo, and some Japanese high-end dining tends towards minimalism. But then there’s manga, anime, kawaii, Nintendo, Sega, Miyazaki, etc., a lot of which is closer to maximalism than minimalism.

Having attended a lot of conferences in Japan, I would have said signage and the like tends towards the amateur and garish. Which isn't inconsistent with what you wrote. I've always found Japan a weird mix of refined/minimalist and kitsch.

Re: The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)

#65
post #22

I read this piece when it came out in 2022. Maybe it should be marked with "(2022)". Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745146 I just want to add that in addition to peculiar web design, Japanese websites have a way of assuming architectures or usage patterns where servers need to sleep or do some kind of scheduled job, which is really weird for people used to sites that need to account for a…

The US Social Security Administration website is available from 6am to 8pm, Monday to Friday (or at least it was that way a few years ago)

The service hours seem a bit wider nowadays [0], but not 24/7.

[0] https://www.ssa.gov/myssa-static/rel_1.0/offHoursPopup.html

Re: The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)

#66
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who has attempted to play Final Fantasy XIV beyond the free trial has experienced this. Their subscription management web app is so incredibly bad it takes a significant amount of time and effort just to purchase a subscription. I wonder how much revenue they lose simply from people giving up.

I was bored and tried playing FF14 about a year ago. You need to do the usual download a launcher to download the game, fine. It asks you to log in before it'll download, fine. It crashes ~10% of the way through downloading the game. Not great but you can make it by restarting the launcher and trying again. And again and again, about a dozen times. It does eventually finish though, and I did almost successfully make…

So you didn’t even get to the final boss, purchasing a sub.

While I played it I always had this dirty feeling imagining what the backend code must look like. Sends chills down my spine.

Re: The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)

#68
I have a little theory that a thing that makes Japanese website feel Japanese is their choice of typeface, which will almost always be something with robust CJK character support. This typeface is preserved when Chrome auto-translates the site.

But fonts with good CJK support have wider Latin letter-forms, even when not in `font-variant-east-asian: 'full-width'` mode. I write about this here: https://maxbo.me/subordinate-latin.html (and cite "the peculiar case of Japanese web design")

Re: The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)

#69

Are westerners entering a period of “minimalism fatigue”? Anecdotally it seems like color and texture are slowly taking hold in designs, especially in works targeting a younger demographic. Example: liquid glass, anything published by Taco Bell, the meme of making sites look like they came from Geocities in 99, etc...

I hope so. I never bought into the minimalism/flat design hype and have lamented its loss ever since. What’s worse is it bled out of the digital world and into the physical. There’s a real lack of color in our modern world, at least over here in the US. Everything is so neutral and boring, all in the name of efficiency.

Minimalism does have its merits though. When decorating my apartment I looked for ways to use color without making whole thing look like confetti poop.

Re: The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)

#70
post #40
post #22

I read this piece when it came out in 2022. Maybe it should be marked with "(2022)". Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745146 I just want to add that in addition to peculiar web design, Japanese websites have a way of assuming architectures or usage patterns where servers need to sleep or do some kind of scheduled job, which is really weird for people used to sites that need to account for a…

Anyone who has attempted to play Final Fantasy XIV beyond the free trial has experienced this. Their subscription management web app is so incredibly bad it takes a significant amount of time and effort just to purchase a subscription. I wonder how much revenue they lose simply from people giving up.

I was wondering why the process was so convoluted. I thought it was because I was doing it from my phone and they just had a poor mobile site. Well, apparently they have a poor desktop site that has poor mobile support!
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