Why Japanese Web Design Is So… Different

Very interesting answers to something I’ve thought about for a long time!

Interesting read. I think most of these points can be applied to the Chinese online space. I come across so many sites that have similar styles to the ones you provided. I have also thought about the reason behind it. Thanks for the read.

I responded a similar question while back at Quora:
Questions That Contain Assumptions: Why does the design of Japanese websites tend to differ from those in the US?

This is much too general. While all these tendencies might be there in Japan society, it’s very easy to jump to conclusions.
If you look at real japanese webdesign examples, you can read the article again and find many things are true.
Or, you can just look at the japanese webdesigns and judge them in a more general design context, without predjudices about cultural values.

http://webdesignsample.net/
http://www.web-mihon.com/rank/dlrank.cgi?mode=lastmonthly

You made some really good points and light to this issue in a way that I think the western reader can relate to. I’m going to forward this to my Japanese ex co-workers and hope they can comprehend English enough to muddle through it.

I worked for a company whose CEO worked directly with the CEO of Rakuten, the very first site displayed, and then for Dwango, who runs and operates another site on the list, Niconico. They are both wonderful examples of terrible design that has achieved huge popularity.

While a lot of these points are valid and indeed have a place any argument as to why the Japanese web often sucks, in my experience, there were really only two reasons: Corporations getting too huge and unable to make big changes and the awfully discouraging absolutism of “Your boss/senpai is always right” phenomenon. In Rakuten’s case, the CEO hand-coded the site and now that he doesn’t do a lick of development, he has historically told his employees that it is his baby, that any changes have to go through him.

Dwango’s product Niconico is the same, I know this one a lot more intimately because I worked there, but the big problem with it was that it grew WAY too fast. It just celebrated its 6th product year last summer. And each section has their own “people who take responsibility”, people who make decisions, and people that you have to report to. They added services before they knew they would be used and things they didn’t think would be used, blew up. This made for a terrible character-packed, visually unpleasing top page UI, but they will be the very first to admit that their site looks terrible and it needs a change, (and they have been working on it since early 2012).

That being said, smaller design firms, freelancers, and sites that have come up in the last 3-5 years (instead of 5-15) look excellent. They have learned to read English as a means to design well and study through the same sources we do. Their designs are clean and functional and they adhere to the same concepts of less is more and so on. It’s these damn mega-companies and their cultural hangups that are holding the rest of the country back.

And just a nit-picky thing to finish up, but I don’t get why writers on Japan seem to have to mention ancient aesthetic customs such as the tea ceremony? In discussing modern web design in the USA, people don’t mention pre-colonial architecture, Jonny Appleseed’s orchards, or old victorian plantation buildings, and for good reason, they have little and less to do with how things work on the web right now.

Wow, thank you very much for such a well thought out article!

I’ve debated this at length with my friends in Singapore and Japan with similar points but I wanted to add a couple.

Signalling:
When we were doing comparisons of Amazon and Rakuten with Japanese friends they thought that Amazon looked more expensive whilst Rakuten was going to have bargains because it resembled a bazaar like Don Kihote or a Hyaku Yen Shop (in Australian retail parlance that would be similar to why you expect to pay more at DJs whilst you think you’re paying less at JB Hifi because of the cheap, spartan, noisy feel of the place). The signalling is that by scrimping on VM or site design means the products will also be cheaper.
Whilst as Westerners we look at newspapers and pulp magazines from Asia and think they’re overloaded that’s also signalling. They’re trying to pack as much as possible in just like early western newspapers to signal that they have a lot of content to make it more valuable to read. That’s a similar thing in web-design.
I know someone who tested two different versions of their global travel site translated into Japanese, one in a modern Western style and one with the dense portal styling from 1999. They found Japanese users didn’t know where things were in the former and much preferred the latter. “Where are all the flights?”
I really think that Tmall.com is leading the way in how to do online department stores, especially how they get the marketing teams for their vendors to populate their product pages with better brand experience and marketing than Amazon whilst being cleaner than Rakuten.

Text Entry:
I also found that text entry is harder in an Asian context. If it was 20+ keypresses to type a few characters on an older Ketai it was probably faster to get to a particular link by simply scrolling through the available links than typing something in search and not getting the results you wanted (see next point). The iPhone was an unbelievable improvement when I started using that. The gestural kana grid entry was so much faster! (Yet teaching old dogs new tricks is hard, as seen by many of my older colleagues still typing on Qwerty boards with two fingers.)

More difficult searching
It’s just simple that if you have more characters to encode, searching is going to be slower. Also there’s a lot of times that similar terms were spelt different ways (sometimes by people purposely using the wrong Kanji because it took too long to type) which prior to machine learning becoming widespread meant that your search results weren’t going to be as fruitful. As computation speeds and connection speeds have improved I guess that’s not going to be so much of a problem.

Specific Devices
I’ve also witnessed in Japan that people hang onto dedicated task devices even when they have something else that makes that device redundant, e.g. Dictionaries and Calculators when then have iPhones. They carry around these extra devices rather than use their phone to do it, maybe that’s something to do with a sense of needing to use that thing for what it was created so you’re not neglecting it or not getting your full value out of it. I think there’s got to be something in the way websites are viewed where that’s also the case, as a website must look a particular way because of what it does.

On Flash:
I’d say the heavy use of Flash is due to Asian web fonts being difficult. The lack of support in older browsers, heavy pages and limited css formatting options are just the start. Look at paying more to get Japanese fonts which at the end of the day drives up the price of a site. To get the full family of Axis for a single machine is near on US$4k whilst a similar range of fonts in a western family would run about $800. Webfonts are a similar multiple of what I’m used to for Latin fonts.

Hey David,

One of my designer send me this link, and I found this article very interesting. You pointed out some good points about the design history background in Japan, but as one of Japanese designer, not only Japanese famous sites are outdate/ stuck in the web 2.0 designs. Yahoo USA and ABC news will be a good example. I think there is something UX problems on those information heavy websites.

Best,

Hi!
Thank you for this article, this was very interesting! This responded to a lot of my questions i had in my mind for a long time. We can observe a big cultural differences, and the way the Internet culture hasn’t still evolved in Japan. As i’m Japanese that grew up in Europe, this is really interesting stuff! Thanks!

I think this article is not too objective.

English-speaking world have the same problem!

1 I often look at the new york time, found inside the English is too dense, the reason is that the English need proper spacing separated so that each word can be independent, we will not see the word as a word situation. But Chinese do not have this problem.

2 English have a problem that English is pieced out by a different letter, a word or less a word, the meaning of the word would be different, but the Chinese do not necessarily mean there will be different

3 Length: As English is to spell out the letters to make the English to express the function, you must complete write.
Also because the Chinese side is using the word structure, the Chinese can be ordered.
Such as: movie = 電影, Product = 產品, Purchaser = 購買者

4 English has a drawback that must be written from left to right; But Chinese can from left to right, top to bottom, right to left

Man, oh man… I sure could have used this back in December. I just spent a brutal week in usability testing – following 3 months of design work. Crash and burn. This article nails it on the head!

Really great article,
Had it hiding in my Pocket queue for months, finally got around to reading it today!
Super interesting stuff!

I’m Japanese.
For us, web sites are the information tools like newspapers.
I feel that large pictures are not comfortable, because they make no sense and force me to waste the time.
Do you feel site like the site better?
http://www.comme-des-garcons.com
Comme-des-garcons is Japanese fascion bland. but for us, the pictures make no scence and tell us nothing about this bland. I think most of Japanese feel uncomfort and do not want to visit such site again, because we feel it is waste of time.

Actually, Rakuten executed A/B test many times.
That is, the users of Rakuten chose this design and said “We like this one!”.