Slashdot Mirror
The Puzzle of Japanese Web Design
I'm Not There (1956) writes "Jeffrey Zeldman brings up the interesting issue of the paradox between Japan's strong cultural preference for simplicity in design, contrasted with the complexity of Japanese websites. The post invites you to study several sites, each more crowded than the last. 'It is odd that in Japan, land of world-leading minimalism in the traditional arts and design, Web users and skilled Web design practitioners believe more is more.'"
Nothing to see here, a blurb from a blog, kdawson strikes again
Ever been to Tokyo? If ain't flashing and neon, no one is going to notice it. For a population conditioned to such an environment, it would make sense that LOUD websites draw more customers.
> Japan's strong cultural preference for simplicity in design
What? It's the exact opposite.
This is my only real complaint about Japan. I can't stand the shops here. There are colored flashy signs everywhere, and you can always hear at least a dozen different adverts at the same time.
Likewise every device is ridiculously complex. My fan has 6 buttons and a remote control. Just to blow air! And the toilet has a dozen buttons and two knows to adjust seat and water temperature. Everything is completely overdesigned.
this is a fairly stupid [read:ignorant] article. 1) in japanese, the websites mentioned in the article are relatively simple. 2) japanese like their content information-dense. pick up a japanese newspaper sometime (or a hot pepper guidebook). it's not that the design is cluttered. it's that they are very eco-friendly when it comes to using paper [read: they like to cram a lot together to save space]. it's very anglo-centric to declare their design to be so cluttered, considering these two things.
Google Chrome offered to translate the pages in question.
After translation it looks cleaner. I stopped looking at the characters as a mess of intelligible symbols but instead as words that i understood.
Here's a great example of the effect in reverse.
http://slashdot.jp/
I don't really see much of a difference between the JAL page und delta.com, united.com or lufthansa.de. And the page of the ministry of health isn't looking too crowded either. Neither is the third one, but I couldn't figure out how to switch that one to English (still, ebay.com seems just as stuffed). The japanese versions of the pages look like a crowded mess, but that's rather because I can't deal with the characters. Switch to english and you should be fine.
And it infects real life. Any business district in any Korean city looks Geocities circa 1998.
A preference for simplicity in design does not imply a preference for a simplification in design.
"One should make things as simple as possible; but not simpler."
--Albert Einstein
Simplicity is highly prized wherever the clutter is superfluous or gimmicky. In 'classical' computer science fields such as language and operating system design, this is given the synonym "elegance".
But that is not the same at all as cutting away useful material simply so that you have less material. Even Ubuntu users were wild once Gnome decided that being able to configure sounds for systems events was something that was unnecessary. This was (contrary opinions notwithstanding) an oversimplification.
Japanese website design works differently to western design for a number of reasons. To begin with, the typical font size is somewhere around (the equivalent of) 16pts due to the requirements of distinguishing many and much more complex characters. Up your zoom level by two factors and see how many non-Japanese websites fail to look cluttered.
Also, decent support for native and interoperable characters (and decent support for fine-grained character placement) has historically been poor for Han/Kana scripts, which need it far more than Latin scripts do. Hence why huge chunks of Japanese websites regularly use images of text rather than text. Part of this is admittedly stylistic, but it is still due to the desire to cram different sizes of font into a "block" shape; this is much more common in Japanese due to the fact that ALL characters inherently take the same space and so they are more commonly written into a "grid" than on a "line", logically speaking.
In short, there are many reasons - some technological, some cultural, some stylistic, some inscrutable - for why things are as they are and will remain so for some time to come. But it's not as simple an issue as you might think at first.
Asian websites seem to reflect pictures of downtown areas of major asian cities - Tokyo, Hong Kong, parts of Beijing, Vietnam, etc. Shockingly, their major cities don't look terribly different from western megalopolises like NYC and London. Their colorful ads just happen to have asian character sets, which have a lot more lines and end up looking more busy to the western eye. Have you looked at yahoo.com/ or amazon.com lately? I mean, Yahoo has cleaned up their image some, but it's still very cluttered and messy. I can only imagine what Google News.jp or .cn looks like, or heaven forbid, the japanese translated version of Wunderground.com?? Just add some purple and yellow rounded corner rectangles in the background and it looks like every other stereotypical asian website out there.
Anyways, my point is, websites are driven by advertising. Websites of local languages are going to look similar to the Times Squares and Piccadilly Circuses of the world, in their local languages and alphabets. Certain color combinations might make certain alphabets stand out better. Helveltica (and all the child fonts it's spawned over the years) happens to look really good in Red, White or Blue on a White or dark colored background, which is probably why western advertising all looks the same for the most part. People tend to use more asian color schemes for party invitiations when using Comic Sans, and that font everyone loves to hate, Papyrus, tends to look best Black on white on tan.
moox. for a new generation.
I looked at the three websites linked above, and they didn't really seem that bad to me. The author of the blog doesn't say if he can read Japanese or not, and it should not be assumed that he can for the fact that he wrote the blog entry in the first place. I think that probably makes a difference. Just looking at the language itself makes it seem more complicated than it might be.
Something that I've noticed on various Asian sites over the years is that they seem to be mainly text based, displaying a lot of information right when you go to them. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially for the Asahi Shimbun or it's English page. It's a newspaper, it should have a lot of information displayed right in front. So should the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare (linked above). The New York Times has one of the best newspaper websites around, mainly because it uses very few images and displays a lot of information right on it's front page. Other local newspaper websites I've visited leave little to be desired. I think if the New York Times website were written in Japanese, one might feel the same way as the blog author.
I'm not so sure he's right, looking at the examples he gave. The examples are crowded and small (even the banner ads are smaller than on American web pages, maybe because they tend to have smaller laptops with smaller screens in Japan), but they aren't cluttered. They are simple in the sense that they present just what is needed, and nothing more. I think this matches the Japanese style he is referring to.
Just for comparison, look at the Japanese Ministry of Health and Ontario Ministry of Health web page. They both start out with a similar header, announcing what page you are on and showing the search function, but the Japanese page takes about half as much space. Then on the Japanese side it's just a solid wall of information from top to bottom. I question their color choices, but as someone else mentioned, Japanese like bright colors.
The Ontario web page then has a huge, stock-photo section with a small little section on each one. What a waste of space. I should say, to me it looks fine, but the same information could have been presented in significantly less space, and the photos, while pretty, are nothing more than that.
So I think it's just a matter of Japanese trying to fit the most amount of information into the least amount of space. Or maybe they don't trust stock photography of smiling people, I don't know.
Qxe4
He's right! Those sites are full of meaningless glyphs and contain almost no words!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Yahoo is quite cluttered in any language.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I checked all three examples and I can't find a single word of text. It's all just meaningless pictures!!!one
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
compared to the web sites in China. In China, not just web sites, all UI have terrible "busy" problems, everything has to be jammed onto the same page. Have you seen an application with 233 buttons on the UI? Yes, that's all the functionalities of the system, and I personally counted the buttons.
I've been working in Shanghai for 7 years. Initially, I just couldn't understand why customers wants us (the vendors, system integrators, developers etc) to put so many things on the same. It's simply not good to have menu, or navigation. Everything has to be presented on the same display. And every customer wants flying ads, flashing images and icons, animation, sound, popups, etc, etc.
After so many projects, I finally started to understand, although I hate it, and would not use it personally.
And everything turns into a vicious cycle that feeds onto itself. There's simply no way to explain to the customers.
A dutch program from my youth tried to explain dyslexia by showing street signs in Hebrew, rather then dutch. It looked apparently very confusing. Except to my mother who could read it. The clutter wasn't there for her because she parsed it as readily as dutch.
ANY foreign language will look cluttered because you brain is trying to create meaning out of chaos and failing. If you watch a loading dock you will see chaos. A person who knows the process will see organization.
People who say in this topic that Tokyo is crowded obviously never been to Time Square or for that matter the Kalverstraat. But your brain can parse those signs and classify them as unimportant.
Your brain, being inhabited in tasty meat, is trained to react strongly to things it doesn't expect because it expects them to be a hungry animal on the lookout for said tasty meat. We don't have to notice that tree we have grown up around, but we have to notice the addition of two eyes and a twitchy tail to its branches.
Here is a simple test: Install a japanese language pack in your OS and change the setting so everything is in japanese. Notice how cluttered it all of sudden is? Excactly the same layout, but you suddenly can't find anything.
For that matter, put slashdot through google translate and see how suddenly the site seems filled with random ramblings by sociopaths who live in their mothers basement.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think it has more to do with their habit of using space most efficiently. Land is a scarce resource in Japan and if you look at people's houses in cities or shops you will see things packed into every nook and cranny.