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.'"

Comments

Do not RTFA, the summary is TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing to see here, a blurb from a blog, kdawson strikes again

Re:Do not RTFA, the summary is TFA

[noidentity]

Do not RTFA, the summary is TFA

What, you mean I unknowingly read the article itself? Great, and I was about to break my previous record of going the longest without reading TFA.

Re:Do not RTFA, the summary is TFA

[Yaa 101]

Because IKEA is swedish?

Ever been to Tokyo?

[gregrah]

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.

Re:Ever been to Tokyo?

[gullevek]

The longer you stay here, the more you ignore it, or your brain makes you ignore it.

When I open those webpages, I just see a normal web page. I am way too used to over cluttered web here, that my brain automatically filters what I need. I probably feel very lost on a simple designed western web page. Like, where is all the content?

Re:Ever been to Tokyo?

[kumanopuusan]

Ever been to Tokyo?

Yes, I lived there for a number of years, including a few brief periods during which my projects included web applications.
There are some places in the city (for instance near Shinjuku Station) that are covered with lights, flashing signs and colorful buildings (even the occasional giant motorized crab, if you look carefully).
However, there are even more places in Tokyo that are always quiet. You don't even need to leave the Yamanote Line. Take a walk between Ikebukuro Station and Sugamo Station sometime.
It's no surprise that you've only seen busy streets if you haven't gone far from the big stations.

To get back on topic, the idea that Japanese web sites are on the whole somehow over-complicated is a bit bizarre. If anything, the key difference between web design in Japan and web design in America, is what seems to be a lag of several years. Technologies that seemed rather commonplace in America such as Ajax, or even widely accepted best practices like CSS-based layout were fairly rare in my experience.
I don't have time to find good examples at the moment, but it's anything but difficult to find a Japanese web site that looks like it came straight out of 1995.

Re:Ever been to Tokyo?

[gregrah]

My point wasn't that there are no quiet places in Tokyo, but rather that the advertising is louder there. This is true not just for Tokyo, in my opinion, but all across Japan.

Some examples:

• Video billboards with loud audio components outside at train stations even in relatively small cities
• Every supermarket plays its own catchy theme song on infinite loop
• IRASSHAIMASE!
• Pretty girls in bright yellow company-themed overcoats handing out free tissues everywhere you go
• Pachinko (and everything about it)
• Nudie magazines displayed in the window of every neighborhood 7/11
• Cars with loudspeakers campaigning for local politicians
• Vending machines with embedded audio and video that make fun noises when you insert coins

And it's not just confined to advertising. Everywhere you go you are subjected to escalators that beep when you approach the end, traffic lights that play Japanese folk music when you cross the street, trains with their own theme songs that play at every stop, garbage trucks with their own theme songs. Japan is a very stimulating place to be.

And I think that as a result, Japanese people have a higher threshold for stimulus than other cultures in less densely populated countries. What I may find loud or tasteless because it overloads my senses, Tokyo residents seem to have no trouble processing. What I find to be tasteful (Facebook, if you can call it tasteful), a Japanese person would find very boring (compared to Mixi, which is MUCH more colorful and packed to the brim with emoticons).

Re:Ever been to Tokyo?

[wisty]

Another explanation - Kanji is much denser than English, but attention thresholds are similar, so they need smaller boxes to deliver bite-sized messages to the readers. Smaller boxes means more boxes, which means more clutter.

A quick search (site:.cn, site:.jp, site:.vn, site.kr, site.kh, site:.th) suggests Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese sites are sparser than sites with Kanji or Hanzi.

Re:Ever been to Tokyo?

[BetterSense]

Japanese has other characters but Japanese people can get the gist of a story in a Chinese newspaper just from the characters.

As an English speaker I can get the gist of a story in a French newspaper, and I've never studied French. Must be because of the magical properties of the Roman alphabet (which came from pictures of things too, if you go back to Sumerian and squint real hard).

If Japanese and Chinese can understand their language by the kanji, then what the fuck do the Chinese do when confronted with a complex Japanese word that consists of a Kanji followed by kana that NEGATE the root contained in the kanji? A Japanese sentence meaning "whatever you do don't press the button!" becomes <hand><press><button> when a Chinese reads it.

<i>They are pictures - for example the Kanji for person is a stylised stick figure. </i>

They always pick a few kanji out and say "See! it's pictures! The radicals for 'woman' and 'child' make the character for 'safe'! (which is a laughable stretch anyway). That's cute, but if you ever looked past the first page of your basic kanji book you would realize the situation is more like "you take the radical for 'lemon' and you place it next to the radical for 'burlap' and you get the character for 'carburetor'".

The only people who think kanji form some kind of logical system are people who have never studied Japanese. The Japanese writing system is one of those monolithic, looming monstrosities of inefficiency and folly that make you question how it could ever have evolved, much like certain pieces of Microsoft code. Westerners are forgiven in looking at Japanese writing (and kanji overall) and trying to project some kind of reason why it is, and what it does, and how it must have some kind of superior qualities somewhere, but no, there aren't any.

Japanese is a language with a perfectly phonemic alphabet, something almost no other language can boast of. No linguistic theory can explain why they don't use an existing, nearly perfect syllabary they already have, and everyone already knows. After learning to read 100 or so simple glyphs, Japanese children can immediately write and transcribe any word they know or have heard. Machines can easily translate between speech and text with a 1:1 lookup table. But they don't use this immensely efficient, perfectly phonemic syllabary, for no reason whatsoever except masochism. How a language with so few, simple sounds evolved a writing system that uses thousands of difficult to draw and store characters to encode them, while at the same time already having a simple and efficient syllabary for doing the same thing, is surely one of the great mysteries of linguistics.

Not my experience

[JohnFluxx]

> 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.

Re:Not my experience

[purpledinoz]

I forgot to mention though, the Japanese toilets are awesome. At first, the water spraying in your ass is really strange, but it cleans much better than wiping.

Re:Not my experience

[binkzz]

Did you figure out how to use the three shells?

I'm still stuck on that one.

Looks less cluttered translated

[SpazmodeusG]

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/

Too much?

[clemdoc]

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.

Simplicity != Simplification

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I cant read your crazy moon language!

[Kenja]

He's right! Those sites are full of meaningless glyphs and contain almost no words!

That's nothing

[2Bits]

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.

• Project decisions, down to the smallest thing, such icons and fonts, are made by the big cheese.
• No one really dare to make decision. As any decision would be turned down by the big cheese.
• The big cheese has to make every decision, otherwise, he would not be able to show his power.
• If he does not turn down other people's decision, the big cheese thinks he loses face.
• The big cheese always want to get the most out of the project, and pay as little as possible
• The more he gets from the project, the more it shows his achievement.
• The big cheese is not the final user of the system or the web site. He would look at it at most for 5 minutes. Therefore, as long as it looks animated, seems to have a lot of functions and information, it'll be good. How it affects the end users is not his problem.
• The big cheese is the one who signs the check. Vendors just play along.
• The busy UI becomes a norm.
• For new projects, the big cheese will look at your proposed simple UI, and say: "I want that one", pointing you to a busy UI example.

And everything turns into a vicious cycle that feeds onto itself. There's simply no way to explain to the customers.

Hebrew vs Dutch

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.