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

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?

[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).

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.

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.