[HN Gopher] How is Japanese web design different?
___________________________________________________________________
How is Japanese web design different?
Author : thejokersthief
Score : 82 points
Date : 2022-11-25 18:09 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sabrinas.space)
(TXT) w3m dump (sabrinas.space)
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| Looking at the websites mentioned in the randomwire article,
| those popular websites are not like this article portrays them to
| be anymore, imho.
| andsoitis wrote:
| What's an example of a "Japanese web design" site that has global
| appeal?
| csande17 wrote:
| The Rakuten screenshot included in the first set of examples
| looks a bit out of place to me. It's a pretty normal, modern,
| flat-design shopping website? Amazon similarly features a big
| colorful carousel and a bunch of different images all competing
| for attention. (Well, if you visit Amazon today you'll get a more
| consistent-looking Black Friday takeover.)
|
| The only thing that really stands out to me about Rakuten is that
| the Japanese UI strings are bit longer and more visually dense
| than the English ones. But that's a far cry from Yahoo Japan's
| early 2000s aesthetic.
| [deleted]
| Markoff wrote:
| Why all thumbnails seem to be loading full version of image?
| Haven't seen this in long time that as I scroll through article
| thumbnails are still just slowly loading while they should be
| loaded instantly. I mean it's hard to take seriously someone
| talking about other sites who can't design own site to load
| properly.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| > breaking the 3 colour design principle
|
| Is it possible designers have some principles that don't
| necessarily match real life usability? Only 3 colors is
| incredibly boring to me.
|
| I see that hacker news also only has 3 colors, it's fine in this
| case because there's not much reason to have more. That doesn't
| apply to, say e.g., photoshop (and gimp following this too now
| for unknown reasons) only having 2-color icons, while multicolor
| ones are faster to distinguish visually
| jfengel wrote:
| Note that the "rule of 3 colors" is about three hues. The full
| design will incorporate variations of those colors: brighter
| and darker, more and less saturated. Your brain actually thinks
| of these as "the same color", though HTML and CSS don't.
|
| It's a design principle which is safe: it's not going to clash
| in an ugly way, or make combinations that are hard to read.
| They can be used (in conjunction with other design principles)
| to draw the attention where it's needed, and have the eye flow
| through the page without distraction.
|
| "Safe" and "boring" are two sides of the same coin. I
| personally don't mind boring, and easily get aggravated by
| choices that distract. A truly great design breaks the safe
| principles, though usually at a high cost. (Usually, having
| tried and rejected many combinations.)
| nstbayless wrote:
| Gimp takes strange turns now and then, does but gradually
| improve over time. It used to be that fuzzy-select would cause
| immense lag practically every time. Now my biggest complaint
| with selection is merely that the rectangle select tool
| defaults to centred.
|
| If it helps, you can enable the old style icons in preferences.
| wolpoli wrote:
| Well, design principles aren't actually laws, but they follow
| trends so they change and evolve.
| nottorp wrote:
| Let's not forget there must not be any contrast :)
| iszomer wrote:
| Because KISS?
| neilv wrote:
| Loading _much_ faster for me:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20221125181106/https://sabrinas....
| datene wrote:
| Well found, images are so slow on original link
| Markoff wrote:
| Author loads full size images which are just shrinked instead
| loading thumbnails and then writes article about website
| design.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| It's not ironic nor hypocritical unless they lambasted
| others who did the same. I can't be bothered to do all
| sorts of things on a personal blog/project that I might do
| on a paid/commercial venture.
|
| Their response is probably "yeah that'd be cool but meh".
| Animats wrote:
| Japan had phones with lots of graphics well before smartphones.
| Those systems were not web-based. They were mobile-only, and for
| small screens.
|
| China has another system. Many things are applets within the
| WeChat environment. This is a whole different world, using MINA,
| WXML, and WXSS. It's kind of like XML with an external XSS style
| sheet. Here's the official repo.[1]
|
| It's interesting to see where that division leads. The XSS
| approach separates content and look much more strongly than
| HTML/CSS does. (At least as HTML/CSS is typically used. It's
| possible to have an HTML document with just the data, and use a
| single separate style sheet in CSs. There are people who argue
| for that, and some elegant examples.[2] But they are voices in
| the wilderness.)
|
| The funny thing is, despite a different underlying technology,
| WeChat applets seem to look a lot like HTML/CSS web pages. The
| difference may be that the WeChat system was efficient enough to
| eliminate the demand for "native" smartphone apps.
|
| [1] https://github.com/Tencent/weui-wxss
|
| [2] https://every-layout.dev/blog/css-components/
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Curiously, twitter, a beautiful minimalist website, is very
| popular in japan, has as much users there as in the US.
| ideamotor wrote:
| Twitter is an incredibly well designed app and website. Well,
| it was.
| michalf6 wrote:
| It's slow as hell and I'm afraid to click anywhere because
| I'm never sure if there's a way to return.
| Oxidation wrote:
| And never seems to load on the first try, and/or rate-
| limits you if you lose your place in the stream and try to
| refresh the page to reset your proprioception.
| Markoff wrote:
| I think he just spelled Nitter wrong.
| sarasasa28 wrote:
| What? No. I mean, what? What??
|
| First time I tried to get myself more into twitter I felt the
| same barrier as trying to use snapchat as a 30+ y.o.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's beautiful and legible. It's also highly unusable.
| canadiantim wrote:
| What changed?
| muspimerol wrote:
| There have been a few broken designs recently, here for
| example https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/15953892028
| 78824448?...
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| It still is.
| theCrowing wrote:
| Was it? They had an outdated "street art style" startpage
| with nothing but a login for over 4 years. No search, no
| trends nothing just a login.
| eat_veggies wrote:
| You rarely see that page if you actually use twitter
| theCrowing wrote:
| I know but everytime I had to relog I couldn't understand
| the wasted potential but it's with every social platform
| the only noteable exception is TikTok.
| aeyes wrote:
| Did they change this? I just checked twitter.com (without
| having an account) it its an endless feed of
| random/popular posts. I opened tiktok.com and it looks
| similar.
| theCrowing wrote:
| yes, was one of the first thing musk changed.
|
| Random archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220201
| 000154/https://twitter.c...
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| It's not obvious that a social app should show UGC on the
| frontpage. If you do it wrong, it can be bad for your
| brand. It's hard to do it right in a way that draws people
| in, rather then turning them off. You want the app to be
| associated with content users like on the app, not
| necessarily with whatever is currently trending.
| theCrowing wrote:
| Yeah you are right it's easier to take the easy way.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| I find japanese web design refreshing in some ways.
| ericol wrote:
| Just found [1] this in "newest"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6ep308goxQ "Why Japan's Internet
| is weirdly designed [video]"
|
| [1] I made a comment before regarding how HN works, and usually
| when one certain issue piques interest there's an influx of
| related posts.
| O__________O wrote:
| Related YouTube:
|
| why Japan's internet is weirdly designed
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=z6ep308goxQ
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I think that the design with a lot more text, and less pictures,
| is a better design. (Unfortunately, almost required them to use
| Unicode; although Shift-JIS is sometimes in use, TRON code is
| not.) (There are other problems with web design all over the
| world including Japanese, but I have seen many Japanese web pages
| with a better design than ones with English text.)
| cuttysnark wrote:
| Anyone else having issues loading the images? They appear to be
| (not even large, dimensionally) pngs, but loading, line-by-line
| as if they are _massive_ files--calculating ~10mins to download.
| Checked my download speed, no sign of an issue.
|
| Edit: curl https://sabrinas.space/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/11/goo-1024x5... --output 'test.png' took
| _0:04:22_
| timoth3y wrote:
| I've lived in Japan for 30 years, and built several Internet
| based startups in that time. Three quick things the author does
| not seem to really consider.
|
| 1. Japan's information-dense design pre-dates the Internet. If
| you look at commercial fliers from the 80s (and probably before)
| until today, they have similar information-dense designs.
|
| 2. This design is not a result of a "critical shortage of
| competent IT professionals." Just because something is different
| doesn't mean it is wrong or the makers are incompetent. Some of
| these e-commerce firms have thousands of good developers. Designs
| are extensively A/B tested. They are common because they work.
|
| 3. Hacker News is also very info-dense and has changed little
| over past decade. It's not due to incompetence, but because we
| users like it this way. Now, imagine we had a steady steam of
| designers posting about how backwards we are and how they needed
| to "fix" the site to improve our experience. That's what it often
| feels like reading these articles from Japan.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Is he drawing conclusions based on those 13 red dots, which
| appear to be as randomly distributed as all the other countries'
| dots?
|
| Seems like a case of "as you can see from this completely random
| graph there is a clear correlation..."
| bitwize wrote:
| She.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| > after running 2,671 images of the most popular websites in
| every country through an AI
|
| Um. That did what? How were the images processed?
|
| I ran the images through an AI feels oddly nonspecific. Perhaps
| it is specified better somewhere the page didn't entirely load
| for me. I see some images of clustering that I presume was the
| output from the AI.
| flobosg wrote:
| > How were the images processed?
|
| The methodology is described further down in the article. The
| author extracted features from the screenshots with OpenCV and
| then reduced the dimensionality of the feature set using t-SNE.
| vinyl7 wrote:
| Have to use the word "AI" for SEO and clickbait purposes. If
| you can't relate to Current Thing then are you even worth
| reading?
| yamrzou wrote:
| People nowadays can't handle information-dense websites anymore.
| I showed HN to a couple friends once and they were like "How can
| you read on this website?". I'm glad HN kept the same design
| since 2007.
| dmitshur wrote:
| > I'm glad HN kept the same design since 2007.
|
| As someone who enjoys and prefers high-density of information,
| I generally agree.
|
| I do, however, wish HN would add support for @media (prefers-
| color-scheme: dark). By now it's one of the few sites that are
| still unpleasantly bright to look at when in a dark
| environment. (When I don't forget, I visit
| https://darkhn.herokuapp.com/ instead, which helps but can't be
| used to upvote/comment.)
| xvello wrote:
| Agreed. In the meantime, I use the following uBlockOrigin
| rules:
| news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter:invert(100%) hue-
| rotate(180deg))
| news.ycombinator.com##body:style(background: white)
| news.ycombinator.com##div.toptext:style(color: black)
| news.ycombinator.com###hnmain td[bgcolor="#000000"]
| mlindner wrote:
| I'm not sure on your browser, but I've used this for quite a
| long time, since long before dark mode was available on most
| websites: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/darkreader/
|
| It turns most websites into a dark mode equivalent (mostly)
| correctly. Some websites it just doesn't work for and you
| need to disable it, but it's otherwise great. It also auto-
| detects (most of the time) when a site supports dark mode and
| shuts itself off for that site.
| aeontech wrote:
| If you're on iOS/macOS, "HN Dark Mode" extension adds a dark
| mode style sheet that works pretty well:
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hn-dark-mode/id1611040838
| RajT88 wrote:
| I love information-dense websites.
|
| As long as you strip out the distractions: Pictures and videos
| which add nothing, ads, other visual cruft.
|
| Clean design is nice, but I like being able to consume the
| relevant bits without having to scroll. I can move my eyes
| around.
|
| Which brings me around to my point - not everyone has the same
| preferences with regard to presentation and parsing of
| information. The latest trends in web design aren't necessarily
| better - they are Western (and English) centric, and as well
| highly informed by an industry which likes to foist things on
| their users and hope they become trained to accept it as
| normal.
|
| I don't see Japanese web design as backward, ancient, dated,
| just different. Possibly, in some ways, better.
|
| I'd love to see an analysis of loadtimes, page size, tracking
| javascript, etc. When I have low signal on my phone (and thus
| not much bandwidth), these beautiful clean, minimal websites
| somehow take an age to load - because of all the largely
| invisible baggage they come along with.
|
| It's part of why I love this site for news, as well as
| lite.cnn.io. (If anyone knows of more sites stripped of
| everything but text for news, I'm always looking for some)
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| https://text.npr.org/
| Markoff wrote:
| I use compact layout in Reddit, mailbox and pretty much
| everywhere but still can't stand HN layout, I read it through
| Serializer.io much cleaner design and anyway I don't want
| curated home page but also don't wanna go through all New.
| wellbecause2345 wrote:
| Because they have taste! Wabi sabi biatches!
| awinter-py wrote:
| I have been looking for the linked 2013 post on density for
| _years_ , thank you
| csa wrote:
| I love the style of analysis, but it doesn't hit on some key
| things, imho.
|
| 1. Japan pretty much missed the desktop internet phase in the 90s
| and early 00s. Services like Compuserve and AOL (or Japanese
| equivalents) were not often utilized. ISPs, while often quite
| good (shout out to TWICS), were used mostly by tech folks, who
| have never been in high demand or had high prestige in Japan. A
| consequence of this is that desktop-based web design in Japan did
| not have a robust or competitive forcing function for
| optimization or usability in the 90s or the 00s, and then was
| just able to be skipped by the smart phone revolution.
|
| 2. That said, and as mentioned by the OP, Japan was way ahead in
| cell phone tech. In the early to mid 00s, I used the web as a
| critical info dump for some folks with whom I was working. They
| all accessed via phone, and I quickly learned that I needed to
| design accordingly (light and clean) if I wanted the info to be
| accessed and used. Most commercial websites were not designed
| this way, and they also were not accessed by users regularly --
| the data charges would have been insane.
|
| 3. Class signals 1 - I read something about minimalist design in
| Japan many years ago that jibes with my anecdotal experiences.
| Basically, if you see something with a simple and clean design
| with a lot of empty space, it's usually a signal of high class
| and/or high quality and almost certainly high cost. This holds
| for a wide range of things like magazines, restaurants, menus,
| hotels, etc. Most Japanese folks see these types of designs as
| either expensive things to avoid (due to budget) and/or possible
| conspicuous displays of affluence that are frequently avoided by
| those who have the means (there are some folks who like to virtue
| signal while pretending to be something that they are not, but
| that's a different issue). So a default reaction for many
| Japanese people to an empty design, especially empty dark, would
| be "I am not their target market", even if they actually are.
|
| 2. Class signals 2 - The following is my opinion based on my
| experiences living in Japan for 8 years and working with things
| Japanese for many more, and I have no citations, but... Japanese
| people across the whole country (i.e., not just people in Tokyo)
| can mostly be grouped into the category of middle class income
| with working class tastes. This can be seen across a wide range
| of categories including food, clothing, housing, media
| consumption, etc. The exceptions outside of this large group
| (e.g., people who were raised with and embrace a classical and
| traditional upbringing) are easily noticed once some amount of
| time is spent with them.
|
| As a simple example, compare the design of this sports newspaper
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_Hochi) with that of its
| mainstream parent company counterpart
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yomiuri_Shimbun). The "everyday
| man" magazines and newspapers with the bold and garish design are
| abundant and ubiquitous (easily seen in convenience stores),
| while the relatively gray and conservative mainstream paper is
| pretty much only seen in salaryman-world. Japanese websites look
| quite a bit like the sports newspaper (to my mildly trained eye),
| and I think websites mimic this design _because it works with
| their target audience_. I think that this is comparable to sites
| in the US that lean heavily on ad networks like Taboola and
| Outbrain as their primary revenue sources -- it works for their
| target market.
|
| CONCLUSION
|
| Internet use in Japan has always been an enigma to me. Japan has
| been so far ahead in some ways (e.g., I had screaming fast fiber
| optic to the home for less than $100 a month in the mid-00s),
| while being so far behind in so many other areas.
|
| I think that there is a lot of room for disruption for companies
| that can take the reality of Japanese web use and tailor a better
| design around that reality. It seems like there is a lot of
| design inertia that is very sub-optimal. I'm not sure if the best
| way to attack this is by segmenting aggressively and targeting a
| lot of small accessible markets, or if the only way to changes
| things will be via a big mover that dictates online design taste
| (e.g., a domestic, Japan-grown Apple type of company). Perhaps
| both are possible.
|
| Anyway, I hope that others who actually live and work in Japan
| can add some additional insights to my comments.
| xwolfi wrote:
| It's not ! China is the same, and I bet my shirt India isnt far.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Maybe Japanese people have resisted the western degeneration in
| attention span and patience, and retain the ability to not have a
| seizure looking at a webpage with a modicum of information
| density. I've noticed this trend following very "busy" 1800s
| signs/newspapers/etc up to now. People back then weren't addicted
| to fast and easy dopamine and had the mental space to parse
| something with detail on it.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| That's an interesting perspective. I've always seen it to be
| the opposite, particularly when playing many Japanese video
| games: signs everywhere, tons of over-emoting both verbal and
| physical, exaggerated everything, lots of noises, ridiculously
| large numbers that must be flashed all over, lots of visual
| flashing. Lots of particle/special effects. Just a ton of
| really inexpensive dopamine for retaining capture of low
| attention span.
|
| Not that any of this is inherently wrong. I'm not judging it
| (and I often enjoy it). But I think there's a sufficiently
| strong example of the opposite in modern Japanese culture.
|
| What's interesting is, I think, we're both describing "very
| high information density" but seeing it as a result of high
| attention span, or low attention span. Heh!
| bakugo wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this is indeed a significant part of it. While
| watching the relevant video she says she gets "overwhelmed" by
| the old reddit layout because of the "amount of text" (which
| isn't even that much) and I really do have to wonder how these
| people even managed to live their lives before the age of the
| smartphone without suffering regular mental breakdowns every
| time they saw a newspaper. The future does not look good.
| hbn wrote:
| I certainly don't get the feeling of a patient attention span
| whenever I've seen clips from Japanese TV where on top of the
| main action they have shining brightly-colored text and
| graphics popping up all over, scrolling banners, maybe a
| reaction cam cutting between multiple people hamming up their
| reactions to everything, etc.
|
| And the websites look pretty similar in design.
| Oxidation wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with all of that: a notable difference
| between modern media and 1800s newsprint is the paper was very
| expensive then compared to more recently, so it was highly
| economical to cram everything onto fewer physical pages.
| Electronic media has essentially zero marginal costs for longer
| or less dense content.
|
| The same goes for cheaper books (which still were not as cheap
| as modern mass-market books in PPP terms): narrow margins and
| crammed text. But as soon as you move up market to expensive
| books, the margins widen and the text lines open up. People
| still liked the aesthetic of open and airy, but it cost a lot.
|
| Further more, for signs, you had to get everything on them.
| There was no Internet, no phones, no Yellow Pages, no CeeFax.
| Someone interested in your service would have to stand there
| and copy the relevant details into their pocket book.
|
| On the other hand, I do very much detest the glossy websites
| where there are something like 20,000 vertical pixels of flashy
| content, but none of it useful. Just endless fluff, vagueries
| and calls-to-ill-defined-actions. 90% of people just want to
| know your opening hours, contact details and a price list
| (services) or menu (for food). And the delivery costs.
| Everything else is a waste of everyone's bandwidth until you
| have made those things front and centre.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I've noticed this trend following very "busy" 1800s
| signs/newspapers/etc up to now. People back then weren't
| addicted to fast and easy dopamine and had the mental space to
| parse something with detail on it.
|
| I've recently been reading _Amusing Ourselves to Death_
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death), and
| it noted that in the 1800s America has a "literate" culture:
| people read a lot and had correspondingly longer attention
| spans. Apparently attending debates and lectures were a fairly
| common activity, and those went on for _hours_ , with each side
| having plenty of time to express complete and complex thoughts,
| e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Douglas_deba
| te...:
|
| > Each debate lasted about three hours; one candidate spoke for
| 60 minutes, followed by a 90-minute response and a final
| 30-minute rejoinder by the first candidate. The candidates
| alternated speaking first. As the incumbent, Douglas spoke
| first in four of the debates....
|
| > The debates took place between August and October 1858.
| Newspapers reported 12,000 in attendance at Ottawa,[7] 16,000
| to 18,000 in Galesburg,[4] 15,000 in Freeport,[8] 12,000 in
| Quincy, and at the last one, in Alton, 5,000 to 10,000.[6] The
| debates near Illinois's borders (Freeport, Quincy, and Alton)
| drew large numbers of people from neighboring states.[9][full
| citation needed][10] A number travelled within Illinois to
| follow the debates.[7]
| viraptor wrote:
| > People back then weren't addicted to fast and easy dopamine
| and had the mental space to parse something with detail on it.
|
| That's one serious assumption you're making. Has anyone
| actually proven that?
| sph wrote:
| Ah yes, the famous modern Japanese restrained design because
| they have longer attention span than ours. They wouldn't need
| flashy neon colours to keep engaged. That's some confirmation
| bias.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabukich%C5%8D#/media/File%3...
| layer8 wrote:
| From one of the YouTube comments:
|
| _I live in Japan and personally I think it 's cultural and has
| more to do with the aversion to change and also the critical
| shortage of competent IT professionals and foreign-language
| speakers in this country. Often times websites aren't just
| designed differently, they are lacking basic functionality. Any
| foreign resident has a story about how some important website
| like their bank or a government site wouldn't let them in because
| their name was too many characters to enter into a text field or
| something. The government released this contact tracing app for
| covid and it didn't come out until like 5 months later that the
| app was broken on android and just literally didn't do anything.
| Japan's former cyber-security minister was outed as having never
| used a computer in his life after admitting in front of some
| committee that he didn't know what a USB drive is. Just look at
| the difference between Amazon jp and the local version, Rakuten,
| and it's clear how dated and non-functional Japanese sites are.
|
| The problem is these companies are all headed by septuagenarian
| nepotism hires who can never be told they're wrong, staffed by
| programmers who have no idea of industry best-practices because
| they've been trained by these old guys who don't have a clue
| either and just want to keep doing what they've been doing since
| they learned to code in the 90s and can't read non-Japanese
| documentation, and the consumers also are tech illiterate enough
| not to notice or care that the websites are dogshit because
| they're used to it and again never access any non-japanese
| content because of no foreign language skills. And also old tech
| is rampant in major companies for the same reasons, which means
| often times these ancient devices are too slow to run modern
| websites well._
| ram4jesus wrote:
| I would love to work in Japan on their websites. I would take a
| pay cut if I could become a Citizen. But they don't want
| Hispanic people over there; which I understand their needs to
| be insular and homogeneous.
| ionwake wrote:
| Very interesting comment thank you
| franciscop wrote:
| This is basically what I thought a while back (front-end dev
| living and working in Japan) but it cannot be the whole true
| because we foreigners have been saying this for a decade, and
| the obvious conclusion is that foreign websites that are
| "better" would come in and sweep the local competition. If
| Japanese were also horrified with these local designs, they'd
| JUMP as soon as a decent design comes, right?
|
| But that just doesn't happen, and except in a few cases (so
| little that could be attributed to luck or natural competition,
| a big example being Twitter) what usually happens is the
| opposite, foreign companies come in blazing and get smashed
| into the ground. See Uber or Airbnb, the former disappeared and
| the latter is used almost exclusively by foreigners.
|
| So I have two/three extra possible points that might happen,
| could also be a combination:
|
| - Japanese _are_ used and expect the density of websites here.
| As others said, look around Tokyo city and it 's all hyper-
| dense, menus in restaurants have multiple layers of information
| within a page, the TV looks actually like the websites and we
| foreigners also meme about it[1]. So it might be the cultural
| norm and expectation, even if we foreigners find it ugly. And
| saying "consumers also are tech illiterate" about Japan is
| ignorant at best, condescending at worst.
|
| - It _is_ just a dinosaur thing, and those same dinosaurs use
| anti-competitive measures to stifle competition. A big one I
| 've been waiting and I'm sure 99% of my friends and I would
| jump is a BANK with a decent UI. I cannot make international
| transfers (in EU it's literally like a national transfer)
| without signing for a different company which is a subsidiary
| (I believe) and cannot make recurrent payments, which are my
| two main complains, but it also just sucks in general. Laws
| based on a strong nationalistic feeling get passed to make e.g.
| Airbnb or financial companies harder.
|
| - Companies entering Japan don't treat it with respect as a big
| market, but just as a "let's slap a bad translation on top and
| expect numbers as strong as in the USA", which is an issue I've
| seen first hand multiple times as well. For very similar
| cultures this might work, but for vastly different ones like
| USA vs Japan you'll need to do i18n besides just translation.
|
| [1] this is really painfully brilliant: https://i.kym-
| cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/418/147/086...
| ben_w wrote:
| > Companies entering Japan don't treat it with respect as a
| big market, but just as a "let's slap a bad translation on
| top and expect numbers as strong as in the USA", which is an
| issue I've seen first hand multiple times as well. For very
| similar cultures this might work, but for vastly different
| ones like USA vs Japan you'll need to do i18n besides just
| translation.
|
| While I can't speak for software going _into_ Japan, I can
| absolutely believe it having seen this exact thing in reverse
| for a game coming _out_ of Japan. You could give yourself a
| banner with a customisable name, but there was only room for
| _one_ character on that banner. Great if your language has
| "Hu ", not so much if 20% of your users pick "E" and another
| 10% pick "T".
|
| Even with much smaller cultural divides, I've faced "Knopf"
| being incorrect placed on a German naughty words filter
| because someone literally translated "knob" without asking a
| native speaker. (And you might be surprised how often IRL
| Germans ask me, in English, if I _drove_ the train to work,
| though I do also appreciate that in reverse I probably sound
| like Crabtree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilhJvFngWcY)
| franciscop wrote:
| This is also true, another very famous and memeable case on
| the inverse of what I said are videogame translations, "All
| your base are belong to us" :)
| porknubbins wrote:
| On the unwillingness of Japanese to change- I think its
| actually Americans who are more unique because we are willing
| to upend large institutions and our whole social fabric when
| new technology comes along. Faith in progress and willingness
| to replace old systems to try something new is historically
| part of our national DNA, for better or worse. Japan values
| stability and generally only wants to use technology in a way
| that fits into the existing heirarchical social structure.
| bluepizza wrote:
| - Uber Eats is super popular, what do you mean with
| disappeared?
|
| - TeamLab's design of the Resona Bank app is modern, lovely,
| functional, and full of features. All done by locals, for a
| local bank, to be used by locals. Don't confuse lack of
| investment with a cultural effect.
|
| - International transfers are difficult in any non European
| country, that's why Wise became so popular. Shinsei makes a
| lot of their money on their antiquated but easy to use
| transfer system, for example. But Wise is the most popular
| international transfer app in Japan. Which also has a modern,
| easy to use UI. Both support recurrent scheduled payments.
|
| - A lot of well designed UIs were jumped at, including
| iPhones, Apple TVs, Balmuda appliances, the new touch screen
| 7-11 ATMs, Uber Eats, etc.
|
| It seems to me that you got trapped in the "I can't criticise
| my host country and need to assent to every one of its
| quirks" attitude that plagues most foreigners in Japan. Most
| Japanese people find those websites fucking ugly, they just
| don't care. I believe that this is the cultural effect at
| hand here - a lot of locals really don't care if the design
| is good or not.
| franciscop wrote:
| How do I make recurrent payments in Shinsei? There's no
| option from what I've searched. For transfers yes a
| transfer from Spain to the USA or UK is a bit harder than
| intra-EU, but it's trivial compared to Japan where you need
| to apply to some gvmt card to even qualify to apply to the
| int transfer service, which of course I got denied 4 times
| because of my name.
|
| Your whole comment seems trying to find the worst
| interpretation of what I said on purpose... I mean Uber
| taxi of course. I said some modern UIs were adopted, but
| still IMHO not enough to clearly show it was a huge pain
| point as we think (saying people "jumped" to the iPhone in
| Japan because of the UI also doesn't make sense,
| considering how long it took to be adopted and how high
| Android was for a very long time). Etc.
| bluepizza wrote:
| You mean because of MyNumber?
|
| It's your responsibility to maintain a consistent
| katakana transliteration of your name. I don't think many
| banks would accept documents if your name was misspelt,
| no matter the country.
|
| MyNumber's purpose is precisely to curtail white collar
| crime. Of course there would be tight regulations around
| that. But it's something that you make only once.
|
| EU countries are economically and legally integrated to
| very high levels. Banking regulation is simplified for
| intra EU transfers. Japan is an isolate that is not part
| of any economic unions. Banking regulation focus on the
| domestic market and crime prevention. Different
| countries, different needs.
|
| I agree that bad UIs are not a huge pain point. As I
| said, nobody cares. But that doesn't mean that bad UIs
| are liked or appreciated. They are tolerated.
|
| Learn Japanese and get yourself a Resona bank account.
| bluedino wrote:
| Sounds like a lot of government signs in the US.
|
| I wonder if their backend systems are also ancient and it's
| hard to bring that to the web.
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