How culture made Japanese Internet design "Weird"

Omg i'm so excited to watch!! The cultural analysis component was really tough for me to navigate and the reason why I couldn't find convincing evidence was almost definitely because of a lack of domain knowledge.

Having worked on web design at a company which maintains distinct US and Japan experiences, we see Japanese users respond positively to simplification, similarly to US users, when using A/B tests. I think there is a culture diff but it is not that Asian people prefer dense content. We can see new sites (Skeb) and existing sites (Ameblo) all moving towards more simplified design. Tbh a lot of Japanese companies are just very boomer and we're seeing this slowly change as younger engineers and designers start to drive changes.

Interesting video! I'm a designer, and I was interested in learning more about design in Asia. One thing that was missing in the video was a clear comparison between two websites that serve the same purpose. In your examples, you were mixing different types of websites. It seems like the Asian websites you showed are news-like websites, compared to small store or portfolio websites. Those types will differ in design, even in Western cultures. For instance, Alibaba and Amazon are very similar, and that's a fair comparison as they are the same website type, sharing the same purpose, and so on.

I once worked on localising a UK grocery website for a major Japanese retailer. Interestingly, they picked a very minimal Swedish website as their examplar 'best in class' and we started making something that looked like that. However, they kept asking for very specific new features to be added and it got more and more cluttered. I attribute this to them wanting to please everyone, and trying hard to overachieve by keep adding and adding. It was also apparent that the people making the decisions were management, who asked for bew use cases without speaking to the designers. Another fun fact - the analytics we collected showed Japan, China and Korea to be extremely phone-centric, much more so than the West, even. In general, I think it did come down to culture, though more that of the creators than the consumers.

My 2 cents (I live living in tokyo): Even Japanese people don’t like this website design and have problem to find information. But there are a strong cultural pressure to not complain and accept everything as it is. An extra one from people inside the IT industry: Japan started later in the game of webdesign, there was a lack of skilled people and researchers in the area. It is easy to see that many websites are moving way from the old trend when I do online shopping here.

I work as a Japanese translator, and this video explains some stylistic differences between Japanese and English texts that I encounter all the time. Japanese texts tend to have longer sentences, which if translated literally into English would seem terribly long-winded and confusingly structured..... I sometimes have to split one Japanese sentence into 5 or more English sentences to make it easier for English readers to read..... Japanese also frequently leaves it up to the reader to infer key information from context, which would seem vague in English.... If Japanese people parse information in a different way because of cultural differences, as suggested in this video, this would explain some of these stylistic differences.

I lived in Japan for a few years and I noticed this cultural difference while I was there. Even things like grocery stores often had multiple advertisements/songs that were playing and could be heard at the same time. It felt like everything was trying to grab my attention at once which was a bit overwhelming as a westerner. I guess if you grow up in that culture you're more used to things like that and it becomes easier to parse all of the information at once. Neat video!

I am not East Asian but I lived in Japan for 11 years and worked on localizing websites. I’m well aware of this topic and it’s something I talked about often with Japanese staff. Culturally Japanese like to get a lot of information before making a decision and this comes at the expense of clean designs favored by westerners. I don’t think it’s anything to do with smartphones. That said for a society that people associate with technology, a lot of Japanese offices are still lacking in tech skills. One of the most in demand skill sets that Japan is outsourcing to mostly foreign workers right now is computer engineers, because they don’t have the Japanese manpower and training to keep up with the demand for coding, and no this is not the west forcing them to catch up, this is Japan wanting to catch up but not having the skills to do it alone. That’s how tech phobic Japan actually is. In offices people still use fax and they still use stamps and paperwork hierarchies to approve things.. this is cultural for sure. But, I wouldn’t necessarily group Japan Korea and China in to the same box culturally at all. I’m now living in Korea and they love doing things very quickly- the Korean office is a world removed from the japanese office imo.

In the Answer In Progress video, the culture aspect may have been omitted because this dense web design was commonly seen in early to mid 2000s western pages as well. Yahoo, MSN, Facebook and even YouTube had this look we now associate with contemporary eastern websites, so we're inclined to believe their web design is "old" and "outdated", not thinking about its intended audience, like you presented. Plus, the languages help, where Japanese, Mandarin and Korean for example can pack syllables or words into one character as opposed to a single letter in a Western language like English, easily presenting the reader entire sentences where they'd be cut out in a Western language.

As a UX designer this idea to me is so profound that a info-heavy design can be a cultural preference! I realized how programmed I am to criticise websites designs shown in this video by one culture's standard, never questioning what if people do not want to scroll away forever in doubt.. or anticipate hidden information inside hamburger menus.. just to see more white space on the page. Thank you!

As a western web designer, I think the concept of ‘optimal information density’ underlies so many of the decisions we make about a layout that we often don’t even think about it consciously; we might vocalize it as ‘giving the eye room to breath’ or creating a ‘visual rhythm’ or whatever. I also think it’s interesting how Western websites used to be much denser (like Yahoo’s portal, for example) and I wonder if AiP’s conclusion about mobile phones triggering a shift away is accurate considering that the push for web standards began earlier out of the wake of the browser wars rather than after the introduction of the iPhone.

I'm conflicted. I grew up very aware of all this as I'm East Asian/White and grew up in both East and West with my first introduction to the internet to be in Chinese. My mother was a webdesigner and pointed out the differences of Chinese/US webdesign almost 2 decades ago. I agree that the differences exist, but I still prefer the simpler web design. It was a relief when website became more streamlined. I think we've gone a bit overboard though. Everything is overly minimalistic, but I am seeing some bounce back to using more color and movement on pages.

I'm a Canadian that's working as a designer at one of the Japanese e-commerce companies. At one time we had wanted to simplify and reduce the information on the front page because that was a pain point during user interviews. When proposing the change the CEO adamantly rejected the design because he wanted to keep it as-is. It's the Japanese mentality where "why fix it when it's not broken?"

I have a lot of problems with the core argument being made here. I'm old enough to remember when the western web was also very crowded. Also if we consider other domains like newspapers we see a similar trend, although maybe not as starkly. Historically newspapers were very dense, and now they have a bit more spacing, although not quite as dramatic as the web which doesn't have to account for paper costs. Ultimately, i think the question isn't why Eastern websites are still crowded, but why Western websites aren't anymore. And yes it's probably a change in the western aesthetic, but probably not related to the cultural psychological differences between East and West.

This makes a lot of sense as an East Asian art student! I go to school in America, but there are many boarding students from Asia. One of the main criticisms we receive in art class is that our projects look too "busy" or that there is too much going on. Your section on Asian art in the MET and multiple museums explain to me why this was the case, while my non Asian peers did not get this type of feedback.

No wonder some anime studios be condensing 100+ chapters into 12 EPs with MAGNIFICENT pacing ʘ⁠‿⁠ʘ

I'm Korean and I never liked korean website design. I also believe many Koreans don't like that kind of design because my designer friends likes minimal design when they design their own websites. I think the individual preference and preference as a company is very different thing. Very interesting video. Thank you!

As an American and web developer who’s spent almost half of his life in Japan, this topic will never get old. And honestly, I am never able to produce a “good” answer whenever people ask me “why are Japanese websites so different?”. Thank you for making this very informative video and new point of view on the topic. I also believe the difference in web design is attributed to deep cultural differences. Using South Korea is brilliant because South Korea is so ahead of Japan in software engineering, yet they both tend to organize information the same way online. One fascinating topic to dive into would be why is Japan so behind in software. Also, why is the tech literacy so low in Japan. This is also leading to a lot of Japanese being disinterested in the current AI boom.

Culture does play a part but probably not as big or deep as you made it out to be. The bigger reason for the cluttered is prob due to how portal sites remained popular in east asia when they've died out in the western world. Basically before the late 2000s, portal sites are big whereever u are, and so sites tried to copy what's popular, and we end up with portal sites-like design mostly. Then when portal sites died out in the western world, some portal sites (yahoo, msn) remained popular in east asia. As such, in east asia, some sites copied what's popular (portal sites), or they stayed same since portal sites are still popular and that's how we still get cluttered web design in east asia. basically, the legacy of portal sites is the bigger reason. Some of the websites you've shown are portal sites. Maybe what we really need to look into is why portal sites died out in the western world and why/how remained popular in several east asian countries. Naver in itself is fascinating, i can't think of another country that has a portal site that is as dominating as naver. Would love to see someone just do a deep dive on how naver got so big in south korea, when portal sites are dying out everywhere else

I really wish this video had Japanese subtitles so I could show it to my Japanese coworkers. I've told them several times that it's difficult for me to read my schedule because there's just WAY too much information packed onto the excel document, but I don't think they really get it. 😣