The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)(sabrinas.space) |
The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)(sabrinas.space) |
I actually hated the web design at first but now I much prefer it and find it difficult to use American apps with the modern tech aesthetic now.
I noticed that I started to get annoyed doing things like filling forms. I feel like American apps tend to reduce complex flows into simpler decisions but requiring more steps. It feels like my brain is wired to want to see as much information at once now.
I mean, it's literally* gambling, so both are supposed to be maximally obnoxious. There aren't supposed to be differences. Yet there appear to be.
And that makes me think that there might be just differences in dopamine resistance between two cultures or something. Like people just take higher doses. I don't think that'll be a crazy concept considering that typical ABVs of hard drinks vary by regions.
Hence, you grab more customers by catering to idiots. Unless you as a business want to avoid these clients.
Idiot design means more steps for non idiots (see: terminal vs GUI)
I just want to add that in addition to peculiar web design, Japanese websites have a way of assuming architectures or usage patterns where servers need to sleep or do some kind of scheduled job, which is really weird for people used to sites that need to account for a range of timezones or 24/7 availability (unless there is a pre-announced downtime that exists as a one-off thing). I know at least three websites off the top of my head that go down for "maintenance" at an exact scheduled time for hours every day, assuming that users would never want to access them overseas during those times (actually, one of those three doesn't even announce the reason, it just returns "server failed to respond" errors until it's time to "open up" for business again). Many services work fine, but at least a quarter to a half of Japanese web services are awful even though they eventually work if you can strangle yourself into making it work. The floor for Japanese web services is way below the floor for American ones. Those sites can get really mindnumbingly bad both on the front end and back end. I'm not sure what the cause is, but it must be a variety of factors. If tech-savvy users can't even make it work, I feel really bad for the struggling elders forced to use those sites.
So since nobody will get any promotions for running good software, they are not incentivized to run good software, and therefore they do just enough to get by?
https://www.japanrailpass-reservation.net/ only works 4:00–23:30 Japan time.
The buttonology is cryptic. Like you asked tasked enterprise java devs to write frontend in jquery.
At least that's how I remember it. Game might be fun, but I'll never know.
[0] https://www.ssa.gov/myssa-static/rel_1.0/offHoursPopup.html
On one hand, that seems obviously stupid. On the other, I don’t see how you could phrase a legal requirement of this nature.
https://services.digital.go.jp/en/visit-japan-web/
I hate it so much I kind of wish I could volunteer to fix it. I suspect the process though would be torture
Note: experience on mobile is bad. I don't remember if desktop is better.
To contrast with a superficially similar style, Chinese web stores are also maximalist, but they tend to assault you with popup coupons, confetti effects, and other such things. Japanese style feels very efficient and utilitarian by comparison.
The font thing is also underrated as a factor. When you only have a handful of web-safe CJK fonts and you can't rely on weight/size variations to create hierarchy the way you can with Latin text, you compensate with color and density. It's a constraint that pushes you toward a specific aesthetic whether you want it or not.
I think the framing of "peculiar" is a bit western-centric though. Dense information-heavy pages are arguably more respectful of the user's time than the trend of spreading three sentences across five viewport-heights of whitespace.
I’m not aware of this stereotype of Japanese minimalism. I guess there’s Marie Kondo, and some Japanese high-end dining tends towards minimalism. But then there’s manga, anime, kawaii, Nintendo, Sega, Miyazaki, etc., a lot of which is closer to maximalism than minimalism.
That said, I think the Japanese commercial ecosystem is still less wasteful than the one in the US except the excessive plastic wrapping. I hope one day they realize that won't count as "Omotenashi".
Japanese society can adopt things fast the "keitai denwa" where created and adopted earlier than anywhere in the world but in 2025 most companies still use fax machines. The japanese society seems to have different citeria for adoption and depreciation of technology (compared to the west).
When considering web layout you have to consider traditional media layout for example magazines, newspapers, books, flyers or comics. With the japanese language it is possible to layout your articles (text) in different directions left-to-right, top-to-bottom and top-to-bottom, right-to-left. Magazines are read from (western)back to front. Basically there is more flexibility in layout compared to other languages but translating that tradition to the web is difficult today and historically was very difficult.
Most visited websites are news pages, those will be layed out more similar to a traditional newspaper. In japan they often adopted a column layout where in the west we adopted a more list like (row layout) format.
As stated in the article CJK characters are problematic, however the japanese text especially is confusing (because they tried to solve it early on) on the encoding side as there are a few standards that don't cooperate. Especially on the early internet due to technical limitations and a fractured technology landscape (different devices, and operating systems). Therefore a lot of websites that wanted more advanced layouts opted for (and still do) publishing images embedded in html for more advanced font and layouts.
Also most japanese primarily visit japanese language text websites and therefore don't come in contact with the western website design styles very often. A lot of non English speaking countries have this however in japan it is common because of the relative cultural separation. Most japanese just don't interact with companies people or media outside of japan often, a huge part of this is because they are a first world country that has a very low English proficiency. leading to the two styles evolving independently.
Example: liquid glass, anything published by Taco Bell, the meme of making sites look like they came from Geocities in 99, etc...
What’s worse is it bled out of the digital world and into the physical. There’s a real lack of color in our modern world, at least over here in the US. Everything is so neutral and boring, all in the name of efficiency.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148942
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254569
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523955
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745146
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35209424
The name Don Quixote now triggers a PTSD reaction in me.
otherwise, a lot of japanese webpages just seem impossible to navigate to me. Some images are clickable, some aren't, you still have to scroll to reach where you're going. It's just a bit like a maze, and a lot of what you see is kind of useless.
The funny thing is, Western minimalism is strongly influenced by Zen, which is diametrically opposed to this.
Depending on the brand, you might want to appear like a good bargain! Alternatively, you might want to appear like you sell luxury items. But either way, the design is communicating something.
In my brief experience,
- Promotional websites (e.g. https://ant.design/index-cn, https://seed.bytedance.com/zh/seedream4_0) seem to be designed similarly to Western websites
- Chinese mobile apps do seem to be more colorful in general (as observed with Japanese websites in the article), and some are more information dense, like Douyin Shop and Live. Bullet comments also add to the density
- I briefly worked at TikTok US, where the company uses Lark Suite. The desktop and mobile interfaces look pretty similar to Notion/Slack, but it has more vibrant colors and slightly more features (being an everything app for the workspace)
Not to mention there being an insane amount of ways you can learn, word games, achievements and even a virtual Japanese garden you can populate with items and animals you unlock as you progress in your studies. :)
And I love it! It works so much better for me to learn the words and characters that way, possibly due to all the added context. Its just so much better than "western" minimalistic learning tools and bland apps in general. :)
But fonts with good CJK support have wider Latin letter-forms, even when not in `font-variant-east-asian: 'full-width'` mode. I write about this here: https://maxbo.me/subordinate-latin.html (and cite "the peculiar case of Japanese web design")
Most of the sites shown are the equivalent of a weekly ad. You have an interest cut off, and you show that limited set of information. Since Japan is a very "low trust" society I'd assume most people just think minimalist sites look like a scam startup venture.
I’m not pretending to understand the why better than the author of this piece - just saying I’m happy for Japan.
Where's the button? Where's the button? I know it must be here somewhere... (accidentally hovering mouse over something) OH THERE IT IS!!
I've always found Japanese design fascinating
The company was well known amongst the web development industry, as it was often referenced at colleges and universities.
The loss of color and texture is my biggest gripe. So many webpages and user interfaces abandoned the idea of distinguishing components using different colors and just went with making the page as close to bleach white as possible. I suppose an upside of this is that it made dark-mode easier to adopt. That being said, good dark mode support seems relatively recent.
(There are also non-store Chinese designs; they are not trying to sell anything so they don’t need coupons and confettis. These are actually enjoyable to use. And they are more information dense than the English equivalent because the Chinese script packs more in a smaller space. This of course makes such designs i18n-hostile.)
- https://based.cooking/ (or the more updated fork https://publicdomainrecipes.com/)
- HN :)
(These are primarily text and lack the occasional color pop of the Japanese style, but I still admire the density and efficiency.)
Later on I remember finding out Yahoo had a search.yahoo.com page or something that was also just a search bar but that was harder to type so was still a failure of design.
This was before combined search and address bar.
To be fair, it was Microsoft-style minimalism that Jony Ive brought to Apple, who then popularized it.
While I played it I always had this dirty feeling imagining what the backend code must look like. Sends chills down my spine.
The eels in the fish tank out front are pretty cool, though.
Gnome (and maybe GTK as well?) submenus now require a click (as opposed to the previous hover) and replace their parent menu (rather than appearing beside it), making hunting for something in a submenu an exercise in frustration. Considering that:
1. The fraction of Gnome users on a small touchscreen is approximately zero
2. You can always support the miniscule number of small-touchscreen users by having menus behave differently on small touch screens; Apple still has a menu bar on desktop applications!
It's particularly frustrating
For overflow, have the bottom nav bar slide up (kind of like old iOS control center) to reveal more options, just have to be cautious not to re-create the three dots menu junk drawer in there too.
I think the three-dot menu junk drawer is just a result of lazy design from a goal of re-using the same UI everywhere, no matter the OS.
If we want good design, then (collective) we need to start making unique native UIs per platform, using that platform’s toolkits and HIG instead of “branded” experiences using cross platform UIs.
That’s for mobile, for desktop just dump mobile design entirely. Go full on information density, menus, etc. Make it designed to be navigated with a keyboard and a mouse.
In many cases, for mobile versions of sites hamburger menus can be easily replaced with an app-style bottom-aligned tab bar and on occasion even a linear horizontal navbar. You wouldn't believe how many mobile hamburger menus I've seen on sites that have a grand total of 2-5 destinations.
In the case of list views, three-dot menus can be replaced by a mini-toolbar of buttons that appears within a list item when hovering or selecting a row (depending on if it's desktop or mobile), and on desktop if your audience has a bit of a technical leaning a right-click context menu can do the trick.
The main thing to avoid is to use either as thoughtless catch-all "junk drawers". Usually if one sits and thinks about it a little bit a better pattern will become obvious.
It'll take up less than half of a smart phone screen, and customers don't need to bother with any burger menu.
The phone web should only have two functions: Poke and scroll. For most normal websites that is.
I suppose my issue is more with the "corporate minimalism" trend rather than minimalist design in general.
The problem with corporate minimalism is that the vague nothingness became the goal of the design rather than a way to set the scene for something else. It's like asking your audience to stop the chatter but then there's no show.