[friedturkey]

I’ve come to prefer Japanese web design over western design in general. It can be messy at times, but you don’t have endless pop ups asking you to sign up for their “newsletter” ad spam that is sold off to third parties(nobody reads those—your stats are fraudulent and people only register because they think it’ll end the pop ups), endless cookie pop ups, random bot support chats for things that would never need it, “Take me to the new design!” pop ups that lead away from a functional page to absolute garbage, h u g e white space for zero reason, random “login with Google!” pop ups for a basic-ass text page, social media buttons, and so on.

Japanese web design feels like walking into a casino, but western design feels like having a dump truck emptied on you.

[jiggawatts]

> western design feels like having a dump truck emptied on you.

To me it feels like when you walk into a whitegoods store and a sales guy with a fake smile immediately makes a beeline for you. Look... sigh... I'm "just browsing".

Or when there's that insufferable person in the meeting (possibly called Karen) that literally puts her hand in your face to shut you up mid-sentence.

Like... we're adults here. I'm talking. You just shoved your hand in my face like that's normal! What... the... #%@(9$?

That's what modern web feels like. They see you reading the content, scrolling through it and... STOP! Read the hand! NOW!

[biztos]

Fascinating, I don't think I ever heard "whitegoods" before. In case I'm not alone: refrigerators, washing machines and the like, in UK English. I think.

So like this:

https://www.ukwhitegoods.co.uk

But maybe not this:

https://www.whitegoods.com

[tupac_speedrap]

That's right, basically kitchen appliances, although fancy lads have separate utility rooms for washing machines and tumble dryers, and they often come in white so I guess the term stuck.

[greggsy]

‘Whitegoods’ is commonly used in Australia too.

[mstade]

In Sweden also. We say "vitvaror" which literally translates to white goods.

[BurningPenguin]

Same in German: "Weißwaren" also translates directly to white goods. I think it's amazing to see the similarities in languages.

[biztos]

Wow I’d never heard (or at least noticed) that and I speak German. Turns out they have red, brown and black too.

https://www.hotelier.de/lexikon/w/weisse-ware

[reportgunner]

In Slovak we call it "Biela technika" which translates to "White technology".

[ubercore]

Was a tiny culture shock learning "hvitevarer" when I moved to Norway too.

[jorvi]

Dutch as well. ‘Witgoed’

[dotancohen]

I immediately hit D (Tridactyl, close page) the instant a popup happens when scrolling or reading. It is so instinctive now that I don't miss the content at all. I think maybe once or twice I've had to reopen the page (also easy in Tridactyl, U) to read content that was critical but not available elsewhere.

I just hope that there is some Google Analytics event that is triggered on page closes within a few hundred miliseconds of the popup interruption.

[annadane]

Hello, fellow Tridactyl user :D

[nirui]

I don't think the newsletter pop ups is a layout design problem, it's more like an idea contributed by the marketing department.

Layout wise... you can totally have a website designed like a whole casino of dump truck emptied on you. I'm not talking about Japanese websites or even pointing my figures, but it's a simple fact that you absolutely and unmistakably can have the worst of the both worlds, and everybody who visits taobao.com can experience that first hand.

[3np]

Also Rakuten. Unfortunately an increasing amount of Japanese sites are bringing over the bad part of “modern” Western web design.

[unscaled]

Almost 10 years have passed since this article was posted, and things are quite different now. Most of the popular web pages have cleaned up, and new startups are mostly following modern international design trends.

Even sites that remained dense in terms of color (like the Rakuten top page), have more white-space around text, less columns, larger hi-res images, and carousel banners. Oh, and Flash is gone for good now.

The Japanese web became a great deal more usable, and in the same time popups are still less trendy here than abroad (although coupon and campaign popups are all over the place in e-commerce sites).

But I still shudder when I encounter an oldskool site. I don't care about the minimalist design, and if done correctly it can be quite fast and fun to use. But usually it comes with hefty price tag:

- These sites are rarely ever responsive. If you're lucky, there's a mobile version that works based on user agent sniffing, and often suffers from feature parity issues.

- You can expect a regular monthly maintenance window where the site will be shut down for multiple hours during midnight. You should keep an eye for this announcement.

- There are no cookie banners popping up, but nobody said anything about blinking gifs or bleeding red text.

- Forms are complicated and have weird validation rules. You usually enter your name which must be in Kanji (or Full Width latin alphabet characters if you don't have a Kanji name), and then a phonetic name which would be either Hiragana or Katakana - but there is no standard for that, and the site doesn't try to be nice and help you with auto-converting these things (although it's quite easy to do).

- Entering your address is also generally painful, since you have to first enter your zip code, and then choose your prefecture (usually on a tiny drop-down list which is arranged from north to south!) and street address. This address is then verified against your zip code, although it could have been auto-generated from your zip code.

- Lots of complex web apps are still written in circa-2000 frameworks that try to keep all the presentational state in a cookie or a URL parameter and won't let you use the back button or open multiple tabs.

- Worst of all, these text-heavy sites are not necessarily as fast as they should be some times, owing to poor hardware, or perhaps log files that haven't been cleaned up for the last 10 years and are now clogging up the disk on the poor host machine.

If you want an example for an old skool site that suffers most of this problem, take the registration site for the ETC mileage club (this is the point rewards club for the nationwide automated highway toll gate payment card).

Top page: https://www.smile-etc.jp/

Registration form: https://www2.smile-etc.jp/NASApp/etcmlg/MlgReq?gvlddpef=1011...

[friedturkey]

Registration forms in Japan are definitely worse than anywhere else on earth. Strict text length limits (last name can’t fit in 4 characters? Sucks for you), randomly flip flopping between characters being full width and half width, having to enter your foreign name only in kanji and wondering whether it’ll accept katakana, full width letters, or hiragana instead (and it only ever accepts one of those and you’ll never know which), data being lost when it inevitably fails to accept your input. It’s hell.

[astrange]

I’ve always wondered why registration and checkout pages in Japan like to be 3-4 pages long with another confirmation page after each one. It’s like they don’t want you to finish filling it out.

[toyg]

The sarariman manually processing all orders he receives via fax, is on the verge of divorce, so he asked to get some respite.

[Tor3]

Ah, full width and half width.. I don't mind Japanese web pages in general, in fact I like a lot about them, but when it comes to filling out forms it can be horrible. Just last month my wife tried to book a hotel room in the only hotel available near a particular airport in Japan, and the online form required her to create an account and a password (the first question is, of course, "why?", just for booking a hotel room?). The problem was that the site rejected all her attempts for passwords, insisting on "half width ASCII". My wife is Japanese and her iPad is Japanese, and she has lived most of her life in Japan, but she had no idea how to get that to work. We tried absolutely everything we could think of, all attempts rejected. In the end she had to phone the hotel and book that way, which they grudgingly accepted (at a higher price). I still haven't figured out what "half width ASCII" is supposed to mean. Not visibly, I think I get that, but technically. What kind of charset was she supposed to use, and how to get the iPad to output it?

[innocenat]

> having to enter your foreign name only in kanji and wondering whether it’ll accept katakana, full width letters, or hiragana instead

Never have any problem whatsoever filling full-width romaji (as written on my Zairyu card) in Kanji section and katakana/hiragana in the reading section (depend on what is requested).

[johnnyanmac]

Thanks, that does make some sense. 2013 and flash made enough sense, I was wondering how old this article was when it was still talking about Window XP legacy support (which ended in.. .2014,5 at the latest?). .

>These sites are rarely ever responsive. If you're lucky, there's a mobile version that works based on user agent sniffing, and often suffers from feature parity issues.

It does suck, but responsive design as a paradigm didn't really exist in the mid 2000's , even in the west (and as the article noted, tech takes time to cross the language barrier). These were the days where you had two web domains with one specifically designed for mobile and one for desktop. But I'm not quite sure how those pre-smartphone mobile sites scale to today's smartphone/tablet screens. Probably not well.

[hungryforcodes]

Fortunately Asia is moving away from being overly influenced by the west so hopefully they will discover their own style soon rather than just copy...

[_blu]

I like those designs.

[granshaw]

Umm, those things have nothing to do with web _design_, but are rather a function of market dynamics

[friedturkey]

White space and pop ups aren’t part of design? That’s a very strict definition. Design is also merely a function of market dynamics, hence why it changes with trends and not to improve function.

[mouzogu]

>Japanese web design feels like walking into a casino, but western design feels like having a dump truck emptied on you.

perfect analogy

i think in general they have more of a "if its not broken dont fix it" mentality whereas in the west we seem to be "move fast and break things"

[tsss]

As someone who works on newsletter popups I can tell you that they do, unfortunately, work quite well. Hardly any other measure translates so easily to increased sales.

[astura]

Same with asking for upvotes and subscriptions on YouTube. It's so annoying but it works so well.