The difference between designing in Tokyo and in Silicon Valley

August 2014, 2 months ago, I was developing my very first iOS game app in Silicon Valley. It was great experience for me to learn iOS Programming at Summer Academy, MakeGamesWithUs Inc, and next month I won the Prize at Y Combinator Hackathon with my respectable hackers.

In this post, I want to write about the difference between designing in Japan and in Silicon Valley.

More than 10 friends from Japan asked me what exactly Silicon Valley brought me in 2 months. I guess my answer would be, it’s clear that I learned a lot from my time in Silicon Valley.”

Tokyo Designers are attentive, thoughtful and politic and take care of their users very very much. Tokyo Developers understand how Japanese are shy and they tend to like to be anonymous and conscious of “who are watching my contents on Social media.” Tokyo creators are freaking skilled at thinking about UX. But sometimes it might be too much.

One more thing that I can say about Tokyo negative points is, maybe Japanese creators don’t see and compare to other country’s website. Because there is no Japanese language in those sites. They are unable to read the sites without Japanese language content. And another reason may be the way they finance Japanese websites with advertisements, the more they have on one page the better the income. For these reasons, I somtimes feel Japanese design has too many adverts. If you design in Japan, you will obviously learn how to make “Japanese Users” happy.

On the other hand, designing in San Francisco was like doing it on white paper for me. It was sophisticated and simplified to match a large majority and mul-tinational. (The population of the United States in 2013 was approximately 315 million.) Designers try to subtract silly functions from their services or apps and try to rationalize those.

Besides, San Francisco is probably the most beautiful city in the U.S. The culture of San Francisco is major and diverse in terms of arts, music, cuisine, festivals, museums and architecture. San Francisco’s diversity of cultures along with its eccentricities are so great that designers are greatly influenced and get rich source of designing inspiration. When you walk around a corner, you will find lovely coffee shop there soon! I liked to get the magical inspiration at that kind of coffee shop in San Francisco. It is hard to explain about my feeling in this post here, but I am sure that I loved that kind of smart silence.

Recently some Japanese tech companies try to learn more from Silicon Valley. I am a one of the people who wants to be more creative. I’m going to do my best to run this fantastic race. Here is more interesting issue about the design of Japanese websites tend to differ from those in the US.