Differences between a Japanese and a Western Website Design
What comes to your mind when you hear someone saying ‘Japanese Aesthetic’? In my mind, it will be all about balance and a structured beauty. From the beautiful Japanese traditional gardens, to the flower arrangement technique, and the beautiful food plating, the art of calligraphy, the bento box cover folding technique, everything seems to be designed to enhance the beauty of Japanese people daily life. Everything is so thoughtful and refined.
But what about ‘Japanese Website Aesthetic’?
It will be completely different.
Japanese website aesthetic is well known for its crowded, crammed, and packed layout. Text scattered everywhere, dozens of low resolution images and promotional banners placed, and different types of products displayed all together. All this, together, placed in one home page layout. Every website element is screaming for attention but easily gets lost in the crowd.
Rakuten, one of the most popular e-commerce websites in Japan, is very well known for this. The website is dominated by the red color and features a palette strongly oriented towards primary colors. If your eyes aren’t trained to see a lot of colors in one time, you will close this website immediately. Japanese websites also feature a lot of text. The more you scroll down, the more text you have to read.
But did you know, that despite the crammed layout, Rakuten has 439 million page views and is one of the top 10 most visited websites in Japan? Not to mention its hundred millions yen revenue and thousand of employees working for it.
From the technical side, there are a few causes that make Japanese websites look as they do.
- The high rate of old browsers users in Japan. A slow penetration of new personal computer models in Japan forces website designers and programmers to create something compatible with very old technologies. If you are working in a conservative government office, or in a large-size company, you might be forced to use old computers that don’t support the most updated versions of browsers. This means that domestic websites are often designed to be compatible with technologies that are almost disappearing in countries like US or Europe.
When it comes to Internet Explorer 6 usage, Japan actually rolls in at third for the entire world.
- Japanese web fonts are very limited and consume a lot of memory. Lack of web fonts is a huge issue for languages that don’t utilize latin alphabets. One set of fonts can weight several megabytes, and is usually very expensive. Variety is very limited. That brings designers to prefer creating graphic images instead of plain text.
- Japanese font themselves lack emphasis. There is no italic or capital letters, so there aren’t many ways to highlight a specific part of the text. This adds limitations to express concepts in a easy-to-read, straightforward, structured way.
- Language barrier on the programming side. Most of programming languages were designed by English speakers, therefore the majority of documentation is actually in English. In the rare case it gets translated, it will take time to be localized, which will make the arrival of new technologies always delayed in respect to western countries.
There is also cultural aspect influencing the website design aesthetic:
- The fundamental culture of showing effort. When presenting something to a Japanese customer, there’s a strong need to give details of the history, background and product characteristics before proposing the deal itself. Somehow it looks like you are working on an essay, and you have to show your thinking process to get to the full point, rather than directly address the customer needs in a straightforward way.
- Buying decisions are based on product understandable information and reviews. The more people can understand your product benefits, also thanks to users reviews, the more chances people will buy your product. Trust is very important in Japan when it comes to purchasing a new product or service, and consumers tend to go for well-established, known brands. Products manuals, instructions and applications often enrich product pages on online stores.
In conclusion, I think that to understand why Japanese design is so different from western design standards means to understand what Japanese people are looking for when they enter an online store and how they receive information.
“Details are needed because risk is absolutely not tolerated.”
Japanese users like to get everything at a glance, and prefer to avoid navigating a website to get detailed product information. If you are a business owner offering something new, you’d better gather all the relevant information on the homepage to avoid the risk of people missing key information due to lack of will to dig deeper. When it comes to purchase online, Japanese people are looking more for content rather than the aesthetic of content, and it’s better to keep this in mind when localizing a website for Japan.
