If you live in Japan don’t read this article

The one design rule that Japanese websites don’t care about.

If you’ve ever seen a Japanese website you will feel like it’s breaking every rule of visual design — the colours, the hierarchy and the sheer amount information. It seems weird when Japan is a global design leader.

There are many theories as to why this is the case but it’s clear that Japanese consumers feel more comfortable when processing large amounts of information and often prefer it. For the rest of the world, this type of design goes against ‘Cognitive Load’ theory.

What is ‘cognitive load’ theory?

Cognitive load theory was proposed by John Sweller in the 1980s when exploring learning difficulties and instructional design.

It basically describes the fact that our brains have limited processing power. When the amount of information we are taking in is far more than what we are equipped to process all at once it makes us feel incredibly overwhelmed.

This feeling of overwhelm makes us worse at completing tasks and sometimes puts us off the task all together!

3 ways to use this theory to solve your design problems

1. Eliminate and automate. Eliminate anything that is not absolutely required and automate as much as you can that is required. The only exception being anything which adds the ‘wow’ factor for your users.
2. Whilst it is important to reduce the amount of clicks to get to the goal, consider what a website would look like without any clicks. Madness! The best way to find the balance is ‘Progressive disclosure’ based on decision-making. Split content out by user-decisions, group the decisions in a way to reduce clicks and try to reduce the number of decisions where you can.
3. If you’re designing a process that requires the user to remember information as they progress, consider the limits of short-term memory. We can only hold 3–4 items in our working short-term memory at once.

Japan we love you…just not your websites.