How culture made Japanese Internet design "Weird"
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ธ.ค. 2022
- Japanese Internet is designed differently, and so is Chinese Internet and South Korean Internet, and many other Asian countries' Internet. It's dense, cluttered, and information rich. Why? The answer lies in cultural psychology. It lies in how culture influences our brain's cognitive processes in perception and attention.
EDIT: Wow, I really did not expect this to blow up, and I wish I was more comprehensive in some of the points I bring after reading through your comments. Thank you for all the thoughts and critiques. This was never meant to be standalone essay, it was always meant to add to the original video as a different perspective, and hopefully invite you to the world of cultural psychology.
This video is a direct reply to the video made by Answer in Progress @answerinprogress:
• why Japan's internet i...
I hope to add to the conversation and investigation that Answer in Progress spurred about this topic and cover the parts of this theory about Japanese Internet that they missed.
My other video essays:
The Writer's Strike is Bigger Than Hollywood: • How Big Tech changes t...
How Twitch Manipulates Streamers: • How I became top 0.5% ...
⟡ socials ⟡
Insta - / cynzyy
⟡ video sources ⟡
Joseph Henrich - "The Secret of Our Success"
• Joe Henrich - The Secr...
Richard Nisbett - "Eastern and Western Thinking"
• Eastern And Western Th...
Julien S. Bourrelle - "How Culture Drives Behaviours"
• How Culture Drives Beh...
• Learn a new culture | ...
Fernando Lanzer - "The psychology of culture"
• The psychology of cult...
Dato Gogichaishvili - "What's So Different About Cultures Anyway?"
• What's So Different Ab...
Simone Buijzen - "How cross-cultural understanding can help us"
• How cross-cultural und...
⟡ paper sources ⟡
East Asian and North American in Processing Information
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/...
East Asian vs. Western Art Styles and Aesthetic Preferences
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/...
Holistic Versus Analytic Expressions in Artworks
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/...
Omg i'm so excited to watch!! The cultural analysis component was really tough for me to navigate and the reason why I couldn't find convincing evidence was almost definitely because of a lack of domain knowledge.
This is so good! I had read a couple of blog posts about how east asians had higher information consumption capacity but I was way too dismissive of them. I couldn't really imagine that it was a real phenomenon (derogatory gesturing at western AND stem student brain). So thank you for making this incredibly well-edited and written video essay and I can't wait to watch more of your videos!
Was about to spam your instagrams with the link to this video. Glad you liked it
Thank you so much for watching!! I'm so glad I'm able to add to the conversation you started and bring attention to a domain of knowledge that many people are unaware of :)
Yo I got some domain knowledge. What kind of domain are you looking for? I work for a hosting company.
Thank you, thank you, I'll take my comedy award now
@@zxvadcsfbh really nice one i will copy, pls allow me to use your joke in the future 😂
Having worked on web design at a company which maintains distinct US and Japan experiences, we see Japanese users respond positively to simplification, similarly to US users, when using A/B tests. I think there is a culture diff but it is not that Asian people prefer dense content. We can see new sites (Skeb) and existing sites (Ameblo) all moving towards more simplified design. Tbh a lot of Japanese companies are just very boomer and we're seeing this slowly change as younger engineers and designers start to drive changes.
Oh look, someone with actual experience in the matter and some experimental data to back things up instead of just hypotheses based on theories about culture.
I think you're quite right, about the boomer influence in corporate culture in Japan, and I say this only from experience living and working in that culture for 8+ years among Japanese people, speaking the language and discussing this with Japanese friends in design.
I think it has more to do with East Asian cultural conservatism than analytic/holistic thinking. As a teacher, I see this play out constantly, to my frustration. I’ll present a new way of doing something, but if it doesn’t strictly fit into what they’ve been taught, it is likely to be discarded almost immediately. For example, I’ve been telling students in my tutor group to stop using past exam papers to study for their exams because it’s not an efficient use of time, and they’ll kind of nod along. But then they’re back to talking about past papers the next week, as if I said nothing.
@@MichaelSchagen These experiences need to get more attention, both this and the AIP video lack real world experience.
@@MichaelSchagen because it's more dramatic to make video essay about "how culture made japanese website cluttered"
Interesting video! I'm a designer, and I was interested in learning more about design in Asia. One thing that was missing in the video was a clear comparison between two websites that serve the same purpose. In your examples, you were mixing different types of websites. It seems like the Asian websites you showed are news-like websites, compared to small store or portfolio websites. Those types will differ in design, even in Western cultures. For instance, Alibaba and Amazon are very similar, and that's a fair comparison as they are the same website type, sharing the same purpose, and so on.
I had this thought as well, and having read/browsed plenty of Japanese fan sites (even in the early '00s) the majority were fairly clean, albeit often heavily text-based... but not very unlike the western ones I frequented around the same periods. But that's a very small, specific, and anecdotal sample, so I wouldn't want to extrapolate anything from it with any confidence.
yeah
The video was lacking in this regard. This video was made with an idea it wanted to prove instead of doing research on the topic
Yeah she also skipped the work culture aspect. Japan is very much focused on pleasing its customers. But it is never a subtractive kind of pleasing, they never remove something and replace it with something better. They always just add onto what is already there.
This translates to all their layout and design work. You will have restaurants that write out all the ways they cook food on their front, text that tells you the same thing in multiple ways. If there is a complaint that someone wants a button to login at the top, that doesn't mean they remove the login button at the sidebar. Everything is additive. No one is ever left behind.
This is not how we do things in the west. Design theory in the west is very much, do not create stuff that just says the same thing. You do not need a huge text that says that a person just did a weird thing on television. Japan has that, they have huge texts on comedy shows that says something weird just happened.
Generally design in the west is also made in a way where users should feel it is very natural. Meanwhile Japan has a lot of complex usages in their design, often times there are explanatory texts for what to do in every scenario. We can track this phenomenon back to their school and societal life, where individualism is not good, following orders and instructions is the right way, meaning thinking for yourself is not good. You should follow the herd and do stuff the same way other people do. This is the opposite of the western way where they teach you to be your own person and disregard what society thinks of you as long as you feel right.
Yes it is culture, but it's more than just "our brain works differently", it's in their society.
If you compare ft/nyt/wsj/wapo to eastern news websites, you will still see that difference.
I lived in Japan for a few years and I noticed this cultural difference while I was there. Even things like grocery stores often had multiple advertisements/songs that were playing and could be heard at the same time. It felt like everything was trying to grab my attention at once which was a bit overwhelming as a westerner. I guess if you grow up in that culture you're more used to things like that and it becomes easier to parse all of the information at once. Neat video!
As a transplanted person in Japan I totally get this. I was born and raised in the US, but have been living in Japan for the past 8 years. Initially I couldn't stand to go shopping without earphones to block out the wave after wave of cacaphony one receives while in pursuit of a good bargain, but I slowly got used to it. Last time I was in the states for a visit the nearly "dead" feeling at the local Safeway was actually a little unnerving! I don't think I'll ever grow to love the website design here though, I still unapologetically consider it awful. On the other hand I don't like the too-stark modern western website design either, to be fair.
That was also my experience while living in Japan and SK. This was a very insightful and interesting video except towards the end when she unfortunately had to try to claim ethnocentrism was a western societal characteristic as if Asian societies don't do the same thing. That was quite arrogant considering how much anti-foreigner sentiment I've seen in these countries. Japan in particular being quite ruthless about it.
looking at Japan from the outside, Japanese reach a point where things stop progressing. Japan perfects it, then it stays that way. Windows Xp usage in japan, fax machine usage in japan, laptop design in japan, the preference to printing reports instead of digital, food, traditional craft methods and even the flip phones
A japanese had revolutionized the microchip and had to go to America to work on the technology, now Japan is no longer a leader in that field. If it works, then it works, don't change the ok button to the right again in android 18.
If you grew up in a dense urban area in the United States this wouldn't have been as jarring. Suburban raised Americans have trouble coping with the activity and busyness of dense cities. Downtown Chicago or New York, not a spread out city like Atlanta. These dense urban areas are as much America as any other place in America but so many people forget the diversity of American life when discussing the differences between here and other countries. If you go from Kansas to Tokyo it's going to be different than going from Queens to Tokyo. I'm not saying it's still not more dense yet in Tokyo, but look at Times Square. It's a mess of dense signs. That's the United States, too.
@@MilwaukeeWoman I think you're wrong. I was born and raised in New York City. I spend a lot of time all over Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. .....The experience the original commenter had sounds like an absolute nightmare that I've never experienced before 💀
I work as a Japanese translator, and this video explains some stylistic differences between Japanese and English texts that I encounter all the time. Japanese texts tend to have longer sentences, which if translated literally into English would seem terribly long-winded and confusingly structured..... I sometimes have to split one Japanese sentence into 5 or more English sentences to make it easier for English readers to read..... Japanese also frequently leaves it up to the reader to infer key information from context, which would seem vague in English.... If Japanese people parse information in a different way because of cultural differences, as suggested in this video, this would explain some of these stylistic differences.
English literary and formal writing tends to be more casual in its style overall. Reading academic writing English isn't significantly harder than reading serious journalism. Other European languages (like French, Italian, or especially German) are much more demanding in that regard, even for someone who is not a native English speaker
This is interesting to me because I have often been to international websites where English is the _Lingua Franca_ and I've noticed that often people 'type with an accent.' That is to say, I can tell from grammatical errors if the speaker is a native speaker of a Germanic, Iberian, French, Italian or Slavic language.
I've never studied Eastern languages and it's clear syntax is so wildly different it can be much harder to suss out what a person is trying to say as the word order leaves so much ambiguity. I wonder if they're taught English syntax because European syntax is close enough to English but Eastern syntax defies me. ( I could've made that first sentence into three. 😁)
Certainly Eastern speakers aren't just left to guess between 'take a picture of the girl in the room' and 'take a picture of the room with the girl in it'. Even with those instructions, I could change the meanings by adding a word or changing a few.
That and someone pointed out that often your foreign language teacher isn't actually fluent in the languages they teach.
That explains a lot of the bad translations for manga and anime alike I've seen.
Sometimes things are just vague and have this feeling that you're missing something
@@Gale42 Might not necessarily be that the translations are bad but that the story is hard to understand for Westerners. If the story already forced Japanese viewers to infer key info from context, you'd still have to piece the details together when viewing the English translation.
@@DABUNGINATOR yeah, maybe the source novel or something was a more poetic work or just hard stories. My bad for assuming bad translations (altough there are a few that really are bad)
My 2 cents (I live living in tokyo):
Even Japanese people don’t like this website design and have problem to find information.
But there are a strong cultural pressure to not complain and accept everything as it is.
An extra one from people inside the IT industry: Japan started later in the game of webdesign, there was a lack of skilled people and researchers in the area.
It is easy to see that many websites are moving way from the old trend when I do online shopping here.
Also live in Japan, agree
Yep, same thing in Taiwan. Also investors don't like to invest into software in general as the nation is priding upon it's hardware knowhow. Therefore SW in banking systems, it systems and websites get stuck in early 2000s.
Regarding the density, I'd say it's primarily language and limitations of the websites. Many times because the websites get very robust it's way too expensive to do a huge redesign and no local company wants to spend the money, so people will have to keep up with the old.
However if we look at Line and how their design is, it's pretty much classic "western" design with news having picture, headline and short description.
@@valervan This is another point. The systems are old. And old websites are working. So no real reason to invest in a new back-end to support a new front-end design.
This is also an investment issue. If you create a new website, you will use the most available and cheap tools on the market.
New companies already have nicely designed apps and websites.
Asian companies hate changes. If this has a cost, they will avoid it like the devil.
@@valervan About the banking systems. In Brazil, it was the same 20 years ago. Nowadays, some companies have just a friendly “mask” over an old system.
They change because new startups start to enter the market. So it was a competitive change that made them move to a new design approach.
The business environment has a strong influence on this.
@@rickricardu yep, indeed very true. And they do avoid it at all costs 😂 pun intended.
I am not East Asian but I lived in Japan for 11 years and worked on localizing websites. I’m well aware of this topic and it’s something I talked about often with Japanese staff. Culturally Japanese like to get a lot of information before making a decision and this comes at the expense of clean designs favored by westerners. I don’t think it’s anything to do with smartphones. That said for a society that people associate with technology, a lot of Japanese offices are still lacking in tech skills. One of the most in demand skill sets that Japan is outsourcing to mostly foreign workers right now is computer engineers, because they don’t have the Japanese manpower and training to keep up with the demand for coding, and no this is not the west forcing them to catch up, this is Japan wanting to catch up but not having the skills to do it alone. That’s how tech phobic Japan actually is. In offices people still use fax and they still use stamps and paperwork hierarchies to approve things.. this is cultural for sure. But, I wouldn’t necessarily group Japan Korea and China in to the same box culturally at all. I’m now living in Korea and they love doing things very quickly- the Korean office is a world removed from the japanese office imo.
It's not because we don't like technology. It's because we inherently don't trust relying solely on it. For instance, when Hokkaido had a island-wide blackout, everything stopped. From SUICA to credit card payments to cell towers. And with an EMP...
"I wouldn’t necessarily group Japan Korea and China in to the same box culturally at all..."
Well said. Absolutely this! This unfortunately is a mistake a majority of Americans and European citizens make. And seeming more and more South East Asians too. And it's absolutely wrong. Even worse is the lumping together of everything under the single umbrella of "Asian" - which, honestly, I think is a lazy racial stereotype. Asia is a continent of 48 independent sovereign nations, with hugely different political and cultural histories, and languages.
I wonder if there’s a link with older generations wanting more information than younger generations.
I used to work at a company that transferred old media to new media, so we’d take old VHSs, film, photos, slides, etc. and digitize them. Most of our customers were elderly. Over and over again they’d compliment the company’s website, which was ugly and cluttered in my opinion, much like the Asian websites shown in this video. But the reason they said they liked it was because it was information dense, not like so many other websites that tell you nothing, they said.
I know that’s anecdotal evidence but there seems to be something to it especially since I know that Japan’s population skews older. I don’t know about other Asian cultures and populations, though.
My assumption was that Japanese web page layouts looked the way they do, because webpages in general looked a lot more like that many years ago. This is for the exact reason you mentioned - there is quite a lot of tech phobia in Japan which stops them from moving away from what they believe is "tried and true" to quite great extents. It's not even just the layout, but often the style and graphic design of said websites too.
@@pvandckwell said.
I really wish this video had Japanese subtitles so I could show it to my Japanese coworkers.
I've told them several times that it's difficult for me to read my schedule because there's just WAY too much information packed onto the excel document, but I don't think they really get it. 😣
If you tap auto translate you can choose the language it translates into, it probably won't be perfect but it might work good enough
In the Answer In Progress video, the culture aspect may have been omitted because this dense web design was commonly seen in early to mid 2000s western pages as well. Yahoo, MSN, Facebook and even TH-cam had this look we now associate with contemporary eastern websites, so we're inclined to believe their web design is "old" and "outdated", not thinking about its intended audience, like you presented. Plus, the languages help, where Japanese, Mandarin and Korean for example can pack syllables or words into one character as opposed to a single letter in a Western language like English, easily presenting the reader entire sentences where they'd be cut out in a Western language.
Mhm you can pack a lot of English, German or Russian language text into a small space as well, because you're not reliant on seeing individual letters to see the message; you recognise words more by their overall shape than by decoding the individual graphemes.
When i was occasionally working in the web sphere in the 2000s, it was common enough to receive a design from the agency which had text mocked up as Lorem ipsum, but made as illegible as at all possible, typeface 6 pixels (5 typographic points) pale grey on white. And then big luscious borders, blurs, image effects, graphics. We would also test against all machines and browsers and invariably on something a combination of a stationary background graphic with a just slightly translucent moving overlay would make the scrolling absolutely crawl, unusable. I can't say i subscribe to this design philosophy, i mean, once condensed text with whitespace around it exceeds little standalone lines (which also ideally should have fair contrast) and transitions into a 6000 word flowing text, NO WAY i would want to read like that!
I think one of the constraints early Internet had to deal with was that it was slow; but what was slow was the markup and images, while text, transmitted with gzip protocol, consumes very little. Even if all you have is 56kbit/s, that's two full print pages of text uncompressed and 2-5 compressed every second. Being on a long and dense page was worth it for not having to wait 20 seconds on a new page load.
Newspapers tend to be dense and cluttered, since square centimetre cost is high. Are Korean newspapers more cluttered than German ones?
I'm not doubting the message of this video, just having random thoughts.
2000s websites are the wild west back in the day and unregulated, modern minimalist websites started to exist when the web becomes organized and regularized. So 2000s is like right-brain creative dominated, and 2010s to present website is left-brain logic and regularized dominated.
@@SianaGearz I think that you actually should doubt the main message of the video. The example with the newspapers that you have brought up is a very salient one. The claim that
“easterners” and “westerners” have uniquely different ways of thinking about things seems extremely bold to me.
@@D.S.handle It refers to surprisingly strong experimental results. It's not all that weird that generations of processing information in certain way, conveyed through the family. lead to a different outcome. Whether and to what extent it applies to popular web pages in particular; to what extent it's this, to what extent it's the people who ended up the ones being tasked with it and their particular trade they trained in and not cultural/ethnic background, is not something you can just expect a clear cut answer to, just different ways to approach this question, and i think the validity of approach in this video is well demonstrated.
@@SianaGearz without a doubt culture frames a lot of our perceptions and understandings, but the way it was presented in the video at least for me seems a bit too decisive.
I'm a Canadian that's working as a designer at one of the Japanese e-commerce companies. At one time we had wanted to simplify and reduce the information on the front page because that was a pain point during user interviews. When proposing the change the CEO adamantly rejected the design because he wanted to keep it as-is. It's the Japanese mentality where "why fix it when it's not broken?"
Man, I think u are totally right. It s the most obvious and bestfitting explanation anyone could have suggested. This thing with holistic thinking is kinda mad and sounds like either Asian nationalism or strange belief that culture can change how u perceive information(I think we all have the same eyes and seek something on the page through moving them...) or some racist stuff. Also it is striking how people are ready to believe that Asian people are some alien like species if one of them says so.
@@KunstPicker I can't say if culture sets people's way of thinking but taking Rakuten, the Japanese Amazon, as an example, the original concept when it starts in 1995 was an online market / department store so you could find anything. You just look at the "map" and you can directly go to the store you want. But as the years go by, many more stores and genres are added, but they continually maintained to have everything on the first load so users can see it all and navigate from there. That said, compared to the screenshot @Answer in Progress showed, the current update since 2020 is much cleaner and easier to view.
I mean, sometimes the mentality is also "why fix it even when it's broken" lol
@@stratospherica specifically "why fix it when it's not completely broken? Let's just patch it up and inconvenient ourselves and customers"
One of the aspects that is frequently ignored is that western internet used to look EXACTLY like the Eastern side of things. I see Japanese/Korean websites, and they make me nostalgic for the older less corporate internet.
I once worked on localising a UK grocery website for a major Japanese retailer. Interestingly, they picked a very minimal Swedish website as their examplar 'best in class' and we started making something that looked like that. However, they kept asking for very specific new features to be added and it got more and more cluttered. I attribute this to them wanting to please everyone, and trying hard to overachieve by keep adding and adding. It was also apparent that the people making the decisions were management, who asked for bew use cases without speaking to the designers.
Another fun fact - the analytics we collected showed Japan, China and Korea to be extremely phone-centric, much more so than the West, even.
In general, I think it did come down to culture, though more that of the creators than the consumers.
Can I ask which grocery website?
Wow. It resonates with me!
This happened to me when I started working at a Japanese office! My boss asked me to make a flyer advertising some services. I brought it to him and he asked me to go back and put some text in a space that I had left deliberately empty. I brought it back to him for approval and he pointed out another empty space, and suggested some text. This continued until in the end I had to make some of the font smaller and move some stuff around and my originally flyer design was lost. It was a bit frustrating but we both learned from each other in the end. He noticed what western design favored and I Japanese.
however, since Japan is an aging population, wouldn't they be less phone centric since there is less young people who use their phones for the majority of the day compared to the older people who use phones for communication. or is that not true?
@@cupid3890 you’re right old pensioners like in their 80s and 90s don’t use their phones as much but in Japan the majority of people you see out and about are young people because they are able bodied and on the way to work etc, so it creates at least the illusion that everyone is on their phone. Also as the people age, the middle aged and upwards will become the old people after all, and they are all already addicted to smartphones like everyone else.
I'm conflicted. I grew up very aware of all this as I'm East Asian/White and grew up in both East and West with my first introduction to the internet to be in Chinese. My mother was a webdesigner and pointed out the differences of Chinese/US webdesign almost 2 decades ago. I agree that the differences exist, but I still prefer the simpler web design. It was a relief when website became more streamlined. I think we've gone a bit overboard though. Everything is overly minimalistic, but I am seeing some bounce back to using more color and movement on pages.
Even having watched this video I cannot imagine somebody who does not find the Japanese web design horribly ugly and headache inducing. But i agree, too sterile is not ideal. I just think the colors were never the issue in Japan's design
You can see it in how boring and Samey UI has become
Great argumentation! I am a designer, there are even more differences than between these cultures - the truth is there's more than one kind of information architecture! Within what you call "Western", there's been recent waves of trying to break from the rules of "simple design" - almost unreadable or wavy fonts, clashing color combinations, elements in random spots... I actually feel the huge standardization of "minimalism" is what's weird, it was lasting a long time and some formulas are becoming uninteresting. I recommend picking up a book about early web design to understand how the standards have coexisted in diff. countries and developed over time - sometimes it's been rather random!
This is super interesting, I will definitely look it it. I also think a partial reason of how our websites developed to this day is just that somebody decided it should be done this way, and no one disagreed, and from then on, it has barely changed because the population just got used to it, hahaha
@@cynthiazhou_ very interesting video. I find myself increasingly annoyed and frustrated at the "minimal" design trend on Western websites, and I'm a westerner living in LA. So often I'm interested in specifications first and foremost and have to waste time hunting for the facts I need to make a decision, fighting with the designer who tried their level best to hide them from me.
I've used digital audio workstations ("DAW" programs) for a long time which tend to be extremely information-rich by necessity, so I'm wondering if this kind of exposure to very complex software has played some part in influencing how I process the world, even having grown up here.
But then, I also don't understand how most Americans think and am headed back to Japan for my fifth trip later this summer.
I would prefer to live in either Europe or Japan. One thing I love about Europe is the often incredibly ornate architecture, which seems to somewhat contradict your thesis in that it's visually very information-rich. Strip malls, they are not.
But then, you have modern Japanese interior design which is often noticeably uncluttered and somewhat reminiscent of Northern European interior design. I remember thinking how much high-end Norway resembled high-end Japan when I was there and wondering why, especially.
You bring up some very interesting points and they really are food for thought, but you seem a little too confident in your conclusions because I can think of so many counterexamples in different areas. I think it's more likely that different places go through different phases during different points in their history, kind of like a breathing motion: take in a lot of complexity, digest & release it, repeat.
The early American web I grew up on was at one point extremely information-rich. I still think of it as the golden age of the Internet in many ways.
I think if you really want to know the source of these changes, I'd look at marketing, at money: what's likely to get the largest number of information-intolerant eyeballs (which it is probably safe to say describes more American eyeballs than not) on your product?
Minimal Design.
We're clearly not building anything remotely gothic over here anymore, and I think it's due to a cultural shift that was not always the case. And there is plenty of "busy" and rather successful, even recent Western artwork. I was just in Vienna last year and I'm recalling a lot of it as I type this.
@@YourMom-zt5zj I'm European and I hate minimalist web designs. Most people I know also are more interested in specifics and technical details of a product and those type of web pages immediately make the seller suspicious. It's the typical tactic of a scam artist to hide his product behind buzz words instead of giving concrete details, or at least that's the psychological reaction people get.
Those minimalist website, at least to me, seem to be more prevalent with big brands and products selling clothes, electronics, tools etc.
When I open a website for a hospital in my area or the government office website to find information or fill out a form the design is more similar to the east Asian one with pages full of information.
I actually always thought that minimalism with big pictures and no info was distinctively an American marketing design and not typical European.
Edit: Man this made me curious and I just randomly started looking at websites of local businesses and brands and they all are leaning more towards the east Asian side then the american one. Like it's not a wall of text but i definitly is way more information on average then those minimalist designs.
@@boomerix Big brands tend to prefer to believe the customer already knows their brand and products, and just wants to catch their attention, hey! This is what you're looking for, we know you know us like you know your own mother. "This is what you want because that's why you're here." "Good to see you again, what size would you like on your Levi Jeans? Further information and sales speak can usually be found on another page for those who hasn't already seen it growing up.
@@boomerix Same too, me I prefer websites that are much more experimental that play with 3d and typography because when you visit a webpage it’s an interactive and online experience like you’re visiting the store physically, I would prefer web companies experiment with their websites to bring out their identity and make it a much more interactive experience rather than just plain simple minimal designs because they want to be safe
As an American and web developer who’s spent almost half of his life in Japan, this topic will never get old. And honestly, I am never able to produce a “good” answer whenever people ask me “why are Japanese websites so different?”. Thank you for making this very informative video and new point of view on the topic. I also believe the difference in web design is attributed to deep cultural differences.
Using South Korea is brilliant because South Korea is so ahead of Japan in software engineering, yet they both tend to organize information the same way online.
One fascinating topic to dive into would be why is Japan so behind in software. Also, why is the tech literacy so low in Japan. This is also leading to a lot of Japanese being disinterested in the current AI boom.
The reason I've seen on why Japan is both technologically advanced (things like advanced toilets and bullet trains), and behind (still using fax, lots of paperwork and still mostly cash) is because of the higher number of older generation, especially with them in higher positions.
there's a lot of older people still working in IT, which means that everyone is still forced to use older programming languages and web design to accommodate them.
It's a combination of being an a society of older people, a society where technology is introduced earlier but broader adoption of that tech is slow, and being fundamentally less interested in new ideas an innovation. The Japanese economy developed over decades of reliance on a few large conglomerates who invested in technologies through concerted efforts, but are also fundamentally risk averse and have a high tolerance for stasis and stagnation as a result. Japan, uniquely compared to South Korea in particular but also to China obviously, peaked in economic and technological innovation rates in the 90s and early 2000s, before their neighbors really caught onto that trend. And as well the Japanese education system is extremely resistant to change and teaching new tech skills is just not something that's prioritized, which means not many IT workers and especially not many *young* IT workers.
Bottom line: For Japan to catch up with its neighbors, it has to learn to be less "old" and less tied to massive, dinosaur companies and therefore more open to new, innovative companies and ideas.
I've seen AI image generation get popular in Japan. NovelAI seems to be the one pushing it.
@@jeremyjackson7429I'm currently standing in a checkout line at an upscale supermarket in Tokyo. Most people pay in cash.
As a western web designer, I think the concept of ‘optimal information density’ underlies so many of the decisions we make about a layout that we often don’t even think about it consciously; we might vocalize it as ‘giving the eye room to breath’ or creating a ‘visual rhythm’ or whatever. I also think it’s interesting how Western websites used to be much denser (like Yahoo’s portal, for example) and I wonder if AiP’s conclusion about mobile phones triggering a shift away is accurate considering that the push for web standards began earlier out of the wake of the browser wars rather than after the introduction of the iPhone.
This makes a lot of sense as an East Asian art student! I go to school in America, but there are many boarding students from Asia. One of the main criticisms we receive in art class is that our projects look too "busy" or that there is too much going on. Your section on Asian art in the MET and multiple museums explain to me why this was the case, while my non Asian peers did not get this type of feedback.
Unfortunately, the part talking about Western vs Eastern art in the video is kind of bad, and it's very apparent that there's a lack of knowledge on " Western art history"(or at least there would be if a unified " Western art " existed, which it kind of doesn't...just likeI doubt that there's actually unified Eastern art, though, I don't know much about that).
To simplify to the extreme, there are actually a lot of "detailed" ," busy" or even "cluttered" Western art pieces; for example, a lot of Michelangelo Buonarroti's paintings.
I have a lot of problems with the core argument being made here. I'm old enough to remember when the western web was also very crowded. Also if we consider other domains like newspapers we see a similar trend, although maybe not as starkly. Historically newspapers were very dense, and now they have a bit more spacing, although not quite as dramatic as the web which doesn't have to account for paper costs. Ultimately, i think the question isn't why Eastern websites are still crowded, but why Western websites aren't anymore. And yes it's probably a change in the western aesthetic, but probably not related to the cultural psychological differences between East and West.
This whole video was full of assumptions and non-sequiturs. As you said, western sites used to be like that.
Agreed. And there were some slips in logic, for example, she asserted: 1. More Japanese people use computers to look at websites than phones. 2. In Korea, 73% of people have smart phones. Thus, 3. The argument that Korean people use their computers to look at websites must be false.
What? That doesn't logically follow! Just because lots of Koreans HAVE smart phones doesn't mean that they don't ALSO have a computer at home that they prefer to use for websites.
I mean, that COULD be true, but the fact that they also own phones means nothing.
Bizarre video all around, honestly.
Your explanation is not mutually exclusive with the cultural psychology argument. Technology or something else changed in Western societies, thus allowing Western design to better match Western psychology. For example, newspaper has page limits and the old html framework was not easy for modern Web 2.0 design. Once these constraints were lifted, Western design changed, while Eastern design didn't because it's already optimal.
I agree that “the ability to intake information” is flawed. I find a lot of western art to be cluttered and it’s primarily an aesthetic preference thing. And there’s a lot of simplicity in Eastern art as well. So idk I think it’s just one of those things that happen
Images and websites used to take forever to load so early websites globally used a lot of text and dynamic HTML and small images that were faster to load. Once those technical limitations were resolved it allowed web designers to be more flexible.
I'm Korean and I never liked korean website design. I also believe many Koreans don't like that kind of design because my designer friends likes minimal design when they design their own websites. I think the individual preference and preference as a company is very different thing. Very interesting video. Thank you!
Samsung's web design is very nice. They are still somewhat information-packed with so many products but with a 'modern' layout. They are in a global space however, which makes sense with their businesses.
Generally the modern trend accompanies any global company in heavy traffic consumer industries; it is just that in America, particularly the US, is home to more multinational companies.
This design trickles down to smaller companies and franchises, but many local websites still follow dense, information-heavy & cluttered designs.
In Japan - Toyota, Sony, Nintendo, etc... large multinational companies, with simplified websites.
@@relaxtoe Korean website design has changed quite a bit in the last few years. When I moved here in 2014, it was common for a "website" to just be a jpeg image of all the content.
Also, I think major sites (banking, online ordering, etc) previously requiring ActiveX security tech held design back because sites stayed with what they were used to in IE.
thanks for being the follow up video for Answers in Progress's video on this. a few seconds after I hit the home button, the algorithm sent me your video.
this was interesting and nice to know.
9:34 This is just fascinating. I played a lot of videogames in the 90s and often liked the Japanese boxart and posters better, I never really understood why the ones we got in Europe were relatively "bland" looking. For example the European boxart of any Super Mario Bros game is just Mario on a single color background, while the Japanese ones literally show the entire Mario world.
As a UX designer this idea to me is so profound that a info-heavy design can be a cultural preference!
I realized how programmed I am to criticise websites designs shown in this video by one culture's standard, never questioning what if people do not want to scroll away forever in doubt.. or anticipate hidden information inside hamburger menus.. just to see more white space on the page.
Thank you!
Exactly! I feel the same too
Agreed that infinite scrolling is way better than a hamburger menu
As a web dev, I like how I can link this video to the designer so that I can tell them to stfu about how dense design is "bad design" >:)
I hate unneccesarily hidden information, every website these days feels like a trap or a mind-trick box trying to get me to click in order to unveil things in some order that someone else decided. It's why struggle as a web designer and web developer because I fundamentally do not agree with the current trends.
It's like modern western websites are designed to waste your time...
@@cynthiazhou_ For something like a homepage, I do think being more dense is actually sensible. Although, there is a point where I as a westerner generally can't find things easily if there is too much.
Although, I do think that for something like an introduction. That a more scrolling focused webpage that has buttons that go to more specific pages is more sensible.
Like if I just heard about a company and am looking into them.
I do also think whitespace is an effective tool for making sure things are legible. But, things can be designed fairly dense so long as the density is strategic.
Graphics and spacial relationship are particularly great for showing context.
Organizing into quadrants. Or node graphs where each node is something significant and you display lines between them as connections are great for seeing the context of data, ideas, etc.
And some forms of websites naturally tend to be dense even in the west. Most notably Course Catalogs for colleges. In many cases, organization can be such that if you want to make comparisons you need to go back and forth between 6 or more web pages. They are significantly easier to find things in than the typical student portal. Since often effectively universities have dozens of effectively separate sites that are only loosely connected together.
With things like books, or similar content like blogs. Tables of contents are really useful. With clear sections and subsections. A nice hierarchy of information.
If the organization structure is made obvious, then I don't have to just rely on seeing less stuff to find the important stuff to me. (Since different parts may be important to different people.)
Western design used to be like Japanese/Asian design. People used to use Yahoo and MSN as their default websites. The only difference is that international Yahoo became untrendy, and Japan Yahoo literally hasn’t changed for decades. Something you didn’t mention is also how Asian companies and societies are intentionally resistant to innovation and change. You can see this in how Japan companies/govt still requires people to use faxes and make multiple copies of physical documents to submit to multiple offices, while America does everything via the internet. Korea and Japan both still require people to use stamps with red ink on paper documents, and Korean banks require you to install “security software” due to poor software practices from the 90s. Asian websites still look “like that” because they literally haven’t touched it in decades, complete with pop ups and pixelated graphics not updated for retina screens.
Mobile apps is a much more interesting topic. The original video says Asians didn’t adopt mobile design, but China and Korea are extremely mobile-first. The only difference is that a lot of these apps have hundreds of functions (aka the “super app”), which is because these apps are run by monopolistic conglomerates. In Western countries, you can see how the Uber app is loaded with taxi, bike, scooter, delivery, groceries, etc. options. Uber’s app is already decently cluttered, but now imagine that Uber is actually the same company as Facebook, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Chase Bank, Airbnb, Groupon, and 20 other apps.
In the 80s to 90, Japan was on the forefront of innovation. What happened since?
Nowadays, a lot in China looks like future, very first foot forward, even if it's not always or necessarily a good future.
This video brings up an interesting point, but from my experience with living in Taiwan and also what you said, it's very biased (I'd argue the study was biased in the first place).
People in asian countries don't just comprehend all the information thrown at them, they learn to selectively focus on what matters in the context. E.g.: out to get a food and looking for a restaurant around (people would use Instagram or Google search but let's say the phone is off), people will look and try to find name which mentions 麵 - noodles. People need to buy some phone accessories, they'd be looking for 3C and so on.
As you mentioned, the innovation on IT systems and websites is stagnant in Japan and Taiwan as well. These are countries which are famous for their hardware and investors are incentived to invest into what they already know works and what they understand.
@@SianaGearz While they were the most advanced in the past, a part of their past unfortunately held them back.
@@SianaGearz economic stagnation, forever recession shit ,family debt for eternity shit
I don't think Asian societies are generally more resistant to change they've just anchored down at different points. Chinese people have wholeheartedly adopted mobile payment where it's still fledgling in America because people have gotten used to their credit cards. Japan is definitely a society that peaked in the 90's and its culture has kind of frozen there.
This made me notice what's been irking me about my art! When I was first starting out, I watched a lot of "how to draw" videos (that were really helpful to be fair) but that all focused on drawing a single subject, usually humans. now ive branched out into animals as well but there always felt like there was something missing, and then i did drawings of this big cathedral and i was SO happy with those drawings! now i realise its because everything was in the context of its environment and not just isolated on my page. anyway this was such a cool video tysm!!!
what an incredible video! thank you for addressing the downfalls of the answers in progress video and also providing valuable context on cultural lens and how it shapes information processing!
This popped up on my recommendation page and I'm glad I watched it. I rarely watch videos in full, but I ended up watching everything. The video was super informational and well-edited. The cultural difference theory makes sense to me as a Korean. Well done!
I am Latin American but raised in the US, i remember learning about the history of the continent and it's cultures and constantly asking myself wether we're western or not. But i agree..really cool video
I remember when I studied web design 12 years ago that websites tended to look more like they still do in Japan today. the focus was more on keeping the information organized in such a way that you didn't have to click to many links to find it. though i love the look of modern websites, i really hate having to look thru so many menu items that are often badly categorized.
12 years ago mobile smart phones were still being widely adopted.
As the push towards mobile browsing become increasingly popular, the information architecture had to change to support mobile accessibility.
Not only are the viewports different sizes, but the interactions available on mobile are different than desktop. (Hover being the most obvious).
As someone who works in the industry It’s much more practical to build a system that works across all devices, than to develop unique systems for each device.
Fun to see how things have changed over the years.
THIS. I miss old web design :( You could find everything you needed so much more easily. It doesn't help that everything is clickbait now
don’t you use the search function?
@@metalmanexetreme search isn't a replacement for bad UX/UI design
That makes sense. My room looks like a mess but I have a system so I can easily glance over and find what I need. I tend to keep a lot of things out in the open because it’s easier than digging through boxes, drawers, etc.
So glad you ended up making this!!! Super fascinating and important to recognize/be aware of!!
Great watch.
in the most honest and respectful way possible, i think you're great at debates, writing essays and articles. The way you presented the information and the structure says it all. Thank you!
I have been online since 1998 when US & European websites looked similar to the Asian sites still do. I usually was able to find what I was looking for faster in the 'older'/Asian layout vs the current/Western layout via where it is. In today's designs, they set it up so you have to search on the site or drill down over multiple levels. Electronics design also reflects this. Back in the time when electronics had a lot of controls or buttons, it was faster to use a specific desired function, whereas now everything is hidden in multiple touch screen menus. It also was easier to control devices without looking via the feel & location of the button. Today's devices make you look at them and use the touch screen or voice control to do even the simplest things.
Chyea, a good example of a website that forces you to scroll and scroll and scroll to see info about a single thing is, Apples website. When you go to any specific items page, you have to scroll a ton to see extra info, while also looking at animated pictures as well. It's an infuriating design honestly, Amazons info about an Apple product is much more condensed, thankfully.
Yeah, when the modern Western UI/UX (not just web!) design started shifting towards this trend of big, touch-friendly, minimalist elements, I hated it. Especially on the desktop. Why on Earth would I _prefer_ to see less information at a glance rather than more? I'd rather see a larger chunk of a conversation in a chat window, I'd rather see more software functions in the same window... without having to... Scroll. All. The. Effing. Time.
I eventually grew accustomed to it, to the point where the old designs actually started feeling too busy to me. But I also think the trend has backpedaled a little bit to strike an actual balance, and to be more sensitive to the presentation medium. Windows 10 and 11 are great examples - the UI dynamically gets slightly more or less dense depending on whether it's used with a keyboard and mouse, or a touchscreen. And the minimalist designs started to be laid out more sensibly - in the beginning it was just the old layout but spread out with more spacing. Nowadays, the entire way the UX is organized is designed to make sense in the context of large buttons.
I still hate stay-on-top navigation bars that are way too wide, websites that have a footer but also have infinite scroll (seriously, who thought it was an acceptable idea), and websites that redefine scroll as an animation, making it impossible to take a glance at the big picture (2013 "trash can" Mac Pro product page...). But in general... you can get used to most trends. Just like we'd get used to Japanese-style web design if all websites started to suddenly look like that.
@@thekatvita When this change first started happening I was using phone alsmost exclusivly in landscape. Android and phone design in general have made this almost impossible now though.
I made a comment describing similar things, I'm glad other people remember that the world used to all have mostly similar websites.
I never thought about that! Electronics do have less and less button.
It seems that simplistic webdesign is becoming more and more common in Korea. My girlfriend is Korean and moved to me in The Netherlands last year. She's a junior web designer, and so far she noticed that the freelance project requests from Korean companies she receives have a common theme: They are all asking for a minimalistic design.
I'd love to know more about if/how/why this change is happening in Korea, if anyone has any sources or personal insights to share.
I am in the industry working for a global company, which might help with this perspective.
Samsung is a large part of it, and Korea is expanding international business relations rapidly.
If you look at most international brands, websites are more simplistic & modern.
The West is home to more international businesses, and the web design industry follows expansion.
As we see this trend with evolving international businesses in the East, design follows the general international trend.
A part of why expansion has been slower is in part cultural differences, but the bigger picture is in industry expansion. You can follow this trend by Googling top international companies in each country and visiting their websites.
It's because international businesses have to tend to their western markets . I'm assuming South Korea has major international companies that are West focused
This change is happening because the "cultural hypothesis" presented in this video is mostly not a real effect.
This "cultural just-so stories" is like the "100 inuit words for snow" all over again. People over analyzing a thing that sounds vague/mystical that would be big if true... but mostly isn't.
The explanation with a lot more power of Occam's razor is simply that technology trends disperse at different speeds, and the simplistic web design originated with English-speaking developers, and just haven't caught up in east asia yet, for a multitude of subtle reasons. It doesn't mean east-asians have alien brains that just prefers a completely different optimal design.
One of the reasons is probably because that new web technology standards are agreed-upon and thus canonized by the English-speaking web dev world. The World Wide Web Consortium prescribes new standards such as CSS which is what made responsive web design possible. Naturally, enthusiasm for this new tech also spreads from this group, this culture of people.
The extent to which culture is involved is that the English speaking culture is more closely related to the W3C culture... that's it...
Just wait a few more years, and when websites in east-asia all look like simplistic western designs we see now, I wonder if any of these cultural-everything people will admit they were wrong.
@@lekhakaananta5864 most logical answer. let's not forget that there are many other cultures as well, but all of them prefer to create a website with minimalism, which is what a normal person would do- encapsulate data.
this video is amazing!! when i clicked on it i had no idea i’d end up analyzing some of my own choices as an artist based on my culture/exposure to other cultures. i learned so much 🤩
Watched this video and answerinprogress' video thanks to this one popping up and wow, what a cool breakdown and analysis of EAst Asian Design! Loved watching both videos so much. I feel smart.
These certainly are interesting observations and comparisons you've raised. Thank you!
That said, I'm not sure if I would agree that crappy dense webpage designs are endemic to 'Asian' culture due to some culture-influenced ability or preference for dense, cluttered web design.
It's easy enough to draw some conclusions by looking at mediums other than web. For example, our newspapers look similar enough, and this is a medium shared by both cultures for over a hundred years. Looking at other ads, posters and such, it's easy enough to observe similarities between both cultures.
I think the example you picked for art and TV ads are a bit of a stretch ;)
I feel that some of it might be due to efficiencies based on economics, namely cost and value of a square inch of space on the screen, how much customers are willing to pay, cost of putting up web content, availability of design tools, proficiency of locals, etc.
The web was essentially birthed in the US, born of cold-war era infrastructure, picked up by local universities due to their easy access for said universities. From there, the advantage grew at the rate of orders of magnitude. Interesting that you brought up South Korea. Gangnam was all farms as recently as the 90s, but due to heavy investment in national IT infrastructure, and focused efforts of conglomerates in IT and electronics, the country/culture reaped benefits very quickly. Furthermore, there's a huge tendency for society in South Korea (even more than Japan) to have trends suddenly and very intensely catch on. Everyone's got a Samsung, and it just so happened that Android had been adopted as its operating system. How different would it be if Apple had licensed their OS to them instead?
Now, not to say that culture doesn't have an effect on web design; however, I don't believe it's to the degree, and for the reasons that you've brought up in your video. Still, this is a very interesting conversation, and definitely worth the participation :)
Thank you for taking the time to create this content!
This was my takeaway, too. Culture no doubt has an effect, but not to the degree and not in the ways portrayed.
Speaking with personal experience, I think there's something about the languages too. Western languages rely on a pronunciation-to-understanding method. In most cases, different words tend to sound differently (although the difference could be very subtle).
But in eastern languages like Chinese and Japanese, there are tons of words that sound exactly the same. You literally need to know the context to understand which word exactly is being spoken. The brain is trained so well I oftentimes find myself understand the general meaning before the other person even finish their sentences. I had a bit difficulties to speak properly when learning western languages because subconsciously I expect the listeners to grasp that I am saying just with a general framework. But obviously that's not how native western language speakers think. They need you to express yourself clearly or they won't get it.
The other aspect is writing systems. With Chinese and Japanese Kanji, it's easy to get what the text means by just a casual glance over. You don't actually need to READ them. Just one look at the key characters and you understand. Even with texts cramped together, it's still relatively easy to find what you want. Because there are thousands of distinct characters and they all hold different meanings.
Meanwhile Western languages work on alphabets. The writing systems are about the different combinations of a set of about only two dozens letters. You can't get what the text say by simply glancing over. You need to read them. Many words look very similar and only differentiate themselves by one or two letters. I often misread when I'm not paying attention. Reading is such a brain cell burning process, I went from the passionate reader in my native language to the type of person who hate huge blocks of texts and who gets headache from reading in western languages.
With the context of western languages in web designing, there absolutely is a need to filter out all the unnecessary text-based content/noise in the background and make your focus as clear as possible. I become much less tolerant to noise in general when I realize that noises (ex. grammatical structure in sentences that are necessary but make it hard to understand the point) are actually hindering my understand.
I had a similar thought, that there has to be something to the way the languages work too, I just don't know enough about eastern languages to be sure, thanks for the info:)
However Korean and Japanese also have alphabets and there are many words in English for example that are the same with different meanings... so..... This is not exactly a reason that works.
@@hitmusicworldwide Do you actually speak those languages to say or you're just making an assumption? Because I speak Chinese, English and French and I'm learning Japanese and this is what I've experienced. Don't know Korean well enough so I didn't mention that in my comment. But as for Japanese, yes they have kinda two alphabet things, but whenever they want to get a point ultra clear they use kanji (like for example the kanji for "danger"). Kanji is part of the language and thay play an important enough role to impact how people read the texts. You can't deny the difference they make simply because you see alphabets.
vietnamese and thai languages also have alphabets
I get your point but I don't think that's the case. Latin derived languages (Romance languages) have the same thing: same word means whole different things depending on the context without changing the tone/sound of it. As an example, there's a book about "Coisa" (Portuguese) dedicated to explain the usage of that word alone.
@answerinprogress さんの動画を見てここにたどり着きました。
あの動画ではwebの歴史や成り立ちから分析してましたが日本人として疑問に思うこと、納得できない事が
ありましたが、こちらを見て非常に優れた分析と回答をされてたのでとても良かったです。
Culture does play a part but probably not as big or deep as you made it out to be. The bigger reason for the cluttered is prob due to how portal sites remained popular in east asia when they've died out in the western world. Basically before the late 2000s, portal sites are big whereever u are, and so sites tried to copy what's popular, and we end up with portal sites-like design mostly. Then when portal sites died out in the western world, some portal sites (yahoo, msn) remained popular in east asia. As such, in east asia, some sites copied what's popular (portal sites), or they stayed same since portal sites are still popular and that's how we still get cluttered web design in east asia.
basically, the legacy of portal sites is the bigger reason. Some of the websites you've shown are portal sites. Maybe what we really need to look into is why portal sites died out in the western world and why/how remained popular in several east asian countries. Naver in itself is fascinating, i can't think of another country that has a portal site that is as dominating as naver. Would love to see someone just do a deep dive on how naver got so big in south korea, when portal sites are dying out everywhere else
I believe you might have made a mistake about japanese art within this essay video. It got brought up that japanese art is often cluttered and dense, lacking a focal point. But this isn't technically the case. If we look at the works of famous, ancient japanese artists such as Hokusai we can see that his works are very mixed. Sometimes they are cluttered as in Ejiri in Suruga Province (1830/31), but other times they were very focused like in "Chinese Immortal Yuzhi and Her Dragon" (1798). The latter is so focused it actually left out all the background, a technique which is called negative space or "mu" (mu, coming from zen and meaning nothing). "Ghost of Kohada Koheji" is another great example of a very focused picture while "Suspension Bridge on the Border of Hida and Etchu" is focused, but uses a lot of "eye guidance" to manifest the focal point.
The major difference here is that japanese art tends to be more creative, less accurate to real life. It treats it subjects less serious than European/Western counterparts. Many paintings of Van Gogh were for example just as holistic as japanese art (literally, the guy was heavily inspired by japanese art after major art imports hat hit the nation after the opening of the country).
What I believe is important is to highlight that we're talking about popular art i.e. art that is consumed by non-artists. In this aspect many of the European arts were concerned with catering to an aristocratic ruling class who wished to express the godliness through their taste in art, meanwhile the art in japan had been treated with a much more humble character (obviously tying back to the entire things about being subtle, and especially shinto/buddhist/Confucius traditions and values like living in harmony with nature, et cetera.)
Many artworks of the Renaissance had been just as dense in it's information and environment as the japanese examples. "The School of Athens" by Raphael is a good example of this, or even better. Look at BOSCH and "Garden of Earthly Delights". This is a painting from the 1500s, which is so heavily dense in information or "Jagers in de Sneeu" by Brügel which tells it's entire story through it's environment. One of my favorite paintings is "the wild hunt of odin" which gains it's entire meaning through the ethereal color and background information.
I do have no problems believing that the cultural lens exists because it's evident just by paying attention to how western/eastern people phrase their observations/thoughts, yet when talking about art this point of clutter doesn't add up with the evidence. It omits some of the most important works of European art and focuses primarily on a few exceptions, most of which are portraits depicting women and ignores almost the entire history of art within Europa. Perhaps, this is an American thing since one who isn't from Europa might think of the word "western" and have all these castle/barrock stuff in their mind that they unconsciously pay attention to works of art aligning with this association, unknowingly ignore all the counter evidence.
None the less, I have noticed that japanese people in generell are better at consuming art holistically. My guess is that this could be traced back to christianity/polytheisms. Perhaps because having multiple gods might incentivise one to think of the relations of subjects to another, while worshipping one being as "ultimate truth" forces one to discard other elements as untrue. Lady Quan Yin(Kannon-sama) is a great example. She is the most important deity in japanese buddhism, known as the thousand armed buddha. According to legend each arm contains an eye in her palm with which she sees another perspective of truth, thus having an infinite amount of arms allows her to grasp the full picture of the existence. Compare this to the Abrahamic God which demands only his view point to be taken as truth.
Thought this is just my speculation. It's most likely a myriad of factors. Regardless, I just wanted to correct the part about "western" and "eastern" artworks.
Great video nontheless.
But, artists like Hokusai were very famous in the West. That tells me something. 👀
Thank you, I thought the same thing (you said it way better than I would have :)
Yeah how she showed some Renaissance as example for subject-focused and not information-dense. The audacity.
I think that she considers “western” and “North America” as the same thing in a big generalization that doesn't really add up when we look at some real life examples across history, such as the ones that you mentioned. You can't just put hundreds of countries from different parts of continents together, since each one has its own culture, versus East Asia.
IIRC, Hokusai was also influenced by western art as it made it's way into Japan and also the increase in ukiyo-e, drawings where the focal point were the celebrities, whom were a big part of the culture then. (Great Art Explained does this well.)
as a westerner living in korea, i think there's some nuance to korea in particular that fits with the smartphone pattern -- with online shopping, for instance, each product is a scroll format, like a webtoon (the popularity of the scrolling webtoon over traditional manhwa/manga design also reflects this korean distinction). you get a TON of information, but it's fed to you in bite-size graphics in a very specific order. also, almost every desktop website has an accompanying phone app that tends to be MUCH more streamlined and minimal.
so you still have the relational information in a way the west doesn't, but korea makes it highly streamlined for mobile consumption
well-analyzed :)
Indeed I also noticed this! but you worded it so much better! The South Koreans have truly optimized their websites for mobile consumption.
thank you for the video and your contribution to the discussion. it is always nice to hear more than one voice on a topic 💚
Loved the video, especially as an anthropology postgraduate who is obsessed with cultural constructs. Thank you for the effort, will definitely stay tuned for more topics like this.
One minor gripe though: "Western art" has NOT always been so subject focused. It's actually a realtively recent development. The examples in the video were a bit cherry picked (although I understand why, there was a point to be made). For those who are curious, look at painters like Hieronymus Bosch to see just how busy Western art could get sometimes.
I disagree that subject focused art is recent. If you look medieval art or art from ancient rome/greece, you will see a lot of art where has a lot going on background, but has a very clear focal point. Making same search about ancient art from japan or china, you will se so many paintings where don't have background and foreground, everything has the same emphasys.
But, i agree about the cherry picking: "West" and "East" resumes multimillenial societies. In a millenia, you can find almost every kind of art you want, everywhere.
It was heavily cherry picked, comparing "western" portraits to east asian landscapes makes no sense
A bit unrelated but, you as an anthropology post graduate, what job opportunities were you able to get?
@@makilikespies Hiya, thanks for the question. I initially wanted to stay in academia and do a PhD then become a lecturer, because I just loved the subject that much. But I didn't have enough funds to pursue this, so I started looking for a graduate job as a project manager and/or business analyst (I thought there were enough transferable skills there). I was lucky enough to get hired at a small consultancy and am currently working a hybrid between these two roles in public healthcare - it's interesting and very research/analysis/solution oriented. I think the people skills I've gained from anthropology actually helped me outperform colleagues who got degrees in business and project management. They lacked practical experience and confidence. The good thing about anthropology is that you can do anything. That's also the bad thing about it. Hope this is useful 🙏🏻
@@aleksmdgreat wow thank you for the answer. This is really helpful for me as a high schooler so I can choose my major better.
I imagine Samsung being a Korean brand with a large worldwide market share might be behind the high early adoption rate while Japan's largest domestic smartphone brand is sony which doesn't have a large market share
Yes, I believe so too
Yes. And a big reason why Japanese mobile phone makers (not just Sony) did not become leaders in the worldwide phone market is that they didn’t embrace Android for years. They just invented i-mode phones a few years earlier, and that was what people in Japan used and continued to use for years. There were attempts to internationalize i-mode, but they weren’t very successful. Android and iPhone were just more versatile and mature, based on existing technologies, and they promised to bring existing services like the WWW and email more or less as they were to the mobile phone. I-mode phones used specialized services specifically designed for i-mode phones.
And btw, a similar trajectory happened for Nokia. They made their own operating system with built-in functions for their phones: Symbian. There was an alliance with other phone makers. But they ended up re-inventing so many wheels, and ultimately only got a very specialized and proprietary system that wasn’t all that attractive to software companies: yet another specialized system to develop for, and with limited functionality. And betting on this eventually destroyed Nokia’s phone business - the company was by far the world’s biggest mobile phone maker before iPhone and Android took over.
No. I am pretty sure it is because Japan has a really large elderly population. The adoption rate for smart phones amongst younger generations was quite high even in 2013.
This is so cool haha, never thought of it that way.
But as a Taiwanese, I'm not sure if I'm just being hugely influenced by the western culture, I do think that there is still potential to make those Asian-style websites a bit more aesthetic or something. idk how tho lol
We are definitely seeing a lot of Western styles begin to influence designs in Asia!
I haven't checked out Taiwanese websites but Chinese websites in Malaysia & Singapore definitely follow a more Western style layout.
@@cynthiazhou_ yeah cause it makes more sense
Wonderful see video essays like this responding or adding information from one to another like scietific articles. Thats the right way!
I presented at a symposium in Japan last week and it was so interesting to see this in practice! Without really thinking, the slides that I'd designed were very information-sparce (I'm from northern Europe): three or maybe four key points, large text and limited use of a small number of very clean graphics. My Japanese peers put a lot more information on their slides - to the extent that you could follow the presentation down to finer details from the PowerPoint alone. Both approaches have pros and cons, but it was interesting to hear how this is likely to be culturally mediated.
it is extremely common advice to not put too much information on slides though. It's how good slides are supposed to look like - easy to read and parse. A beginner's mistake is to put walls of text on their slides that they then read aloud. A PowerPoint presentation is supposed to suplement a speech, not be the speech.
Japanese Powerpoints are the absolute worst! LOL!
I’m still hesitant to boil down too starkly to “easterners think this way, westerners think that way,” but the comparison of ancient/early modern chinese landscape paintings with their multi perspective, non focal approach, to the dense and busy websites you are studying is a really great point! thanks for the analysis!
i don't believe they are arguing that all easterners/westerners think the same, rather there is a dominant design trend in each respective culture that is accepted as "good design". when taking like a graphic design class you would learn techniques and how to follow the "rules". doesn't mean that you can't design outside of those rules, but that is what is the agreed upon cultural norm. and design trends change over time within cultures as well.
Its thought it was such a reach. Bad design is bad. UX research are way over this. And there are plenty of modern Japanese websites too.
why are you hesitant to accept that both cultures think differently? That's the occidental side talking. So focus centered on the idea that we all should think in the same way. Language, expression, culture, etc is different between regions; it's natural to believe that the brain works differently too.
My experience in e-commerce seems to show that Western companies think they know better, and if it works for them, it should work for everyone, even if data says differently.
@@superlynnie Your statement is contradictory. "if it works for them, even if data says differently". But I do agree, it is common to think that all research made in the West should apply to all around the world, when clearly there are cultural and behavioural diffferences that should not be ignored.
As a european design student who is currently living in South Korea I myself also found a lot of cultural differences in the way information and products are designed, I really enjoyed the way you explored this topic!
Thanks for sharing your work, participating in that way to the conversation is what I love the most about the internet 🙏🏽
This is absolutely fascinating! Great video.
There's also the simple mechanics of language and formatting, when you work with a character set where most if not all glyphs can comfortably fit in a series of mono-spaced square boxes it's much easier to predict the shape that the actual text is gonna have when being looked at from a distance, on the other hand the latin alphabet has letters of variable width and height plus the breaks in each line are often unpredictable causing text boxes to have a lot of blank spaces that mess with the design. Unlike advertisement where you can massage the text to fit the space available websites have to be designed in such a way that the ever changing content being presented still looks good, after all you can't write a whole article in uppercase and expect to be taken seriously, so it makes sense to just use copious amount of white void to mask this issues. And yeah, the fact that culture has already trained us to look at the focal point and ignore the surroundings and consider that to be aesthetically pleasing helps quite a bit, web design is little more than chasing trends at the end of the day.
Also with the Asian alphabets the more complex (in the case of Kanji) the character the more meaning it has, each Kanji character can mean different things in different types of context. With Japanese the gana/kana word meanings can be different from the same set of characters (especially in the context of people's names) than in Kanji. In the case of my last name I tried to find the meaning for the Hiragana/Katakana version of if and only came up with Hawk (Taka) Mountain (yama) while my last name written in Kanji is Alpine (I find the meaning of the Kanji even makes sense with the town of Takayama in Gifu, since it seems to be up where it snows and is most likely a mountain town).
I guess this can also be said for Korea's unique alphabet too (in relation to China and Japan).
This is an interesting addendum to a very interesting video. However, as a designer I DO think there’s room for improvement even within the difference in information absorption. For example you can find both good and bad examples of design in Japan even within the context of this difference of aesthetic preference. I DO think there are a lot of variables at play. I am also suspicious that there are a lot of instances of information being prioritized over aesthetic. All that to say, as a designer living and working in Japan, I’m interested in this conversation and appreciate hearing various opinions on the matter.
My final point just being that simply because something carries a lot of information, it doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t play with a broader variety of compositions.
Also with regard to usability… still think Japanese websites are teeeerrrrible to navigate. Buying tickets on Tokyo Disney’s website for example is a grueling process that doesn’t even work half the time. Lol
This video is the perfect complemente to AIP's video, so glad I found it. I would love to read your paper too!
This is pretty great recommendation by YT, It rekindled curiosity in me about certain things that were in my mind but I kept putting them off. So thanks for that. BTW really great video.
Having lived in both the East and West, I'm not entirely convinced of this argument. I think both you and Answer in Progress make good points, but I also think that the most significant factor is much simpler than that - Easter script is itself very dense. Hanzi, kanji, and hangul are all very densely written characters, and having a product that says "FRESH MISO SOUP" looks like "鲜味噌汤", 新鮮な味噌汁”, and "신선한 된장국", all of which objectively have more strokes and more complexity.
That writing style appearing everywhere makes people accustomed to that level of information density.
Sure, culture and smartphone adaptation may play a role, but I really think in both cases these account for (much) less than 50% of the reason. The largest driver, I think, is that the written language just takes so many more strokes to convey (arguably) the same amount of information.
although I agree that east asian are more tends to dense design. But these design you picked is not a good design even judged by the locals .And they are not justified for a good design.There are good designed dense websites and apps but not those poor designed outdated ones. That is only a excuse for not changing the design.
I was thinking the same, The Latin character have mostly straight line and are relatively less complex with very little intersections. But the characters in the East Asian languages (and Indian languages) have a lot of intersections and are quite complex. So the Typography is the main issue. May be due to complexity of the scripts it doesn't lend itself well for smaller screens. I checked some of the Indian news websites in English and in local language. Even with the same layout and design when viewing the page in a local language it feels very cluttered.
I agree with your point. However, there is one thing i would like to add. Due to the complexity of written characters, hanzi, kanji and hangul are able to contain more information in a shorter text. This is what i noticed when I went to this museum in Japan.It had artwork descriptions in several different languages, including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and English. English was the longest and chinese was the shortest in terms of length. This is also why I think East Asians are better at reading things at a glance rather than the whole thing, since their "whole thing" is more compact and occupies less space and thus easier to see with a quick glance. Here is the Google Chinese translation of my reply:
我同意你的观点。不过，我想补充一件事。由于书面字符的复杂性，汉字、汉字和韩文能够在较短的文本中包含更多信息。这是我去日本这个博物馆时注意到的。它有多种不同语言的艺术品描述，包括日语、中文、韩语和英语。就长度而言，英语最长，中文最短。这也是为什么我认为东亚人更擅长一眼看清事物而不是整体，因为他们的“整体”更紧凑，占用的空间更小，因此更容易快速浏览。这是我的回复的谷歌中文翻译：
As you can see, the Chinese translation is shorter than the English text.
And another interesting thing to know: if you scramble the order of Chinese written characters in a sentence, the Chinese might not notice at all when reading it. I'll provide an example: "研表究明，汉字序顺并不定一影阅响读。比如当你看完这句话后，才发这现里的字全是都乱的。" I would say that the Chinese read word by word less than English readers, so are faster at reading things at a glance.
Might be digressing a little bit... but just wanted to share some of my thoughts and experiences here :)
Western websites used to be a lot more cluttered. That changed when Apple came along and made "simplicity" fashionable.
Then Western companies jumped on the bandwagon; icons became less colorful and more monochrome, logos became more sleek and simpler, interfaces changed from the many-buttoned Blackberry to emulate the single-buttoned iPhone. Minimalism bled everywhere. And things that used to present some surprises when looked at a longer time, lost that.
Otoh, Eastern companies did *not* hop on the Apple bandwagon. They buy the phones yes, but do not emulate Apple.
@@keiraholst1563 Minimalist design, though, was around and fashionable post-WW2 for decades before Apple was even a figment of Steve Jobs' imagination. It would have found its way into web design simply as more actual graphic and commercial designers became involved. And Job's influence was on the hardware style rather than website content and presentation.
The thing that strikes me when I see the difference between western and eastern websites is that western frontpages tend to seem more like a brochure where as eastern websites look like a map. You're absolutely right about the holistic aspect. Eastern and japanese presentations in general tend to convey so much that it feels like a whole world in and of itself that you can get lost in, very similar to their art, where as western presentation tries to present some sort of form or color that identifies the website first and foremost that you can then hold some relation and feeling to. So where the east focuses on the whole, the west focuses on the individual.
Oh thank you so much, that was what I was waiting for when i watched the original video, thank you, it's very interesting.
this video along with the answer in progress video were so interesting! thanks for the resources! The pics at the end references how the food table is also super different - compare a Japanese breakfast with a Western breakfast and you'll find similar difference!
Such an excellent critique and perspective on a much bigger video. Yours doesn't lack in quality and presentation either! Well written and edited! As an chinese from South East Asia, I too felt that video had something lacking, but you added so much to the conversation!
Yeah this video made a lot more sense to me as an asian american. I left the original video not fully understanding what their conclusion was. According to their theory, if eastern asians had their phone/smartphone revolution before we did, then they should have adopted "minimalistic" websites sooner as well, not ignore the design entirely. The actual culture, language, and different ways of explaining and processing information makes much more sense. And you can definitely see the design preferences in more than just each other's websites, as you said. Nice.
I just stumbled onto Answer In Progress' video and found it super interesting. Fortunately your video was recommended after, so I check it out and wow... it makes so much sense. Great job :)
Found this by chance. Very good food for thought when designing a website for multiple cultures. Thank you for your insights!
I've recently found and began to follow your content on this channel. Your quality as well as the way you articulate your thoughts in your videos are phenomenal! I appreciate the research and time you've put into this.
I love that you touched on the artistic side as well, as a western animator I see this a lot compared to eastern animation. It's such an interesting perspective and approach and I'm sonstantly trying to learn from it as I see both viewpoints have their uses and advantages. Thanks for the informative video!
This is so fascinating! I’d love to hear about how culture influxes how we see shape if you ever decide to do that video.
This is so fascinating. I really appreciate you making this!
hey! i was writing an essay on the exact topic and found this while watching the other video. your view and evidence on how culture has had a significant influence on east asian design widened my perspective and made my essay rly successful so just wanted to leave a comment!
Very exciting and impressed. Thanks, Cynthia.
As a Korean SW engineer, I had a chance to develop an ecommerce site for Japanese company in 2013~2014. They requested me to add more text description on web page and I realized that Japanese web sites are more dense and information rich. I had been curious about the reason.
One thing I would like to mention is that the asian web sites you showed in this video seemed search engines, portals, or news sites which contains a lot of text. Whereas the example western websites were in differenct categories. That is because trendy ecommerce or fashion web sites in Korea looks simillar to western ones. Thank you anyway. Your video inspired me a lot. :)
Wouldn’t it be the culture how much they respect older people or tradition? For example, Korea tends to change very fast and focus on younger people, which results in inconvenience to older people. So do the web sites, too (except government sites)
However, as far as I know, Japan tends to stick their tradition and conventional culture, so the web sites are more focused on older people. That is just my guess. :)
Could it be possible that young Japanese who are mobile friendly are more analytical thinker than holistical thinker and they don’t like information rich web sites. I am not sure whether holistic and analytical thinking is embedded in our DNA or not.
This is a great point. The templates from a lot Western website making tools tend to be dedicated to e-commerce and portfolio websites, which all serve as a different function to news pages and forums.
I would also be very interested in seeing how these design evolve in the next few years, especially as modern designers in East Asia start leaning more into the Western design style.
@@cynthiazhou_ that was a great video, but i Just need to make one correction: the west culture is an union of jewish ( Christianity), Rome/latin (civil rights) and greek ( philosophy/ science)... not a germanic, nothen european thing.
the Focus on one thing is connected with the "essence", witch is a core in greek philosophy.
The ideia that west culture is northen european is an white supremacist's Idea.
Sabrina's work is immensely well thought out. We need more videos like yours that expand where her time and space constraints caused her to miss..
I really liked a lot your video! It is really complementary of the video of answer in progress! Shared here in my social media!
First off, this was very well made. I think what you have brought up here is just scratching the surface. The goal of the video was to explain how culture could influence design, and you accomplished that, but it also shines a light on something I've begun to understand. If I see a problem I try to understand the whole picture and context while adjusting my stance according to my bias. I think most "western" people have this capacity in their daily life but we end up framing things without context. I have difficulty explaining what I'm trying to say so I'll summarize with an example of the problem this raises: There was a street corner that had an unusually high amount of crime, and the city wanted to put a stop to that. Their first instinct was to add extra police patrols there in order to dissuade people from committing crimes, however someone in the decision making room asked a few more questions, and found out that the street corner in question had a pub that was right across from a local diner and a movie theater. They suspected that the high crime rate was a result of drunk people walking home and interacting with the high influx of people leaving the theater and diner at the same time the pub closed. Their proposed solution? Have public transit that runs for an hour past when the pub closes. The bus there stopped running before the pub closed, so all those drunk people were forced to walk home and probably didn't have anyone to go pick them up, and also happened to be the time the theater and diner let out. So by letting the public transit run later, those drunk people were able to go home without having to walk past the diner and the theater and in fact it lowered that unusually high crime rate.
I think this kind of holistic thinking is what is sorely missed when making decisions. This video is an excellent example of a surface level issue that shows just how big of a difference the two types of thinking can have and shows just how broad of area that is. My example is an example of it brought to an extreme but I truly think this is how we will be able to solve the issues of the future. We need interdisciplinary understandings from every angle to come together and be able to understand and communicate with each other and have room for empathy in order to find a solution to a problem that we never would have come to if it was just two ideas for a solution pitted against each other. It's going to take a lot for people to think like that, but with the internet and access to information from multiple perspectives and a multitude of cultures and a generation of people willing to hear each other out, I think it's just a matter of time. That's my TED talk lol.
And yes. I liked my comment and commented on it so it would be shown more :)
After watching this video I watched your video called: "The Manipulative Power of Design" and I think you are dead on. That's basically what I was trying to say with the included existential dread of the current struggles I'm facing. I understand how my role in any job will be just to do what my employer asks, and if I want to make a living wage where I live I'll have to work for companies that have those unethical side effects. I also see how design impacts every facet of our lives. In my example in my big main comment I was actually talking about urban design and how public transit and road design and zoning laws all sort of clashed together to have one visible negative consequence. I see everywhere how if we had less dependency on cars and built more concise areas that felt like a small town, and had a wide array of public transit or bike paths we could have more livable and enjoyable spaces and be within walking distance of a place to hang out with friends. Even things like zoning laws inhibit the design of urban sprawl to prevent duplexes or multi-family homes to condense the space and lower rents. And all of that is just within urban design, that's not to mention the design of the education system and how desperately it needs a reform to make learning fun again and not focus so heavily on standardized tests which are only beneficial for colleges to weed out people and how college is seen more of a stepping stone for a career or job rather than a way to further one's education, or the design of media and how it plays into our weaknesses and rawest emotions in order to keep us engaged and enraged at each other, or the design of policies and laws which arguably have ties to everything above and how that can affect peoples lives drastically if decisions aren't made with them in consideration. It's extremely hard for me to see all that and even harder to begin to figure out how I can play a part in fixing it when everything was designed to work the way it is now. The only way I see any of these larger issues being resolved always returns to raising awareness and getting people to start thinking like a designer, specifically with how everything they do feeds into the psychology of the end user. My TED talk has now become a rant about everything I concern myself with. Thank you so much for reading this, I hope I was able to convey my thoughts in an understandable manner. And thank you for making these videos.
Thank you for sharing! I'm so happy this has spurred you to think about how you see the analytic vs. holistic way of thinking in your daily life. These are some very insightful examples and I think everyone should be more aware of these differences in perspectives shaped by our cultural upbringing. (I will also like and comment so your comment will be shown more lol)
I think you just said this in a way that makes more sense. The way the video was seemed too ranty. If not for the TedTalk clips Cynthia would have had only a rant and a dislike.
@@DROIDFARM ...seen from your perspective shaped by your cultural upbringing
Interesting topic raised, but I believe its easy to come up with this conclusion within 2 weeks of watching the other video, when one hasn't been working during the early years of web design during late 90s in in Asia until now (I worked in both Hong Kong and China) The simple reason is just very very conservative people on the top running each of these news companies etc. Don't forget that the cluttered design started during Netscape portal and Yahoo portal news sites. And basically no one wants to take risks or find better solutions because its run by sales and marketing teams, who just want to put as much content on the first page, and put as much of the banners as possible. Its sales led, rather than content. That's the difference and not about holistic versus analytical. In fact if you had to use one or the other, the ones that make the decisions are very logical and analytical people, who see sales results rather than customer experience.
Exactly. There are cluttered news sites in Europe as well but many consider those sites "trashy". Clean websites are more elegant and nicer to use.
This video scratched an itch i had for SO LONG. Thank you so much!
OMG This is so much fun to watch!
Thank you so much for the effort you put in in making this vdo.
I love how rich in information and context this video is! Thank you!🔥
Recently Japanese web design has also started adopting "western" minimalistic web design guidelines. I noticed its slow roll-out across variety of websites, it mostly affects start-ups though (maybe because they are in general more innovative?)
That’s probably because there’s a much simpler explanation lol. Boomer companies do boomer things. The reason they still use fax machines is the reason they use ancient web design.
@@cd2320 This, but East Asian culture (aversion to conflict and deference to elders) really amplifies this. Unless you have a company that only consists of young people (startups), the only people making decisions are older, senior employees. I don't think it's a stretch to say older people have a harder time keeping up with and accepting new trends (we'll get there some day), so when the system discourages any one else from speaking up and bringing fresh ideas, it's no wonder why innovation becomes stagnant.
@@cd2320 I don't buy this given it was boomer companies that changed our internet form the information dense student internet into the empty internet it is today. I think it's more to do with the perception of the internet as a thing for the young. Grandmas are excpected to use the internet here, but in Japan you can still fax your paperwork or drop it off at a government office (a thing we basically don't have anymore except in the biggest cities because you need to use the internet to get anything there). Students are used to note taking, and information rich pages, Boomers haven't needed to worry about that in forever so want an empty internet, whereas in Japan they can just do thing in person instead.
@@SheezyBites the same boomer companies which are a lot more accepting of change as compared to their Eastern counterparts
Hmmm, not really. You can tell by looking at the Japanese TH-cam thumbnails. Regardless of age, the more information, the more clicks.
You will be surprised that Japanese thumbnails are very flashy.
If it is not flashy, it will not be clicked.
After that, the biggest e-commerce sites in Japan are also flashy.
But corporate sites are different. It has always been a minimalist site.
Thank you for elaborating on this with your video.
10:28 I’m so glad this point was made because I was thinking the same. I’m doing East Asian studies at my university, and one of my classes has us reading a lot of classic Chinese literature. We had one class that talked a lot about how it was common place for a lot of classic Chinese texts to read them with the annotations and commentaries of scholars from the past. When we looked at original texts with the commentaries, they ended up quite cluttered with text in every nook and cranny. But my professor emphasized that many people’s first exposure to the stories was with the commentaries. So I definitely feel like this was a contributor to the culture
This is an amazing response to the original video. Seeing creators have a dialog with each other in such a polite and well researched way is really great.
Very well-made argument, while watching their video I wasn't convinced by their explanation at all.
It looked like they made their most efforts confirming the website design myth, which was very well done but didn't research enough about cultural differences.
I have to say they provided a very good start to this conversation, and they definitely researched into places I would not have
This video definitely shined light onto a cultural question about design that I am interested in learning about. Great job presenting information on culture as a base and then design on the back end! You earned myself as a subscriber from this video
This was fascinating! I ignored this youtube recommendation several times, I'm so glad today I finally decided to watch this video!
Thanks for making this video, I wish TH-cam had recommended it earlier instead of months after the original AiP video lol.
This made me think of Wester design in a different way: it's more often about marketing than information. Usually the main goal in such design is to direct the viewer to a single Call of Action (CTA), e.g. to buy something/subscribe/visit a page etc. so to make it effective designers try to have the CTA highlighted in isolation so as many viewers as possible must have seen it (also repeating here and there). Websites are mainly designed as marketing platforms, even personal ones sometimes, and I think we can see it on some Asian sites like musical artists' sites that are selling music or events. Informational sites like Wikis are still pretty dense while focusing on having an easily navigable hierarchy.
One of the main gripes with dense Asian sites is less how dense they are and more how text-focused they are on top of that. In UI design, I like being able to use different fonts and other graphic elements to add some style to a page which is also more mentally stimulating for me. You could say there's more room for branding your page. Asian sites seem to be more informational as the video mentions where branding and marketing seem less relevant, which seems weird to be unless there's not all that much competition for those platforms so they don't have a strong need to strongly brand a site or grab attention in creative ways, like everyone knows which website to go to for X and which to go to for Y without browsing much.
I wonder what the main barriers or thresholds are in Asian sites that make a website have an increased bounce rate where users will quickly leave the site, since that kind of density is what usually pushes people away in some other cultures, along with content quality.
I have lived in Japan for nearly 40 years and totally agree with your thesis. When preparing documents, emails, web pages for Japanese clients, I revert to dense in information cramped into fewer pages. But when doing the same for overseas market, my brain switches gears and I try to aspire to a Steve Jobs approach to design and documentation. Never questioned why I do this but now it makes more sense to me. Thank you for your post!
Damn that’s so interesting! Definitely gonna look into some of the articles you linked 🙌🏻
This video helps to present an even broader perspective that Answer in Progress started to paint for this topic. Thank you both for your well-researched contributions!
Thank you so much for making and sharing this. You explain things well, and I have learned some important things about eastern and western culture differences in design; and in general thought patterns. Gold.
this was a fantastic video! great analysis and thank you for teaching me something today :)
This was a fantastic analytical video, you covered everything clearly and concisely
I actually watched that video. Your arguments are awesome and make total sense, kinda surprised she left that out of the video
Great video! This is a really interesting idea that I had never heard of before. At a student conference the other day, I got annoyed with some of the other students for cramming too much information onto each slide. I couldn’t easily tell what point they were trying to make, and wished they would split it up into several slides to help tell their story better. I’ve had it drilled into my head throughout my academic career to simplify and minimize the amount of information in my presentations. I wonder if this has anything to do with my East Asian colleagues being used to consuming information in a different way, though I would guess that academic writing/presentations would have many different rules and norms that could impact these perceived differences.
This video is so good! Definitely felt the answer progress video (though answering an excellent question and creating an interesting premise) lacked something
I love this so much. Excellent response and so interesting! I love learning things like this about other cultures.
I studied intercultural communications as a minor in uni some 15 years ago and I really do miss its approaches and insights in a lot of intercultural discourse that is going on nowadays. People tend to focus so much on superficial cultural phenomena without really bothering to make the next step of understanding the reasons for certain things being the way they are in different cultures, which then would enable us to have a more appreciative and understanding approach towards each other.
You did an amazing job in this video! Instant sub in hopes for more of such content.
What you said about the western vs. Eastern approaches to art was interesting to me... Because I've always thought the opposite way about each of them. I think of traditional East Asian art as abstract and minimal, with traditional Western art as busy and hyper-detailed. Also, I noticed that several of the examples of Western art you showed were from the Impressionists, who were heavily influenced by the East Asian art that was being imported to Europe at the time. But I'm not an art historian or analyst! I'm fascinated by how language and culture affect the ways our brains work, and this was a cool way of learning a bit more about it. Thank you!
Such a cool video, thanks for the insight into different web principals! :D
i follow them but i guess i need to force them into my notifications cuz i missed their video. but what i wanted to say is that i love these 'response to' type videos that augment the content. it happens a lot in YT space but this augments the existing information instead of just regurgitating the same talking points, as is usually the case for say, tech reviews or 'let's talk about drama'
I have to say. From my time in japan I noticed that design of many things feels very old school. Like compare a ticket machine in japan to a western one. The western one is usually mostly a touch screen while the Japanese one has so many bottons as if it was a casio calculator. It’s even more apparent with meal ordering machines in restaurants. Even new ones in Japan are usually a bunch of colorful bottons with all the options while in the west it’s usually a touch screen with steps and different menus.
On the other hand if the difference is cultural and not bc of smartphones then why western sites looked similar to asian ones 15 years ago
Any touch screens over there
Super interesting! I am Japanese-Brazilian and I've worked the IT field as a Systems Engineer in Japan. I learned systems design back in the late 90s and worked in Japan as systems engineer between 2002 and 2010. My cultural background today is a mix of both Eastern an Western cultures (if Latin America can be considered as Western). In the beginning I was shocked by the amount of info the websites had. Then, the more I got into the culture, more I got used to the holistic paradigm. It's very true that Japanese people get information about relationships from non-verbal communication, something like reading the between the lines. As you said, the holistic view is embedded in their arts and communication systems. They also have an expression called 空気読めない that means "someone who can't read the air" as a joke to address those that struggle to read social situations.
"read the air" sounds a lot like "read the room" in english. or the idea of being "tone deaf"
Man, spergs must have a really hard time in Japan.
@@ididntknowtheyhadwifiinhell it's the same! in this context it's closer to "read the atmosphere (of the situation/room/etc)" instead of air.
we also shorten it into KY in slang.
Muito interessante Henrique! Tu acha que isso tem alguma relação com os portugueses que chegam no Brasil e são literais demais com a linguagem e não entendem coisas básicas que queremos dizer? Ou brasileiros que vão pra Portugal e não são compreendidos por não usarmos a língua de maneira literal e racionalista como eles usam? Tipo aquela clássica pergunta em um estabelecimento "Vocês fecham no domingo?" que eles dizem que não, mas quando vai ver a loja está fechada no domingo e na segunda eles argumentam "Como iríamos fechar se nem abrimos?"... É uma habilidade de ler as entrelinhas que temos que os portugueses não têm. Será eles não sabem ler o ar também? Nós somos muito relacionais aqui no Brasil também, sinto que temos uma leitura do mundo muito a partir das relações. Que semelhanças tu vê com a cultura japonesa?
English:
Very interesting Henrique! Do you think this has any relation with the Portuguese who arrive in Brazil and are too literal with the language and don't understand basic things we want to say? Or Brazilians who go to Portugal and are not understood because we do not use the language in a literal and rationalistic way they do? Like that classic question in an establishment "Do you close on Sunday?" that they say no, but when you go to see the store is closed on Sunday and on Monday they say "How could we close if we didn't open?"... It is an ability to read between the lines that we have that the Portuguese don't have. Don't they know how to read the air too? We are very relational here in Brazil too, I feel that we read the world based on relationships. What similarities do you see with Japanese culture?
@@joaotragtenberg Oi João! Conheço muito pouco da cultura portuguesa. Só conheço portugueses que vivem no Brasil e a maioria está aqui há tanto tempo que já se adaptaram a nossa cultura. Talvez o fato do Brasil ser um país de imigrantes que não falavam o idioma e tiveram que se esforçar para aprender a se comunicar fez com que a cultura brasileira tenha essa característica de buscar compreender as entrelinhas. Apenas uma opinião sem fundo científico... Faz sentido pra vc?
You went deep into this subject. Amazing content
what a great video !, this topic is so interesting thanks for ur work :)
I am educated in Singapore under a largely western influenced education system and work in a Japanese MNC. We were taught to keep our presentation slides simple, less wordy and use more pictures. I was quite shocked when I was told to clutter my presentation slides with as much information as possible (font size 11) when presenting to the Japanese. It was really important to highlight relations between information as that was the quickest way for them to understand the context and that context matters a lot to them. Context matter a lot to them and without context, they will not understand it. I think that is the opposite of north american culture where context is less important in information processing, thus they are more susceptible to fake news and misrepresentation of information.
On the other hand, holistic thinkers may be less likely to spot discrepancies if the overall context suggests something else. Therefore, it is easier for groupthink to be established. I don't think there is an inherently superior mode of thought.
@@michaelvins3215Unfortunately, the west is also bad at spotting discrepancies. I think the eastern way is superior, context is much more important than highlights.
Big citation needed in the claim that westerners are more susceptible to misinformation and fake news. I know plenty of highly educated people brought up in east Asia and I also speak their language. They DEFINITELY don't show any greater ability to avoid superstitious nonsense and fake news.
@@michaelvins3215the opposite is just as at risk for not spotting discrepancies considering there is potentially limited consideration for context since the "bigger picture" isn't the point
Idk man I'm East Asian and largely spend time with other Asians while residing in a western country and some of the stuff you read from the family group chats in mandarin/native language doesn't lend credence to your hypothesis at all about easterners being less susceptible to fake news...