Comedy
Peace
War
Japan is home to many extremes — not to say our own countries don’t — but we can all agree that Japan is a unique place. A place where people want and can marry intangible objects [link to article]. A place where you can’t walk several blocks without seeing a vending machine [link]. A place where everyone in the world knows and enjoys their entertaining comedy shows [link]. The zen place for peace, nature and the simple things [link].
Having lived in Japan, studied Japanese, and taught English to the Japanese — I’ve some insight into their home, culture, language, and design. Regardless of what the medium may be — communication via language, product, or design — there’s always a sender and a receiver. Communication comes in various forms, like pair-programming. And how one perceives data will not always be how another will understand it. It may seem counter-intuitive at first, but think back to a time you were sitting in a lecture trying to make sense of the gibberish the instructor was spouting! At times, it’s as if the sender and receive don’t speak the same language.
If you were to start to analyze possible reasons for the disconnect, many factors may cross your mind. But all in all, we were raised in different households in varying surroundings and taught to think for ourselves — some more than others — and this would, for the most part, account for many of the disconnects. In other words, our culture and our language shape ourselves and our senses. Therefore design is also greatly and directly effected.
You must’ve heard of this company, unless you’re that young and I’d rather not think about that… But, can you recall how their homepage was like back in the good ol’ days?
I never really paid much attention to it, but thinking back I do recall the first time I landed on their page and was overwhelmed by all the links and info on it. For a split second, your eyes and you brain don’t know where to start nor how. Then because we come from a society where we read from top-left to bottom-right, we start from there. It hasn’t really changed too much in this aspect over the years, but our default of web design has drastically transformed!
Yet, when we have a look at the Japanese site:
At first it seems quite squished and condensed — which it is — but this may also be contributed to not being used to seeing many Japanese characters in one place. You can’t tell, but there are three vertical scrollbars on the page. Perhaps this hasn’t really driven my point home yet, so let’s take a look at another example:
What happened at their meetings for designing this page — did they collectively decide that whitespace was evil and they must vanquish it at all costs? If you look at the format though, you may come to the conclusion that it is similar to our own native sites like Amazon. But if you actually visit the site and look at their menus as you hover over navbars, you’ll notice that the purpose is to simply provide as much info upfront as possible.
This was something I had subconsciously noticed but never really stopped to acknowledge it as a cultural difference. The other day I was reading some Medium blogs and doing some light research on any topic that came to mind. One such topic was character encoding, specifically geared towards Japanese. My thought process was to see if that would lead me to how I could build a site with Japanese characters for such an audience.
Instead, I stumbled upon some other resources on how Japanese website designs were a result of their culture and how they prefer more specific and technical info — even if it involved longer descriptions and required more effort to read. This is opposed to our laziness for very sweet and concise descriptions that get to the point and convey all the necessary and desired information and data while preventing us from being discouraged or bored.
In business and marketing, it is essential to pinpoint your desired target market prior to dishing out specific business plans and strategies. While obvious, I feel like it is also important to actually understand them rather than simply identify them. If you don’t understand your audience how can you expect them to pay attention or understand you and what you have to say or offer. You may as well be speaking Japanese.
