I've lived in Japan for 30 years, and built several Internet based startups in that time. Three quick things the author does not seem to really consider.
1. Japan's information-dense design pre-dates the Internet. If you look at commercial fliers from the 80s (and probably before) until today, they have similar information-dense designs.
2. This design is not a result of a "critical shortage of competent IT professionals." Just because something is different doesn't mean it is wrong or the makers are incompetent. Some of these e-commerce firms have thousands of good developers. Designs are extensively A/B tested. They are common because they work.
3. Hacker News is also very info-dense and has changed little over past decade. It's not due to incompetence, but because we users like it this way. Now, imagine we had a steady steam of designers posting about how backwards we are and how they needed to "fix" the site to improve our experience. That's what it often feels like reading these articles from Japan.
> Just because something is different doesn't mean it is wrong or the makers are incompetent. Some of these e-commerce firms have thousands of good developers. Designs are extensively A/B tested. They are common because they work.
Everyone in Rakuten repeats this. It's not true. A/B testing between bad and bad still results in bad. You just get which bad works better.
If Japanese design was awesome, it would be pretty obvious to anyone how awesome it was. This sort of rationalization of bad quality is the mark of today's Japanese mediocre output.
Luckily there are strong local players, like Recruit or TeamLab, who refuse this idea of "it's good because I say so", and are actually pushing for better products.
1. The US also had information dense fliers / magazines / newspapers back in the day. The point is that the US moved away (at least in web design), while Japan didn't
2. Hard to comment on "competence", though I guess I'd like to see a minimalist redesign of a japanese website and see a survey on which one Japanese people prefer
3. Hacker News is extremely niche. And as much as HN people hate Reddit's new modern design, Reddit has orders of magnitude more users than HN. I would bet the vast majority of people prefer the UI of Reddit over HN
1. Japan's information-dense design pre-dates the Internet. If you look at commercial fliers from the 80s (and probably before) until today, they have similar information-dense designs.
2. This design is not a result of a "critical shortage of competent IT professionals." Just because something is different doesn't mean it is wrong or the makers are incompetent. Some of these e-commerce firms have thousands of good developers. Designs are extensively A/B tested. They are common because they work.
3. Hacker News is also very info-dense and has changed little over past decade. It's not due to incompetence, but because we users like it this way. Now, imagine we had a steady steam of designers posting about how backwards we are and how they needed to "fix" the site to improve our experience. That's what it often feels like reading these articles from Japan.