>Japanese consumers favour websites with very dense content, and little whitespace.
It's not just websites, all their software is like that.
Japanese sites just seem poorly put together in both design and implementation to me. Confusing layout (and I base this on watching Japanese use them, not just from using them myself), takes 20 clicks to do anything, shitty back-end tech, search results always seem to be awful, etc. Do they favor it? Or do they just put up with it? I suspect it's the former myself, as well, but if you've looked into it a bit I'd certainly like to hear about it.
It might be similar to what happened with cell phones here where for a long time the accepted wisdom was that the Japanese market demanded all kinds of quirky hardware bullshit that no one else in the world would care about, so you had to design phones especially for it. I guess you saved money on making the software because it was always terrible and an afterthought for those phones. Then Apple and Softbank came along and ate their lunch.
The Japanese consumer might be starting to become ever so dimly aware that software is important, too. There might be hope that the days of the shitty Japanese landing page are numbered.
> Do they favor it? Or do they just put up with it?
They put up with it, for a couple of reasons. First is the absolute domination of the internet by mobile phones running proprietary "versions" of the web, and second is the language barrier - the newest ideas and techniques from the west simply don't get translated, or get translated poorly.
I've recently taken a job running UI/UX for a Japanese software company, and let me tell you - it's an uphill battle.
You mean i-mode, ezWeb, etc? They aren't as dominant as they used to be though, right? A mobile site has to support both an i-mode and a mobile web version now, so i-mode is in a sort of IE6 situation? Not as far along yet of course, but getting there.
No, it's not as bad as it was in, say, 2007 ;) But it's still dominant.
For a large percentage of Japanese, the cell phone is their personal computer (and camera, and wallet...). If they own a desktop or laptop at all, it's rarely used. Obviously iPhone and Android look, to us, like nirvana in such a society but there's hesitancy there because (1) by and large they lack some key features like NFC and (2) switching carriers in Japan is, to borrow a Jobsism, a bag of hurt. It can be done, but you'll leave a lot of yourself behind.
Perhaps it's a remote culture thing. I feel mostly the same about european web sites filled with cruft, buggy transaction handling and sending me back my password in plain text. It just sticks out when it's from a different environment than the one we are confortable with.
About the iphone in Japan...there's been a lot of myths and misinformation, but from my POV the iPhone was the shiny modern and bugged to death "smart" phone, and it was to be used in combination with the "dumb" phone handling all the serious business (making calls, handling NFC transactions, hosting the official bank apps, GPS navigation etc.). For a lot of people, crashing when recieving phone calls was a non starter if it were to be used as the sole phone device.
Sorry for the ambiguous wording. I was writing about the crappy ones, not all european websites.
I think there are crappy web sites and buggy back-ends all around the world, and we just learn to ignore most of them in everyday use (or you don't and you just go crazy).
Just to add to this, one thing you can learn from the iPhone's success in Japan is "don't let Japanese exceptionalism blind you to good and innovative solutions that people will pay you a lot of money for". The Japanese love to tell you how unique they are and how different everything is here. It isn't hard to get the typical Japanese salaryman halfway up his own ass in Nihonjinron bullshit after a few beers. In that, they are like nearly every other people on Earth, but for some reason they seem the most convincing. It's probably being on an island and having a tough language, and some other stuff.
Anyway, a "keen student" of Japan would likely have told you the iPhone would fail here (no 1seg? Ha!), and that an invoicing service for Japanese companies, built by foreigners, was an outrageously stupid idea. But the Japanese market is no more impenetrable than the American market, or the British market, or the Indian market, nor any more difficult to learn and understand (though you still have to do that, of course).
It's not just websites, all their software is like that.
Japanese sites just seem poorly put together in both design and implementation to me. Confusing layout (and I base this on watching Japanese use them, not just from using them myself), takes 20 clicks to do anything, shitty back-end tech, search results always seem to be awful, etc. Do they favor it? Or do they just put up with it? I suspect it's the former myself, as well, but if you've looked into it a bit I'd certainly like to hear about it.
It might be similar to what happened with cell phones here where for a long time the accepted wisdom was that the Japanese market demanded all kinds of quirky hardware bullshit that no one else in the world would care about, so you had to design phones especially for it. I guess you saved money on making the software because it was always terrible and an afterthought for those phones. Then Apple and Softbank came along and ate their lunch.
The Japanese consumer might be starting to become ever so dimly aware that software is important, too. There might be hope that the days of the shitty Japanese landing page are numbered.