> Advertising – Rather than being seen as a tool to enable people Japanese companies often see the web as just another advertising platform to push their message across as loudly as possible. Websites ends up being about the maximal concentration of information into the smallest space akin to a pamphlet rather than an interactive tool.
This is rich. I'm not sure who they're comparing Japan to, because definitely not to modern American/mainstream web customs. In fact, my biggest complaint about the latter could be written like this:
Advertising - Rather than being seen as a tool to enable people, modern web companies often see the web as just another advertising platform to push their message across as loudly as possible. Websites ends up being about the minimal concentration of information into the largest space akin to a billboard rather than an interactive tool.
> People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision – they are not going to be easily swayed by a catchy headline or a pretty image. The adage of “less is more” doesn’t really apply here.
That's actually a pretty strong compliment. One could reverse it and ask, why in America and Europe people are easy swayed by lies in "a catchy headline or a pretty image", instead of demanding actual information about the product?
>That's actually a pretty strong compliment. One could reverse it and ask, why in America and Europe people are easy swayed by lies in "a catchy headline or a pretty image", instead of demanding actual information about the product?
Maybe because the information is useless when it's too complicated or out of context?
For example, if you look at the spec sheet of an iPhone you might think that it's less capable than a cheap Android phone unless you have very deep understanding of the technology.
In west, companies try to communicate the utility or the feeling that this product will give you and most of the technical information is seen as distraction and only the cheapest, lowest quality companies will bombard the users with that information in a bid to convince you that they offer the same thing for cheaper.
Apple famously doesn't advertise RAM or processor clock speed on iPhones.
Interesting. Does that mean I'm in the minority, because for me, the more a company tries to "communicate the utility or the feeling that this product will give you" instead of factual information, the more I perceive them as crappy and/or dishonest? I'm an adult, I know my needs, I can read the specs (or learn to read, or ask someone more knowledgeable) and make the purchasing decision myself.
I'm curious, how do you know that you need 1) 3500mah battery or 2) 2.1Ghz processor or 3) 4GB Ram on a smartphone? These things are meaningless without
1) detailed energy consumption analysis.
2) SoC Architecture details
3) OS Architecture details
Even if you are knowledgeable enough to understand all these, that information is useful only if you are going to do something different than the original design purpose. If you are going to use the product for the purpose that it's designed for, all you need is the average use time between charging.
Maybe you are an expert in the area but what about washing machines or tables? How likely is that the engineering specs of these products will also be in your domain?
For a random, unique electronic device alone, the specs like you gave are difficult to make use of; but in reality, consumer electronics is not random - most competing devices are in the same ballpark of functionality and internal implementation, so battery capacity, processor speed and amount of RAM can be easily used to compare between models and against expected use cases. E.g. if last year's model with 1GB RAM choked on its own stock operating system, I can be sure that this year's model with 1GB RAM will be choking even more, and it's probably a safe bet to go for the 4GB one.
I do not expect consumers to have expert knowledge in every possible domain. But some things can be estimated pretty easily if companies are providing relevant data. Which they go out of their way to avoid, to muddy the waters, so that people don't ballpark things.
You said washing machines or tables - two areas which are as far away from my expertise as one can be; I still believe I'd be able to do a good job shopping if I had the following data:
For washing machines - peak/average power/water/detergent use on "typical" and "highest cleaning" (worst efficiency) program. Also peak and average generated noise (in dB) for those programs.
For tables - size, weight and supported weight (I'm flabbergasted by companies which don't provide the last; do people buying desks/tables not care about the safety of secondary use cases like "sitting on a desk" or "standing on a desk to change the lightbulb in the ceiling light"?).
How battery mAh is any better than Talk time, browsing time and video watch time that Apple provides? After all, all you'll do is to try to guess these things from the battery capacity but despite what you believe battery capacity and use time are not always correlated linearly as the radio, SoC efficiency and OS optimisations etc. will have dramatic effect.
Giving engineering specs for consumer products is often very easy way to con to the consumer. All these knock off cheap devices have amazing specs that are advertised very loudly.
An interesting observation is that you actually don't want engineering specs about washing machines or tables :) That's probably because you are not very knowledgable about these things so you seek information that will affect you as a user. You are interested if you can fit the table and how much it will cost you to operate the washing machine, which are not exactly technical specs of the product but impact on the user.
If you step out of your techie shoes and step in the shoes of a washing machine nerd or a carpenter shoes you will find out that all you want to know bout a smartphone is how long the battery lasts and does it work nicely. Now, you probably want to know the type of the electric motor of the washing machine, it's power circuit and the material of and type of the pipes. As a carpenter you probably want to know what kind of process was applied to the wood and what's the brand of the glue used.
Talk time, browsing time and video watch time are even worse than technical specs, because they're heavily dependent on specifics of particular use cases. Is it "time watching Netflix" or "time watching YouTube" as tested by C-suites' kids? Or "time watching a video on our optimized player under minimum brightness, no connection and all other measures of power optimization engaged"?
The thing is, I don't trust the vendor. They have every incentive to stretch and lie in their marketing copy, and they do that. And you can put any bullshit into self-selected "real use" metrics like "talk time", "browsing time" or "number of songs / photos that fit on the device", by choosing unrealistic values in some parameters that make the result look favorable. But you can't cheat much on raw GHz, mAh or GB. In the atmosphere of (experience-based) lack of trust, I prefer raw facts and making the necessary ballpark calculations myself, thank you.
("Number of songs / photos / movies that fit on the device" is one of the more annoying/dumber metrics ever. It's as if car companies gave you "number of cities you can round-trip through on full tank" instead of MPG or l/km values.)
Or, if the vendor insists on "real use" metrics, they should at least provide the math behind it, so that I know they're not pulled out of the asses of people in marketing department. The core problem is, still, that I have experience-based (and market-understanding-based) bias against trusting what a vendor says at face value.
--
RE washing machines, don't confuse engineering numbers on the interface with use cases (the "technical specs" of a product) and the engineering numbers for internals. I don't give a damn what kind of motor you put inside, much like I don't give a damn what particular CPU you put in a mobile phone. The motor turns, and apparently has enough power and torque to drive a loaded machine to stated speeds; all I need to know now is how much power it (or rather, the whole machine) eats and how noisy it is. With phones, the CPU is ARM and runs Android; there's little user-facing difference between various SoC models, so all I care is how much cores it has and how fast are they.
(And yeah, I actually might be interested in the materials used in the internals of my washing machine, as a proxy for its reliability; however, given how hard it is to find reliable white goods these days, I just don't bother - I assume they're made out of costs saving and super glue, and plan accordingly.)
I really want to down vote you. You claim that you can accurately estimate usage time from battery capacity in mAh, performance from Ghz number but you are concerned by the type of the app that plays the video on manufacturers estimates?
What if Apple/Samsung employs you and you look at the battery capacity and inform the rest of the world about usage time? Such a talent should not be wasted. You might be close to disrupt the battery industry or win the "I got a talent" TV show.
If all fails, start selling "Geekbench hates this guy" video series and teach the world to accurately estimating gadget performance and battery time from spec sheets.
You can also bring down Youtube to it's knees as all these test and review videos will become worthless overnight.
I have an app idea for you: The fastest benchmark software on the planet, instead of running intensive tasks just write a code that compares numbers of Ghz, Ram etch. Whichever is bigger that device is faster, obviously. Gone are the days of 12H battery tests, just calculate it from the battery mAh.
> You claim that you can accurately estimate usage time from battery capacity in mAh, performance from Ghz number
I'm not claiming that I can accurately do that, for engineering values of "accurate". I'm claiming that I can estimate the fit of the device for my use cases better with those values than with manufacturer-provided "real-life" benchmarks.
Ignoring your sarcasm for a moment; you mention benchmarks providers - yet the reason those third-party benchmark shows and sites exist is because manufacturer-provided benchmarks are usually pulled out of asses of the marketing department and are utterly worthless and usually (by design) not usable for comparison shopping.
This comment pretty much circles us back to the original quote I pulled out of the discussed article: "[Japanese] People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision – they are not going to be easily swayed by a catchy headline or a pretty image." You seem to be advocating that one should be "easily swayed by a catchy headline or a pretty image". Well, I don't trust marketing departments of consumer-good vendors that much.
The thing is that battery time is a function of capacity AND consumption.
I don’t think that you can use average consumption since even software update can make or break your use time as it can drastically alter the behavior of the device.
Oh and it’s still the marketing department that choose to communicate these numbers to you, not engineers. If the battery doesn’t last they will choose to slap the mAh of the battery instead of the estimates.
but maybe i’m wrong, maybe these days the phones use about the same energy and battery capacity is a useful measure
Why are you attacking him instead of replying to his points?
He's saying that with the battery capacity he can estimate how long it'll run for him because he know what his current phone is like. It's a relative comparison.
If he's told by the manufacturer that it plays X hours of video he can't try and figure out what that means for him, especially if his phone is from a different manufacture. Also two different manufacturers will use different video players making it harder to compare the two.
mAh is a the best we can get. I know that given two phones one with 3000mAh and one with 2000mAh the former will probably have longer battery life under the same OS. If there are different OS's then I need to apply a bit more comparison from knowledge but I still have more information.
I tried to hint at this point, but let me say it explicitly: devices from the same category, like mobile phones of given "class" and year, tend to have more-less the same power consumption. This "tend to" and "more-less" are good enough for rough estimates and comparison. Of course, I would also include other knowledge like common sense (a phone that holds less than 1 day on average is considered broken; no smartphone will hold for more than 2 days in actual constant use).
Also, knowing battery capacity in mAh gives you another funny side effects:
1/ I can ballpark how long it will take to charge it.
2/ I can ballpark how many times I can recharge it with my powerbank (or conversely, what powerbank to buy to have at least two recharges of my phone).
That's the nice thing about such "natural" metrics - they allow for further comparison for different use cases.
This strategy might work semi OK for the same vendor, but I struggle to see how it works for Android vs iPhone since iPhones typically have half the RAM (since it's all native code instead of GC'ed Java) & a drastically more efficient CPU (i.e. runs faster with less battery use at a smaller clock speed than other ARM manufacturers). Moreover, the Apple chips (at least in the past) are able to run all cores at their full clock frequency whereas other vendors have had to throttle down drastically which makes for a pretty large performance/battery life gap that isn't visible from just the GhZ/RAM size/mAh. Even Android vs Android this is difficult to compare as even SoCs from the same ARM family will vary within the same family for the same reason (better thermal design, optimized for GPU performance vs CPU compute, etc). Once you go across ARM families, GhZ numbers are generally not useful for relative comparison & definitely not for power numbers.
I agree you can kind of estimate the charge time via mAh if you pick one charging speed (most now support multiple charging speeds & there's also wireless charging in the mix) but most vendors provide guidelines of charging times you can expect & there's a crapton of benchmarks by independent third parties validating those claims & providing a more complete set of results. Same goes for battery life claims. As for powerbanks, I guess the mAh is useful but there's plenty of info online outside of the vendor's website for that.
If I were the vendor providing this kind of in-depth detail that's demanded by/useful to a very small percentage of the customers would be counterproductive (if I'm providing the info in the best interest of the majority of customers) since it would be more likely to confuse customers who want to compare on just raw specs rather than what the device actually delivers. I can just rely on third parties to report that info for the people who care.
Talk time and the like introduces even more variables (OS version, manufacturer's test conditions), so it makes comparisons to competing devices harder. Furthermore, if one plans to replace the manufacturer's OS with another version, these numbers become even less meaningful. On the other hand, one can be reasonably sure that a device with twice the battery capacity, same OS, same settings, SoC, display, etc will last roughly twice as long with the same usage.
Comparing hardware specs across ecosystems makes little sense, since all modern smartphones are generally fast enough, so it comes down to what kind of walled garden you prefer.
OK, for washing machines: I would like to know how many out of all machines, have been returned with a clause "damaged beyond repair during normal operation". How many of the manufacturers would happily advertise this information?
Same thing goes for everything else that I have no technical knowledge about: there's look and feel, general customer reviews; sadly most of which are getting highly commoditised via bot-fuelled channels. I would on the other hand love to see the version of the internet where these reviews are directly tied to your IDs.
So how can you trust the words of a company over a spec sheet? Apple has been caught lying before, it's not like they are some good guy company out to help out the common people.
>>'m curious, how do you know that you need 1) 3500mah battery or 2) 2.1Ghz processor or 3) 4GB Ram on a smartphone?...
Your way of comparison is wrong, most of the user neither need a phd in electric or computer science or are going to compare that way. The way is simple
3500mah> 3000mah
2.1 Ghz<2.6 Ghz
4 GB Ram < 8 GB Ram
See.
But why? What benefit this brings to the user? Practice their pre-school math?
Why just don't write random numbers on the box so the users can compare these?
Write, for example, 400 capacitors and let users compare the number of capacitors on the circuit board. Let them brag that their phone have more capacitors.
Maybe write the number of diodes, so Huwei Hr67 users can enjoy the wonders of diode dominance over Mi 8jj that has 20 diodes less.
Clock speed, number of cores, amount of RAM, battery capacity, etc. are not just "random numbers". They're very descriptive in real life, for devices grouped by similar purpose. They really are good enough they can be meaningfully used to compare mobile phones between all vendors using nothing but pre-school math, and they also have two additional benefits:
1/ They're more "natural" - which means it's easy for everyone to give those numbers, giving you something to compare in the first place. With "real-use" measurements, one vendor will give you "video time", the other will give you "browsing time", and you can't compare them.
2/ They're harder to fudge. Amount of RAM is amount of RAM, it does not depend on what testing procedure a vendor uses. "Video time" is not directly comparable between brands.
> But why? What benefit this brings to the user? Practice their pre-school math?
Because these numbers are harder to fake. Suppose phone A advertises "8 hours of typical use" and a 4Ah battery. Phone B advertises "10 hours of typical use" and a 3Ah battery. Which do you think would actually last longer in use?
Interesting, presumably the relevance here is you think mobile phone makers are putting 4-core processors in and blocking use if 2 of them, or putting an extra unused battery in? I can't see how it relates otherwise.
Interesting as it is from a "lies marketers tell" perspective aren't they much more likely to lie about 200 hours standby time than 3800mAh of battery power? The latter can be independently verified much more readily.
They can lie about the standby time in a way they can support in a court of law - it was tested in pre-production with no apps running and the best battery they could find that has been made to the specs, say. But they can't really support putting a 20% lower power battery in and labelling it wrongly.
If it tells you the processor, you can compare with other phones using the same, or other devices with similar chips. CPUs with disabled parts are given different courses by the manufacturer.
Hours of use, etc., would only be useful if done by an independent agency, like NCAP car safety ratings.
But in real terms, that might actually not be the case. The OS implementation, use case, and hardware setup will affect all of those things meaning direct comparisons aren't really all that valid.
You can dive down the rabbit hole of comparisons; a 3500mah battery might be bigger than a 3000mah, but if the 2.6Ghz processor demolishes it faster than the 2.1Ghz one, it'll end up worse.
This assumption that humans only make rational, logical decisions is inherently flawed. I know HN likes to decry marketing, but humans crave the way these things are framed. Granted that means it's open to manipulation, but the continual argument here is always "give me every single piece of objective information about absolutely everything and I'll make my decision" doesn't extend too far outside of this echo chamber.
Direct comparisons are valid enough, and are definitely more valid than whatever comparisons you can try and make with manufacturer's cooked numbers like "hours of video time". The goal isn't "perfect", it's "good enough in practice".
> Granted that means it's open to manipulation, but the continual argument here is always "give me every single piece of objective information about absolutely everything and I'll make my decision" doesn't extend too far outside of this echo chamber.
Again, the argument is that objective information, even if mostly incomprehensible to people, is still better than whatever fake-metrics vendor's marketing department spits out, by the virtue of reality not actively trying to confuse you.
And you end up with something misleading. The top Android phones always had hardware that was more powerful, yet they never felt as snappy as iOS. I don't know exactly why but it seems that Android was just a lot less efficient for whatever reason so they needed more powerful hardware to get in the same ballpark.
And the software makes a huge difference. I remember an old computer I had converted to Slackware linux completely burrying my much more powerful windows 95 machine because the networking stack was so bad on Windows it couldn't keep up with the efficient Linux one.
I was at the Sprint store a few months ago and wanted a cheap phone that had a gyroscope. I couldnt find it listed anywhere on the phone kiosk, so i asked the sales rep. He didnt know so he asked his manager who also didnt know. I had to go home and google it.
> Does that mean I'm in the minority, because for me, the more a company tries to "communicate the utility or the feeling that this product will give you" instead of factual information, the more I perceive them as crappy and/or dishonest?
No, it means that you are probably not in the core audience that Apple tries to target with its ads (to use the iPhone example from the parent). This is nothing good or bad - I also prefer to compare specs instead of "feelings" (I openly admit that lots of important information is not given in the specs listened in a typical webshop, such as how long the mobile phone will be supported with Android updgrades). The important spec field that makes the difference is "Operating system": If you care about what iOS offers, you will only consider mobile phones that have "iOS" in this field (i.e. only compare the specs of the different iPhone versions). If you don't care about what iOS offers, you will probably not buy an iPhone anyway.
That's not how purchasing decisions are usually made outside of big ticket items, and even then.
Thanks to all of our basic needs being met there's only real emotional and psychological ones left. That's what all advertising targets, promise of fulfillment or some other emotional rewards. In our consumerist society you buy things not because you need them or because of their specific functions but because they promise to fulfill some imagined emotional need.
> In west, companies try to communicate the utility or the feeling that this product will give you and most of the technical information is seen as distraction
So you mean typical manipulative advertising that distracts you from informed decision making to get at your feelings so you'll want their product.
> Apple famously doesn't advertise RAM or processor clock speed on iPhones.
As long as I can remember, they've always under-specced their hardware and then jacked the prices up for the cost of "experience". And my memory goes back to the mid 80's. Same old game then as it is now.
Until now, Samsung's flagship smartphones have always been king of the Android phones – but Google's latest offering has finally knocked it off its perch. Another shock is just how badly the new Sony XZ performed. It finished in last place, some two minutes slower than the iPhone 7. This isn’t the first time the Apple iPhone has won Gold in a speed test. Earlier this year, the team at PhoneBuff pitted the iPhone 7 against the now-discontinued Samsung Galaxy Note 7. The iPhone managed to open and close the chosen apps in a total time of 1 minute 40 seconds, while it took the Galaxy Note 7 a whole 3 minutes and 14 seconds to complete the same task.
It means you provide the minimum hardware necessary to provide a quality experience now, without regard to (and in anticipation of) near-future developments that render that hardware under-powered.
I didn't knew that Apple is doing it. iPhones are used for very long time, holding 2nd hand value the most of any other smartphone.
The same goes for Macs, people tend to use these things for many years. In fact, Apple is still selling Macbook Airs like hot cakes despite the device not being significantly updated for almost a half decade now and people are happy with that product.
The claim sounds like induced anxiety of a user who just couldn't swallow the premium paid over the same Ghz laptop or same Megapixel smartphone :)
I used my iPhone 4 for 6 years. I was very happy with it and it was virtually indestructible. The battery was also pretty decent even after 6 years. The iPhone 4 felt like a device that "lasts forever", like some pre-smartphone devices used to be.
However, it did get slower over time more so than I would expect from a phone and became almost unusable near the end. Not sure whether it was OS updates, application updates, or what, but it was very noticeable. So I would agree with the grandparent comment in that respect.
If I used my phone a lot, I would have probably bought a new phone MUCH earlier due to how slow the 4 became.
Maybe they are happy with Air because its the cheapest Apple. I know since i got one recently for development purpose. I would have liked a better spec'd once, but others were costly.
I'm also going as far back as their first 20 MB SCSI drive that they charged $550 for when IBM compats were charging $400. They did something goofy, unsurprisingly to the hardware to prevent users from using the cheaper SCSI drives.
And this was back in the '80 s. Its not surprising they still play their stupid games. People in tech have such short term memories - much here is on a day by day basis, or weekly. Yet, its the same actors in the Apple administration (well, minus Jobs).
They do not "under-spec" their phones. They spec them to exactly what they need. Over-speccing a phone is useless and a waste of battery life. Remember: YAGNI.
YAGNI is bullshit for infrastructure (including platforms). In fact, the opposite is true - the more you give, the more interesting uses follow. Every extra sensor, every screen resolution increase could be dismissed on the basis of YAGNI. Hell, that 64K quote comes to mind.
Also, battery life and Apple phones - that's rich too, given that Apple was found to make iPhones reduce their computing power over time to preserve battery life, instead of educating their customers that batteries are not magic pixie dust, and they degrade over time.
Bwahaa, is this not the same Apple we're talking about? The one that eliminates headphone jacks and Flash and usb ports and cd drives and anything else people hold dear all in the name of YAGNI?
If they could eliminate even less, I'm sure they would. The fact is, we need exactly what we have now, nothing more and nothing less.
I never said I agree with what Apple does. In fact, I strongly disapprove of the decision to drop the headphone jack from new iPhones, and it further alienates me from their platform.
With that mindset, I demand Apple make an iPhone with a serial port and a built-in fax machine given how often I need a serial port and the ability to fax a piece of paper.
I find myself morally outraged that they did not consider my very common use case when building their smartphone.
Not sure about the iPhone, but on Android phones you should be able to do both of those with appropriate USB-to-$whatever connector and an app. And this is possible precisely because people didn't go all YAGNI about a proper micro USB port and ability of apps to use it.
> In west, companies try to communicate the utility or the feeling that this product will give you and most of the technical information is seen as distraction and only the cheapest, lowest quality companies will bombard the users with that information in a bid to convince you that they offer the same thing for cheaper.
Could be just me. But maybe west here means the U.S.? I don't think I have seen even iPhone ads without a little spec sheet.
> Apple famously doesn't advertise RAM or processor clock speed on iPhones.
There is a lot of space between these two extremes. While I do not expect full spec sheet for a tool (because, as you said, I couldn't understand it anyway), I do expect to be able to find out some basics; for me RAM or CPU certainly are a part of these basics.
Which is funny when you think that teaching martial arts or zen from the japanese culture is done by using very vague metaphores and general directions instead of detailed technical instructions.
You are supposed to 'get it' or 'feel it'. How you manage to get your foot or your mind to perform as instructed is an exercice left to the student.
There is even a difference of what zen is from master to master. The problem with defining zen, illumination and other similar concepts, is, according to a lot of teachings, that words are inedequate tools to describe them. Practice and experience is what get you closer to what it is.
It's pretty hard to agree on something you can't talk about.
We already have a hard time agreeing on things we have metrics on.
"zen to aku" is a common Japanese expression that means "good and evil". It also means "wholeness" and "everything", among a bunch of other meanings (not all spelled with the same character, but pronounced the same). Zen is a very broad term in Japanese, that probably encompasses the western notion.
>That's actually a pretty strong compliment. One could reverse it and ask, why in America and Europe people are easy swayed by lies in "a catchy headline or a pretty image", instead of demanding actual information about the product?
Makes sense since Japanese culture is risk averse.
Lack of choice. In north america we generally have binary product choices: andriod or iphone, the expensive iphone or the less expensive. We lack the massive variety of products that is common in asia. So we dont get into the weeds of specifications as much. We pick products based on brand, tribal loyalty, and social factors. Those dont need as much text to win a sale.
> That's actually a pretty strong compliment. One could reverse it and ask, why in America and Europe people are easy swayed by lies in "a catchy headline or a pretty image", instead of demanding actual information about the product?
I visited Japan once. I'll take a stab at it.
In America and Europe we have plenty of space to pile up junk we don't really need. Thus we can be more careless with our consumption. I often browse Amazon and just buy random things I might need out of boredom. Sometimes those things improve my life, sometimes they just end up who knows where. And I often buy those things with nary a glance to anything other than a couple lines of user reviews.
If you do online check in with a japanese airline like ANA or JAL its kind of hilarious how many things you have to click to confirm just about everything... "Click here to go to online check in", then you are there and its like "click here to start checking in online"... then its like "type confirmation number here.." etc.. all on separate pages like we are engaging some kind of nuclear code sequence that requires multiple stages of fail-safes where you can go back at any moment.. yes the webpages in japan are hilariously over complex for a non-japanese audience all with the goal of ensuring you don't accidentally do the wrong thing.. the idea of one-click buying on amazon I have a feeling either rarely exists or is probably actually 2 clicks somehow..
That resembles some paper processes in Japan, e.g. to get an international conference trip refunded (as a PhD student) I need to submit around seven forms:
1. Application for travel
2. Acceptance for travel
3. Schedule
4. Request for payment of conference entrance fee
5. Export control form
6. Travel Report
7. Notice of absence
Because most of these are also required for travelling within Japan I sometimes just don't bother asking for a refund.
That sounds like any academic institute I’ve come across.
After I did the fleet of forms, they managed to credit the money to someone else who shared the same last name, and then send them a crabby message demanding repayment. Happened the next few times as well. What permanently corrected this behaviour was
me getting the recipient to send the money directly to me minus a transaction fee, theb asking for it to be refunded. Good times.
The only plausible explanation for this is if they store the names in order like: <Last Name> <First Initial> and somehow just assume the first Smith J is correct.
Since you mention Amazon: They do have massive success in Japan, especially over the last few years. Same day delivery got to Japanese cities 1-2 years earlier than in the US I think, at least we got it in Tokyo for a while now. So I think the lack of polish in web design is actually a good chance for disruption by Western technology companies, it's just that you have to get all the other stuff just right to exceed in Japan (e.g. good localization, high levels of customer service, precision in delivery).
The same-day delivery is spot on and probably the best in any Amazon-serviced country. They never missed the 2h time window I picked. Obviously there've never been any dents in the packaging as well.
Oh cool, so do they actually have "Buy it now with 1-click" on the amazon japan webpage? I'm super curious if they have it or if its actually used by people?
Interestingly, for anything that is not Prime, Amazon almost never gives me right estimates for delivery. In most cases it tells me stuff will be delivered within 3 to 5 days, when they actually are delivered the next day. (I live in Japan, not even in a large city)
> In most cases it tells me stuff will be delivered within 3 to 5 days, when they actually are delivered the next day.
I've observed the same in Germany. I think these pessimistic estimates are on purpose, to convince unknowing customers to subscribe to Prime because of the better estimates.
Most things I buy on Amazon come through Yamato, and a few through Sagawa or the Post office, so in fact, Amazon uses Takkyuubins. (I live in Japan)
Tangentially, takkyuubin is actually a trademark by Yamato, and the Ghibli movie, Majou no takkyuubin was actually sponsored by Yamato, and is one of the reasons there is a black cat in the movie (their emblem). The generic term is takuhaibin (宅配便).
> Tangentially, takkyuubin is actually a trademark by Yamato, and the Ghibli movie, Majou no takkyuubin was actually sponsored by Yamato, and is one of the reasons there is a black cat in the movie (their emblem). The generic term is takuhaibin (宅配便).
Ahhhh. I've seen Ta-q-bin which obviously seems trademarked, but not realized takkyuubin vs takuhaibin.
Amazon definitely profits from the existing delivery network here - no need for them to build this themselves, and it would be pretty hard to compete with anyways.
Delivery in Japan boggles my mind to be honest, I'd love to get an account of their cost structures - the logistics behind making this scale at the existing price point must be amazing and should probably be studied extensively in the west.
JAL is the single worst airline website I've ever used. It had the looks and responsiveness of something out of 1998. Apparently they were planning to renovate it when I was booking a ticket, so they had a big warning of 15 day (!) downtime while I was browsing it.
* All text is embedded. Fat chance ever finding it with a search engine, copying anything, searching within the page, or using Google Translate on it
* Every URL is guaranteed to die. While link rot is pretty common in Western webdev as well, things like SEO have caused some to clamp down on it. And it's no way as bad as it is in Japan, where I'll come back a month later to find the link dead or the whole website has moved and none of the old content exists anymore.
* They still use Flash.
* Navigation is often not as efficient as it can be, with sites often throwing you on a landing page, navbars being confusing, and lack of search
* Images are often low resolution and low quality
Some of the reasons given in the article make sense (for example webfonts being expensive or large in size), but it's really disappointing when you compare it to a Japanese novel or magazine and see that the country is perfectly capable of beautiful work.
I noticed the first one when I clicked a link here in these comments to a JP site and clicked "translate" in Chrome... it translated much of the page, but quite a bit of text was in images and of course couldn't be translated.
Then of course I switched to Amazon.com for a comparison and almost every word on the page was part of an image and could not be translated either. I guess it's more common than I thought.
Based on this, I can say I think that Korea may be worse:
* Many websites, especially government ones, require Active X. You might need to dust off that IE6 installation file.
* In lieu of Active X, some sites require you to download and install their own proprietary "security" program; what it does, I don't think anybody really knows
* Like you describe Japan, lots of Korean text is embedded in an image
* Many sites try to prevent users from right clicking or copying text, for "security" of course
* The eCommerce site I used had quality issues similar to Ali Express. Listings could be anything, a seller could list a baseball bat, a cell phone and a watermelon on the same page. Sellers would play this trick of having at least 2 variations of a product, one being a very low price and also conveniently out of stock all the time, this would ensure it showed up when you sort products by lowest price first, but it was impossible to ever get it for that price.
When I was there a year or so ago it was getting better. Hopefully it's mostly fixed by now.
On the bright side the internet is really fast and cheap.
There's as well a cultural factor that, IMO, affects design as well. This factor is the obsession of the Japanese to show that "they are working hard" and the culture of sacrifice. Everything in the company culture is based on that. People staying until really late at work without actually doing anything productive, meetings scheduled on Saturday just because, etc.
That makes that, when they present a design, it has to look like they worked really hard in the design. That's why there is always so much information.
To the eyes of an executive who has no idea of design (most of them) a minimalist design would look like if the designer was lazy and didn't work hard enough.
Of course, I am exaggerating.... But not a lot.
Source: Working as a Web Developer in Japanese companies in Japan since 5 years ago.
Hmmm...the work culture fact is undeniable, but no smart person regardless of culture would be impressed or fooled with density as a proof of hard work.... This is probably more related to the highly methodical and intensive approach to optimizing space. Reductionism and efficiency are concepts that the Japanese learn from very early ages. The extreme lack of space and the atomization cities are one of the reasons why the Japanese take density as a standard of life.
Having worked long-term in South Korea, which has a corporate culture very similar to Japan, I'd have to agree with 6t6t6t6. The more "information" you can fit on something, the better. This is taken to the extreme with powerpoint presentations.
> no smart person regardless of culture would be impressed or fooled with density as a proof of hard work
I am far from being a person who has deeply studied Japanese culture (I just happen to live here) but my impression is that it is so ingrained in the mentality that it works at a subconscious level.
I've been here 8 years and worked in IT for several of those. Definitely get the "hard work" ethic, but I feel like your post takes an overly cynical/narrow spin on it.
In my own limited exposure, most designers I have encountered worked by feel and experience instead of analytical principles. I've definitely heard people say that a part of the page feels a bit empty or get some evaluation to that effect from peers. It's much rarer to hear someone say something looks too busy or crowded.
I suspect that in the long grind to "polish your work", there's a simply tendency to remove all these "empty feeling" spots more than to "trim the fat".
This reduced the problem to why there's a bias for things to feel empty instead of busy. To venture a bit of personal sociology here, my experience makes me feel like Japan produces a bias toward more intentional and deliberate behavior. Or worded less charitably, we could maybe call it fussy?
Accepting this idea, in web design we'd expect a bias toward needing deliberate explanations for every aspect of the page layout, including every bit of white space that someone might point out.
> I suspect that in the long grind to "polish your work", there's a simply tendency to remove all these "empty feeling" spots more than to "trim the fat".
I think it's interesting that "Japanese design" in almost every other area hints at a certain functional minimalism, that stands in stark contrast to these sites. I mean sites like, ironically enough, the Css Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/), highlight the western perception of their design principles: lots of white space, consistent design, minimalism.
I don't this this article is very relevant in 2018. Modern Japanese websites look the same as any "hip" Western site. Take a look at Coincheck.com, for example (the exchange whose NEM just got stolen). Their landing page is the standard Bootstrap-y, scroll heavy, big icons, sparse kind of layout you would see anywhere. Every startup is like this. Even big corporations like Nintendo.co.jp manage to have modern looking websites these days. If all this cultural speculation were true, then startups would still be doing the information-dense Web 1.0 thing.
The article does make a good point about how sites were "mobile first" for Japanese feature phones. Smartphones took a while to catch on in Japan because people were already satisfied with their feature phones, but now smartphones are in full force and web design has mostly caught up with modern/trendy practices. You can see all kinds of articles about modern web stuff on Qiita.com, even translations of buzzy blogposts.
I think any speculation about cultural differences is nonsense. Overwork or trying to appear busy or neon signs or whatever doesn't make for shitty web design. Web design was bad simply because the main focus was on the feature phone (which had limited rendering capabilities) and desktop sites were an afterthought.
You have to know that Rakuten itself doesn't do much beside the frame. Rakuten is an Internet Mall - a place for merchants to show their products. These people are just sellers, not designers, and they are allowed to customize their products' and shops' pages however they like. Rakuten is to blame for not promoting consistent design among the merchants, but merchants themselves are to blame as well, for tons of noise in the pictures. When you compare, on Amazon pictures are big and clear, while on Rakuten they are there because seller just must put something. Often when you click the thumbnail, you get... the same thumbnail instead big product picture (which makes me mad.) And if sometimes 60-70% of picture space is covered with text. But what really makes me wonder is - how this strategy works? They are there, they are successfully selling their products! It's not only Rakuten, it is visible everywhere on the streets. Posters and commercials are full of noise. Not only text, mind it. It is common practice to have a person with tube in front of your store to praise the products they are selling. Noise is everywhere here. Everywhere except luxurious boutiques. :)
Rakuten doesn't look any more crowded than say, Amazon. It seems to be a shopping website, so perhaps the amount of information is more related to the type of website than the culture in this case.
If anything I think Rakuten and Yahoo.co.jp are the outliers. They look more or less the same as they did years ago. I think they stay the same because they don't want to upset longtime users. Maybe like how Craigslist keeps the same old school layout because people are familiar with it.
My argument is that, if all this stuff about Japanese people liking information density were so true, then why do new websites not look like Yahoo.co.jp? Nobody is making web portals anymore. Those sites are relics of the past.
Also, I can find plenty examples of modern webpages besides the two I linked. How about Mericari, who have taken over the second hand goods market from Yahoo Auctions (http://www.mercari.com)? How about Gunosy, a news aggregator who have no doubt stolen tons of traffic from Yahoo (https://gunosy.com)? How about the bank AEON (http://www.aeon.co.jp)? How about the Post Office (http://www.post.japanpost.jp/index.html)? The Yelp of Japan, Tabelog, looks almost exactly like Yelp.com (https://tabelog.com/ - the English version looks less modern, click on 日本語 if you get redirected).
Edit: Consider also that Yahoo.co.jp and Rakuten are an amalgamation of like 100 different services. Yahoo has news, weather, train info, maps, games, forums... If you look at the subsections, they don't have that 90s Web Portal kind of feel: https://games.yahoo.co.jp
The article seems to be missing what I think is the major reason why Japanese websites are how they are.
I think one of the major factor is how the IT industry works in Japan, and the process to build a website, an application or anything which involves software engineering.
A good majority of Japanese websites are not built or controlled by the company, but rather by what they call "System integrators", which they refer to as SIer, and these are quite different from the software/design agency we see in the US or in Europe.
The usual flow is something like
- Company A wants to build a website
- Company A talks to the SI company B
- Company A and B spend hundreds of hours doing meetings
- Company B's "System Engineers" write tons of specifications on Excel
- Company B asks company C to actually code the specification written on Excel
- Company C may then again delegate part of the system to company D, and this can a few more levels down depending on the size of the project
As nobody actually does the "building the service" part in company A or B, they usually do not have any designers, and therefore cannot give enough design related information to the company actually implementing the software.
However, the only incentive for company C being to get paid by company B, the quality of the work or the UI/UX does not really matter that much as long as it fulfills all the specifications written on Excel.
Now, some companies are starting to see that this model is quite flawed, and either recruiting engineers and designers of their own (e.g Recruit, a huge company in Japan owning many different webservices [1], has put a lot of efforts recruiting engineers and designers these past years). Some other companies start choosing companies which are closer to the software/design agency model - companies who actually do the engineering and designing part - but the SI model is still prevalent [2].
I don't think the giant chain of subcontractors explains the problem - I've been a part of the same process in the US and the resulting website[1] was quite pretty.
This article is entirely focused on sites built by corporations. In my opinion, Japanese and English sites are more similar than ever today, as more of the web is dominated by blog and social media platforms, but there used to be more interesting differences.
I spent a lot of time on the Japanese web about ten years ago, when there were still a lot of self hosted amateur sites for fiction, tech, and other hobbies. These sites were spartan compared to their English counterparts, with a much higher ratio of text to images. What few images there were were often original photos or illustrations. It's hard to express how different the aesthetic was, but it was as though everyone from artists to meme makers to TV show fandoms were taking design cues from 90's programmers.
In comparison, the equivalent English sites of the time had a strong aversion to emptiness. Every page needed banners and buttons decorated with copyrighted images that had been cropped and filtered. Authors were more concerned with elevating the best work taken from elsewhere than showing one's own work, and one could participate in that work by remixing it.
Seeing this cultural difference changed how I thought about copyright. Copyright is easy to enforce when social norms and cultural aesthetics don't treat content as a commodity everyone needs to have. This isn't a popular opinion among tech libertarians, but I'd rather live in a world where private content creators had more control, but where everyone was doing more creating than sharing.
> Anyhows, it's functional, if not beautiful, and it works for people. No need to "refresh the look and feel" of their web properties every so often.
This is the most infuriating characteristic of modern web-deveopment, the constant churn to change what is working for people. Glad to see that it is not universal.
Korean websites have similar aspects. However, Korean websites are slowly changing to be simpler and more visually appealing. Having experienced from Korea, I would extrapolate that Japanese (or Korean) websites are cluttered not because they believe it is better than non-clutter. It's cluttered because most people there don't have expertise in designing a simple and appealing website. In addition, Asian countries tend to be more focused on following the design of their rivals, and since early design is obviously more focused on information than beauty, people follow that. However, if you give a finished product where one is cluttered with information and the other is simple and visually appealing, I highly doubt that people will prefer the clutter.
Korean websites also suffer from the early adapter phenomenon. Many were build when ActiveX controls were the new hip thing and everybody was on the same version of Windows, and same with flash. Add to that that some websites require logging in with government-issued credentials (which is probably not something that you can easily rip out and replace by a nice form) and you can see that there's a lot of early 2000s cruft floating around... I'd be interested in knowing Japanese websites have similar baggage.
I had to look up the results of my Korean language test the other day. This should be as easy as entering your name + test registration number to get one number of info back (your test score). I had to install so many suspicious browser plugins that I ended up downloading a VM just for this.
"Character Comfort – Logographic-based languages can contain a lot of meaning in just few characters. While these characters can look cluttered and confusing to the western eye, they actually allow Japanese speakers to become comfortable with processing a lot of information in short period of time / space (the same goes for Chinese)."
The concept that your native language can impact information processing speed/density is pretty interesting.
I think he meant more in the fundamental difference between phonetic vs logographic. For the latter, when speaker can't read a new word but can have a good guess of what it means.
I personally think this is the main reason, coupled with the natural tendency of kanji to look like squares. Western languages deal with lines, Eastern ones with squares. The former need significant amount of empty space to be readable, the latter not really; the former must flow horizontally, the latter not really; the former is drastically different from images, the latter not really (which is why emojis originated in Japan, among other things).
That’s all stuff that directly impacts design density and so on.
Exactly. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean letters are all designed to fit in a square grid.
Movable type was invented in Korea 200 years before Gutenberg, and their version was much easier because they just had to plug letters into a square grid. When I was a kid, everyone learned to write on sheets of paper containing a 20x10 grid. Lengths of books and school essays in Korea are still frequently measured by the number of 20x10 sheets they would take up if printed on such a grid.
When your writing system is designed to fill a two-dimensional grid, whitespace is not only unnecessary but also potentially distracting. Chinese and Japanese don't even use spaces between words. (Korean does, at least in modern usage.) Leaving a large amount of space between lines would break up a block that should belong together.
Probably for the same reason, WYSIWYG editors here tend to insert <br> instead of <p> when you press the Enter key, Western semantics be damned. Extra space between paragraphs is implemented using two <br>'s instead of margins on the <p> tag. In other words, people see no need for vertical space that isn't an integer multiple of the height of a 1-em square.
Hmm, actually, my (Korean) experience is that East Asian typesetting compensates by adding extra space between lines.
Because each character fills a square block, if you pack characters as close as possible, a paragraph becomes a rectangular array of dense squares, which is tiring to the eyes. Adding extra space between lines makes it much easier to read.
With Latin alphabets, characters have irregular shapes, so you will have enough "holes" between successive lines, which helps the reader follow the current line.
It's not just the Japanese. Chinese websites are also similar - pages full of links, messy to the untrained eye and difficult to navigate. However, that sort of web pages suit the Chinese more. Build a traditional, Stripe-ish style landing page and you'd score lower points with them.
For some reason I really appreciate the information density of these sites even if they're quite busy. I feel like one large page load allows me to do a lot of things whereas it seems the trend in the west is to download a heavy SPA JS app one time only to have it sparsely populated and take tons of clicks to get to information.
You see this in real-world UX in Japan too. Almost every travel guide to JR railways and/or metro says some variation of "press the button on the top left (ok, I forgot which button) and a guy will pop out of a hidden door, and help you buy a ticket"
Or, their ATMs. Amazingly confusing at times. Yet, no Japanese seems harmed in the making of this situation.
We cannot disclose any information regarding this account if you are not its owner or authorized party.
For the security and privacy of our customers, all account requests are verified prior to the disclosure of account information
I believe the mincho font (pretty much the de facto standard of modern kanji) does have italics. They're not used all that often or to the same effect as in English though.
Others have also pointed out the dots which are quite common in formally printed materials. In emails and such, I see people use the 「」 quotation bracings as emphasis from time to time.
Dakuten(what you call “dots over letters”) are used to modify the way consonants are pronounced, not for emphasis, e.g to turn the character for “Ka”(カ) into “Ga”(ガ).
And the usage of katakana in the way the parent describes isn’t “tiring.” It follows almost the exact same pattern as words are italicized in English, where a word or phrase is represented differently from the surrounding text. Less common/standardized, but not tiring.
EDIT:
My bad on the bouten/dakuten confusion. Apologies.
As @chch mentions, the parent probably meant bouten/etc. I couldn't find an English article on it, but the Japanese Wikipedia page has examples and some cool CSS styling info that's related:
As for katakana, it really does depend. For common or short words, people usually don't have a problem, but if you throw a whole katakana sentence at a Japanese person they will often stumble and reading speed noticably decreases.
Their point about katakana was also correct - normally a word is either written in katakana or it isn't, regardless of emphasis. Using katakana for emphasis happens but it's not common, and would get tiresome very quickly.
This has been an interest of mine since seeing web designs from that part of the world. They have cool things like fixed footers with 10px font just to display quick simple site maps, and small ideas that would be considered taboo in the US / EU.
"Some kind folks have translated the article into..."
They are not doing it out of kindness, they are probably going to add ads and PageRank-siphoning links to the translation when you're not looking.
"WebDesignGeeks" was an outfit who used to pull this scam all the time to popular programming articles, and their "translations" were just the output of Google Translate.
Don't link to unchecked translations and don't let them be hosted on someone else's site.
Hmm, interesting. About the lack of web-fonts for ideographic writing, let me ask: how do people write them with a keyboard? Don’t they use some sort of multiple key encoding, a sort of predictive writing, to navigate the code space and select a particular symbol? Well, at every waypoint the font can add a single fragment to the ideograph so it just needs to encode these as the font glyph? I guess it can’t be too many right?
It sounds like while there are a lot of reused components, there's a lot of tweaking needed for it to look right:
> For instance, just have a look at the various uses of the radical 言 (yan, speech). Even in cases where it is in the same position, such as the left half of the character, the stroke weights and shapes are slightly different (the characters shown below are the exact same font and size).
As for input: there are component-based input methods where you would for example type 明 by entering the keys corresponding to 日 and 月, but as far as I know, they aren't very popular. Most people use phonetic input systems where you type e.g. 明 by typing "ming" and picking it from a list (or letting auto-correct do it for you).
I think the Japanese font used on Android might be doing something like this! Look at this screenshot: https://ibb.co/hUAgWw
Upper line - complex kanji,
Lower line - its components.
When you look at the complex kanji on the upper line, some of its components look unnaturally stretched, as if they were automatically scaled instead of being drawn by hand. So I'm guessing the design is at least semi-automated.
(It's common for kanji like 日 and 雨 to have slight visual differences when used as components – the tiny 'legs' 日 has are missing in 曇 and 温, at least in the font I have. But it still looks like they just have a few variants of each character that are reused)
Oh I don't know much about ideographic writing, but I wonder if one can describe the language as a big search tree where the leaf ideograph is the overlay of all intermediate nodes (say each node being a vector representation.)
It's always difficult for me to trust the rest of an article when it's really confident about a meaningless detail and gets it entirely wrong. What am I supposed to think about a story that goes out of its way to define pachinko parlours as "game arcades"?
While this was true in the mid-2000s, I think the modern websites are much more similar to Western websites.
Perhaps the one thing that stands out is my adblocker doesn't work on japanese advertising so I get all the ads that I'm no longer used to seeing on my usual websites...
The simplest answer to anything anachronistic can generally be explained by the population's composition. The older the population is, the more resistant to change, and perceived problems by OP is a matter of change. In really popular websites, the population's composition largely reflects your customer's demographics. In newer websites targeting younger demographics, you are allowed to be more "hip" and "trendy". I also think the devices used to look at these websites also played a huge role. Lo-res images and text-heavy simply load faster.
Supposedly cities like New York looked similar into the 70s, but then came a backlash because much of the ads were for "burlesque" entertainment and similar.
Japan, and perhaps also the rest of Asia, has not had such a backlash.
This is rich. I'm not sure who they're comparing Japan to, because definitely not to modern American/mainstream web customs. In fact, my biggest complaint about the latter could be written like this:
Advertising - Rather than being seen as a tool to enable people, modern web companies often see the web as just another advertising platform to push their message across as loudly as possible. Websites ends up being about the minimal concentration of information into the largest space akin to a billboard rather than an interactive tool.
> People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision – they are not going to be easily swayed by a catchy headline or a pretty image. The adage of “less is more” doesn’t really apply here.
That's actually a pretty strong compliment. One could reverse it and ask, why in America and Europe people are easy swayed by lies in "a catchy headline or a pretty image", instead of demanding actual information about the product?