I freakin' love Japanese web design. I think the Japanese just favor the old "info dump" style of web page, as opposed to here where web pages are supposed to function as either advertisements or substrates for advertisements.
For an example of what this looks like in English, check out Hitoshi Doi's web pages, which are still up in more or less their original form from the mid-late 90s. I learned basically everything I know about Sailor Moon from him back in the day: http://www.usagi.org/doi/
Another thing I saw is that, for a subscription service, Japanese website tend to just put the pricing info first thing on the landing page, while English website tend to try to hide it.
I wonder if prolonged experience with a written language that can condense quite well (and go in other directions that just left to right) is a factor.
I prefer old “data dump” websites even in English - much better than whatever the current “hero image” design we have now where we do about five words per ten inches it seems.
Gosh I hate hero images so much. Wasting anywhere between 30%-100% of the above-the-fold space on an often completely meaningless stock photo or illustration with a loose connection to a keyword — who the fuck likes that?
Users do. I spent a whole summer A/B testing an app's landing page to get 10+% more conversions. Over 50 experiments, the biggest win was having a hero image. Its actual content didn't matter as long as it was a photo and featured humans. And the more screen space it took the better. Probably different for different markets and apps, but yeah from my experience users love em.
I don't see why it would be different. The only difference between anadvertising page and a news site nowadays is how quickly the hero image needs to change.
Reddit's old vs. current design is probably one of the biggest examples of the user philosophy changing overtime. Not really a "hero image", but the focus of presenting text with small thumbnails to huge thumbnails and a small header likely follows a similar philosophy.
I also find it easier to ctrl/cmd-f what I’m looking for on a data-dump page than try to parse their information architecture (navigation) or use the search box, which rarely seem to return useful results.
I don't really like it for the simple reason that a digital canvas is infinite. There's no need to dump everything onto as little space as possible. It reminds me of a billboard.
Space isn't just about advertisement but also presenting information in a form that reflects the structure of the content. Dumping everything, as the word suggests makes it harder to figure out what is important, the order of what's being presented, and so on.
Yeah I’m with you. I miss the days when websites were about actually giving you the information you want, and not the playground of an overpaid design firm more interested in winning awards and impressing their peers.
The modern web is a bloody mess, and it’s ridiculous how far backwards we’ve gone.
It occasionally makes me think that the only thing holding back trends are overarching cultural norms, rather than a small, devoted group of people willing to fight to take back the "old ways". It's very hard to change Japanese society unless everyone is moved into action at once (as the continued use of paper forms would show). I think from this resistance to change, we people from other cultures are able to view this alternate version of some other Internet where people don't care or don't want to use the latest tech all the time.
I once read in a Japanese economics newspaper that the general sentiment is: if you ask your boss if you can use shiny new technique 'X' to solve a problem, you're going to be told "no." As a result, nobody bothers to ask.
Sometimes, I wonder if nothing short of that kind of deep-rooted hesitance at a societal level would have been necessary to stop today's Corporate Memphis web.
The only time "info dump" type sites are bad in my experience is if they've been written in such a way that text doesn't reflow well or navigation is cumbersome/nonexistant. As long as those two things aren't problems they're generally not unpleasant to use.
It makes me think of when i visited Japan, just so many shops that carry every single possible different piece of inventory possible. While in the US, if it's not selling, they'll just stop stocking it, so you're left with a way less variety of things you can buy.
For an example of what this looks like in English, check out Hitoshi Doi's web pages, which are still up in more or less their original form from the mid-late 90s. I learned basically everything I know about Sailor Moon from him back in the day: http://www.usagi.org/doi/