Why Japanese Internet design is weird

Notes

statistical method - dimensionality reduction used to group website screenshots(T-SNE)
websites are brightly coloured, dense
3 reasons:
1. characters(65k glyphs → character representation)
2. culture
3. technology(revolution happened a decade early, love for outdated tech, mostly browse on older devices hence website design didn’t change)
few font options, lack of hierarchy
we all see the world through cultural glasses
The lens with which your brain sees the world shapes your reality.
it shapes how we think, what we pay attention to and how we perceive things.
Culture → characteristics, values, knowledge, lifestyle within group of people or place
east Asian → china, japan, south Korea
western culture → UK, Germany, USA , Australia , Canada.
culture psychology
westerners → analytical thinkers(focus on individual objects, their attributes)
easterners → holistic thinkers (see picture as a whole, focus on relationships of objects)
east Asians tend to process 60% more info and find twice as many relationships compared to westerners.
hence the designers cram lot of info in websites because they know their audience will be able to find what they want
there is no right wrong culture
even advertising is affected because of it
east Asian art
subject focused western art
understanding this allows us to perceive the culture differently and enable us to see the world through someone else’s lens.