News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Generation Nintendo. Parent comment

Re:Generation Nintendo by unabst on Monday May 23, 2016 @05:06AM (#11752679)
> Their websites look like shit to use,

No no no... It's just that good web design is simply hard to find. No one is proud of these "asian websites". And it takes a while for updated good design practices to make it across the shore. Here is a decent site:

http://www.jp.playstation.com/psnow/

And for the record, a shitty "asian" one:

http://www.rakuten.co.jp/

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Generation Nintendo by wingerlang on Monday May 23, 2016 @05:36AM (#11752768)
Oops, I meant to write "to us" not "to use".

My main thing was that asian websites have more image-based content and their sentences and blocks of text look more blocky (due to uniformer characters and lack of spacing). I am not saying this is "shitty" - I am just saying that they have a different culture that makes these website the norm for them.

The rakuten looks quite busy, but at least it looks discoverable. I opened amazon and eBay and frankly they look hard to use since they hide some information.

But yeah the PS one looks more like a western page with a different language.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Generation Nintendo by lmm on Monday May 23, 2016 @06:11AM (#11752874)
That second one looks a lot more usable. Reminds me of the old Ebay or Amazon homepages back when they were growing really big - lots of links making it easy to find whatever you wanted, maybe not beautiful according to some arbitrary aesthetic but very functional.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Generation Nintendo by unabst on Monday May 23, 2016 @01:59PM (#11755581)
Regardless of whether it's usable, "reminds" is right. Rakuten is a huge modern forward-looking company, yet this is the best they can do. It's basically a classifieds of clickbait.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Generation Nintendo by digi_owl on Monday May 23, 2016 @08:47AM (#11753483)
As i like to phrase it, functional has a beauty all its own.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Generation Nintendo by enqk on Monday May 23, 2016 @07:12AM (#11753072)
Can you break down what's wrong with the rakuten one? I don't find it repellent at all. I also like this one: http://cookpad.com/
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Generation Nintendo by unabst on Monday May 23, 2016 @02:16PM (#11755706)
It's a clusterfuck. And as with the parent's correction, it's less about usability really. It just looks clusterfucked. Some say the Japanese have a higher tolerance for complexity, but they are also known to have a lower tolerance for bad aesthetics. You can see effort with cookpad (jp site). But even cookpad, which is a huge profitable online business, does not have a responsive site, is guilty of cramming content, which is so web 1.0.

Also, if your ad blocker is on, you're probably not seeing these pages in their full glory.

JP Yahoo vs US Yahoo is a good contrast also, though the US site does smell of defeat as a portal (JP site is still dominant in Japan).

http://www.yahoo.co.jp/

http://www.yahoo.com/

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Generation Nintendo by hammock on Monday May 23, 2016 @09:03AM (#11753560)
Wow, toggle between the Japanese and American version of this one page and you can see the difference (note I'm on mobile)
[ Parent | on HN ]