Web Design and Consumer Behavior: Culture in Context

How does our culture and language shape the way that we process information?  

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon two Youtube videos with contradicting arguments surrounding the topic of website design and why it is so different in the west compared to the east. Both of these creators brought strong arguments with interesting research to support their theories. Today I wanted to explore and compare these arguments. 

First, lets take a quick look at how different it actually is. These images were linked from Sabrina's video on Answer in Progress thanks to webdesignmuseum.org. 

Japan

United States

 When comparing these examples, there's some pretty stark differences! The Japanese webpages are text heavy with information spread all throughout the page. There doesn't seem to be any visual hierarchy, and notably, the website didn't change much in five years. In the US, the design seems to be more minimalist, even in the 2005 example. There is a visual hierarchy and many images. Text is grouped together. 

This is one example out of many, but the similarities remain consistent. Let's continue onto a few arguments of why this is the case. 

VIDEO ONE: Why Japan's Internet is Weirdly Designed

    In this video, the channel Answer in Progress, takes a research approach to try and understand why Japan's internet looks so different from our own. Sabrina, who is conducting this video, uses web-crawlers and VPNs to capture over 2,600 screenshots of varying websites from across 200 countries. She then feeds them to an AI to compare and contrast these different websites. The AI then came up with 'design clusters' to organize these screenshots based on similarity, which led Sabrina to find that Japan's website design stands out with bright colors and dense formatting. 

   

    In the next part of the video, Sabrina poses three hypotheses to explore why Japanese web design is considered to be 'unique'. 

CHARACTERS: Chinese, Korean, and Japanese use logographic lettering, also known as CJK characters. For this reason, their text files are much more dense. To put this into perspective, most Latin type formats support around 3,741 glyphs, while logographic texts have over 65,000 (Cruz, 2022). Despite this being a hypothesis for web design reasoning, Sabrina rules out this option once she compares Chinese and Korean pages, which do not follow Japan's unique website formatting. 

CULTURE: This is an important part, as Sabrina states "I am not convinced that culture is the primary cause of Japan's unique web design", and closes the case of culture. We will come back to this!

TECHNOLOGY: Sabrina's final hypothesis is that the rise of smartphones is the reason behind Japan's web design. Once smartphones were introduced to American consumers, it was important for websites to acclimate to the new design. Previously clunky websites became minimalist and 'modern' for the sake of simple navigation, but Sabrina argues that this change was not one internationally accepted. Apparently, Japan's smartphone revolution happened about ten years before ours in the USA (Tabuchi, 2009). Sabrina states that Japan didn't feel the need to 'modernize' as their smartphones and consumers were already very comfortable with the user interface, and they didn't need to expand for international consumers as it was already profitable enough in Japan. 

The video wraps with the conclusion being that lack of technological expansion in Japan is the cause for strange website design, but lets take a look at the opposing argument by Cynthia Zhou. 

VIDEO TWO: How Culture made Japanese Internet Design "Weird"

Cynthia begins her video in reference to the Sabrina's, and summarizes the previous argument. In response to Sabrina's lack of convincement to the cultural argument, Cynthia states: "Let me convince you, Sabrina. I think there are deep rooted cultural reasons as to why modern websites in Japan, and other east Asian countries look like this: dense, cluttered, and information overloaded" (2023). 

The argument begins by talking about the smartphone revolution Sabrina had previously mentioned. Cynthia states that sure, Japan didn't really hop on the wave, but South Korea and China certainly did. She goes on to say that since the US, SK, and China adopted smartphones at a similar time, so their websites should also look similar, right? Cynthia finds Chinese and Korean examples of modern websites, that look rather similar to Japan's. I am unsure as to how Sabrina missed this in her website-scraping. 

Cynthia proposes: "Since its not tech, it has to be culture". She begins the next part of the video by stating it is fundamental to understand that easterners and westerners think differently, and how this is heavily documented in cultural psychology. She goes onto explain how the west uses analytic thinking while the east uses holistic thinking. Analytic thinking is characterized by "focus on individual objects, and the details and attributes associated with the single objects", while holistic thinking is characterized by "seeing a picture as its whole, focusing on the relationships between objects" (Zhou, 2022). She gives the example of asking the two types of thinkers to describe a dining table. 

            Analytic: "It is made out of wood, and it has four legs"

            Holistic: "People sit together and eat on it"

So, what does this have to do with website design? Cynthia shows a clip of psychologist Richard Nisbett explaining: "Asians are picking up much more about the physical environment and the social environment than westerners are. They just see a tremendous amount more. The Japanese pick up 60% more information about the context, and twice as much information about relationships" (2023). Because of the way we process information as a culture, the way it is presented back to our culture is bound to internationally vary. 

Cynthia further explains how there is a different expectation as to what the 'optimal' amount of information to present is depending on which culture you reside with. She references a research paper by Wang et al, and states: "East Asian content is information rich because the holistic way of thinking allows people to see all information as equally important and absorb all of the information in the whole context. In contrast, the North American analytical way of thinking allows people to be more organized and focus on the core salient message" (2012). This was further proven by the referenced paper, where researchers compared European Canadian and East Asian's ability to quickly find relevant information in complex and dense websites. It was found that East Asians were able to find this information much quicker than their Canadian counterparts (Wang et al, 2012). 

This density can be seen all across East Asia, especially in advertising. Consider the visual landscape of Tokyo. Cynthia circles this back to art history, and compares works in American and Japanese art museums through a study called "Comparing the Attention to Context of East Asians and Americans" by Masuda et al in 2008. This study looked at over 1000 pieces of art from these museums, and noticed that east Asian art contained denser scenes without focal points compared to western art that has a subject focused style. This lack of focal point is still seen when comparing eastern and western websites.

CONCLUSION: 

In the end, it seems like the case for culture wins. Cynthia's insight on analytical and holistic ways of thinking directly relates to the reason why our internet seems to be so different. Tracing these patterns back to art was a really interesting connection to make, and further solidifies the argument. While I am impressed by Sabrina's tech-based approach, I am disappointed that she didn't continue questioning beyond her conclusion. 

Overall, both of these creators put in a lot of research to present their respective arguments and posed very interesting questions. Beginning this blog with the preface of the first video made me feel compelled to continue exploring, and I am glad that Cynthia uploaded a response to Sabrina's video. I think that Cynthia's explanation is an important one, as many people can't see the extent to which their culture impacts their perception. These digital environments are great examples, as they show how culture can even seep into technology- things many people view as objective or omnipresent. We learned that Japan's internet isn't 'weird', we just can't culturally relate to it. Their internet is as 'weird' as ours is 'stupid'; our brain's can't even begin to process the way these websites are set up. 

I think that these videos also show an important lesson on unseen bias. While I respect Sabrina's argument, I think that her self-conducted scientific investigation could lead many people in the wrong direction. The faults in her research are a good example of how not every question can be answered by science or 'logical' AIs. Oftentimes, the root of the question is much deeper and more human; if Sabrina had given more context for her findings she could've been lead directly to the case of culture. 

RESOURCES: 

Answer In Progress. (2022, November 24). Why Japan’s Internet is weirdly designed. [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6ep308goxQ&t=2s&ab_channel=AnswerinProgress

Masuda, T., Gonzalez, R., Kwan, L., & Nisbett, R. E. (2008). Culture and Aesthetic Preference: Comparing the Attention to Context of East Asians and Americans. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(9), 1260-1275. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167208320555 

Tabuchi, H. (2009, July 20). Why Japan’s smartphones haven’t gone global. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/technology/20cell.html

Wang, H., Masuda, T., Ito, K., & Rashid, M. (2012). How Much Information? East Asian and North American Cultural Products and Information Search Performance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(12), 1539-1551. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167212455828

Wang, M. (2022, April). Generation Z Subculture Marketing in the New Media Environment: A Case Study of Bilibili. 2022 International Conference on Creative Industry and Knowledge Economy (CIKE 2022) (pp. 256-260). Atlantis Press. DOI: 10.2991/aebmr.k.220404.047

Zhou, C. (2022, December 9). How culture made Japanese Internet design “Weird”.  [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opy-SjDU0UY&ab_channel=CynthiaZhou