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Akatombo Web Log

Friday, April 30, 2004

Usability Issues on Japanese websites

We are going to be writing an article on common usability problems on Japanese websites in the near future.  Some of the main items for discussions are:

• Use of English for parts of the website crucial for navigation
• The use of frames
• failure to specify language encoding

The problem with pointing out usability problems is that generally you stop using sites that are hard to use and forget all about them.  We are trying, over the next couple of weeks, to make a note everytime we have problems figuring something out on a Japanese website.  We will then compile together these notes and try to find solutions to the most common problems.  We hope to publish this article in a Japanese language web design publication, but we need your help:

If you are using a Japanese website, and find something that is confusing, please take a moment to leave us a comment on this post.  Let us know the url of the site, and what was confusing to you.  We really appreciate your help!

1. Posted by UltraBob

   Our apologies to a site visitor who seemed to have problems posting comments here.  We appreciate you sending them through the contact form, and I will post them up here for you.

   We think the problem was either your browser or your firewall doesn’t give information about which page you have come from.  Our contact script checks for this to keep comment spammers away, but unfortunately catches people with setups like yours as well.  We will consider modifying this behavior, and have already modified the error message that you received to be a little more useful.  Without further ado, here is the comment:

   The purpose of a web page is to convey information or to obtain information from the viewer, but Japanese web pages make this difficult in many ways:

   1. Overcrowding: Most Japanese web pages are crammed with scores of links on the home page, without any organization. If there is a Search function, it is not placed in large letters at the top in a contrasting color with a big red button, but often hidden in some random portion of the page. The Search engine is usually some one-lung effort by a Japanese university researcher that yields either 10,000 hits or none.

   2. Software-on-Parade: Many Japanese sites insist on using the latest version, released last night at 11PM, of some flashy plug-in to show you a boring, endless introductory movie. They don’t realize that people want to obtain information as quickly as possible, using old computers running ancient software, on crackling slow Japanese phone lines.

   3. Frames: Print a Japanese web page and the chances are nearly 100% that you will be printing a frame you don’t want, due to the excessive use of hidden frames. Frames are rarely an improvement.

   4. It’s A Small World: Typefaces on Japanese web sites are too tiny to see for person over 40. Hint: persons over 40 make most of the money in Japan and most of the decisions.

   May 17th, 2004 06:27 PM
   
   
   
2. Posted by Oli

   Here’s a site that has several very unfriendly things:
   http://www.champ.co.jp/
   First, it’s in a full-page frame so there are no bookmarkable URLs, despite frames not actually being used for anything useful. All their content is actually on:
   http://www.ecbugyo.com/
   So I guess they use the frame as a (bad) mod_rewrite substitute.

   Normally you can still get URLs to bookmark by using the contextual menu, but for some reason they’ve replaced all their links with Javascript, eg:
   <A HREF="[removed]category(’http://www.ecbugyo.com/servlet/csb’, ‘00000147’)">
   (This redirects to http://www.ecbugyo.com/servlet/csb/00000147)

   Even better, If I try to use the back button within their site, I get an warning message:
   “To reopen this page, the form you completed to open the page the first time must be sent again. This may cause the website to repeat actions it took the first time you sent the form.”
   This doesn’t happen when using the site ‘directly’ via an ecbugyo.com url.

   So they’ve managed to purposefully kill bookmarking AND the back button. Amazing.

   Peace - oli

   PS since it’s a Japanese site it doesn’t seem worth mentioning that it’s table/font tag hell. I mean, of course, right? I was really surprised they actually have a charset

   June 21st, 2004 04:36 PM
   
   
   

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