10 things I’ve learned about product design while working in Japan
Japan is known as a homogeneous society with a strong sense of group and national identity and little ethnic or racial diversity. Designing products that target Japan requires a deep understanding of the cultural boundaries and nodes to find what could trigger a behavioral change.
Without being born and raised in Japan, designing products for a Japanese audience requires a proactive switch in perspective. More and more companies (such as Netflix, Stripe, Uber Eats) have realized that it is crucial to diversify their Japan strategy and target it as a unique, mature market different from other emerging countries of the Asia Pacific ( or AxJ — Asia Economics excluding Japan). So, why do companies want to make the effort to invest in such an idiosyncratic and complex market? The reality is that even niche markets within Japan are still much bigger than entire smaller emerging markets from Southeast Asia.
Disclaimer: This is just my personal view as an Italian Product Designer who has been living in Tokyo for a decade. This article might include some generalizations and overall trends that certainly do not hold true to every individual.
1 — A matter of trust
One of the most recurrent fundamentals of Japanese society is the value for the group over the individual. This concept is also visible in the way companies target early customers in Japan.
People’s sense of “trust” towards a new product is directly proportional to the number of existing users. No matter the improved level of convenience offered by the new product or experience, I’ve noticed a certain tendency to avoid becoming an early adopter, which might feel like too much of a gamble. The significant appreciation for well-established brands makes a challenging field for newcomers.
“An-shin” 安心 (reassurance) is a term often used when describing a service or a particular product experience that won’t hide any unwanted surprise. People already know what to expect; they feel secure in their comfort zone. Sometimes this concept is brought to such an extreme that many would feel like there are no other viable alternatives to “that car,” or “that restaurant,” or “that university”. The same goes in the opposite direction, companies need Designers who can truly understand the user’s mindset before trusting them to build the products.
One of the most challenging parts has always been getting over the company’s biases about the market fit, convincing them to take some risk or properly test a prototype. I often found that many of our assumptions were correct, but we couldn’t get the “green light” from our conservative stakeholders. In a couple of cases, the company chose to build the product only after realizing that other companies were already successful with a similar idea.
The most successful strategy is to build trust step by step, showcasing how much you understand their concerns; the more risks you are allowed to take, the easier it will be to validate your product and bring home useful data.
2 — Learn the language
There is no other way to tell you this. If you want to work in Japan and be relevant, make an impact and gain authority, you have to learn the language.
I know Japanese is hard, and there are no easy ways to learn it. You have to invest your time and effort to become fluent. It will be the main difference between success and failure.
Japan is a country where understanding the language unlocks the many faces of its unique culture. Being able to pick up the right term when explaining a concept is often crucial for the success of a project.
More and more young Japanese professionals can speak fairly good English. Going to spend a year or two in an English-speaking country is becoming a good habit of many millennials. Still, the fact someone can speak your language won’t necessarily make them understand your western culture. There is only one way around it: you learn their language.
As a non-native Japanese speaker, learning the language made my life in Japan way easier. After 11 years of life in Japan (and being married to a Japanese person), I have gained a certain degree of fluency. Still, there are a lot of cases where my language skills are not enough to hit the pinpoint of a topic, so I require a native speaker to support me. Without being able to “read in the air” (a common expression that Japanese use to describe the ability to understand the mood of a conversation) my day-to-day work would be way harder, and definitely more uncertain.
Fun fact: Being the “alien” in the room (a non-Japanese who speaks fluently) will help to decrease the formal atmosphere of those meetings and perhaps serve as the ice-breaker that both sides use to open a business conversation.
3 — Targeting Japanese audience
Japanese culture is unique; people tend to be long-term customers, often establishing an emotional bond with a brand. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, the niche markets in Japan prosper thanks to the dedication and the loyalty of customers. To prove this theory would be enough to have a look at the thousands of loyalty programs that almost every brand, service, and store offers to the Japanese audience. Compared to the loyalty programs I’ve used in Europe, the Japanese loyalty programs are much more serious and streamlined. You’ll quickly realize how convenient it is to collect and use points when shopping, commuting, or eating at your favorite restaurant.
Following this mindset of “showing reliability -> establishing trust -> confirming customer loyalty“, many successful foreign brands adapted their storytelling and visual taste to create a tailor-made Japanese version of their product.
One effective formula is to make the audience feel your product as Made in Japan. There is nothing stronger than the belief that “only Japanese people can create products for Japanese customers”.
Successful examples can be seen with the Korean company Naver, which created Line, the answer to Facebook’s Whatsapp. If you ask almost any Japanese person they will assume it’s a Japanese company.
In contrast, a different but still fairly successful example is Uber Eats which approached the Japanese market with a campaign targeting mainly people in the Tokyo startup ecosystem. Uber Eats onboarded a large number of “tech-savvy” users (the ones who already knew the brand from Silicon Valley) and somehow redefined food delivery standards and expectations for a Japanese audience, to the point that other companies such as Dominos and Pizza Hut adopted the same GPS tracking system with their delivery guys.
4 — Sales department
I have experienced working with many clients that depend too much on their sales department.
When designing for the SaaS type of industry (Software as a Service), “the sales department is what can make the difference, especially in the kick-starting phase.” This is what I heard a lot.
Sometimes it feels like “no matter if your product isn’t really solving any user’s pain, customers will give it a try anyway if your sales department did a good job”. Unfortunately, that’s a reality that leads to a lot of frustration — and it has happened to me at least a few times.
Although I still believe that sales teams are essential for products in Japan and the fact they exist should not become a threat to your Build-Measure-Learn process.
Pairing with the sales team from the start will probably be as beneficial as pairing with the other teams like engineering and marketing. It’s useful to onboard the sales team in your product discovery practices, share understanding with them, and “recruit” them as honorary UX researchers.
I have found this strategy very effective when working in a company that didn’t allow me to interview its users in person. I was able to train a few people from the Sales team to become my “eyes and ears” on the field, mapping customers’ behaviors by asking the right questions.
5 — A “gentle” UX
Many times I heard requests from clients to design “gentle” customer experiences. Especially in BtoB type of products, the risk of making your user upset from lack of information or by the tone of the copy in a dialog modal is a recurring nightmare in Japanese digital product companies.
While building a digital platform for an M&A company, I experienced working with very traditional industry. Most of their processes were happening offline through telephone, FAX, and mails. Establishing trust with the M&A digital customers has been my most difficult and challenging job as a product designer.
Most of the problems happened when we tried to onboard the customers to the platform “too directly”, in a straightforward way like any product from Silicon Valley.
What we validated after months of prototyping and testing was a wake-up call. The M&A process in Japan is a long and complex journey, being very emotionally involved for the customers (especially sellers). Our approach was smart and quick but didn’t empathize with the delicate state of mind of a 65+-year-old company owner, shyly considering to sell his lifelong project — his beloved company — and eventually retire.
The key solution to this has been redesigning the user journey, creating slightly more friction by providing more information to the customers, onboarding step by step, giving previews of the next phase requirements and consequences. This helped M&A customers to become more confident in using the platform and they eventually started sharing more information — crucial for the platform in order to create great matches with potential buyers.
6 — Decode culture-related behaviors and routines
As product designers, one of our tasks is to decode the little things that most people take for granted and track down those behavioral patterns that someday might become mainstream.
Japan, with its unique culture, might be a great field to study how people interact with services, why, and what makes their brains click.
One example is how Japanese people perceive the value of convenience.
In Japan, the word “convenient” (便利 Benri) might have multiple understatements. The electronic payment system such as the Suica or Pasmo cards is usually associated with transaction convenience.
You can use the card ( or even the digital version available on certain smartphones and Apple watches) to smoothly pass through train gates, shopping in a supermarket, or pay for a taxi. The benefit perceived by Japanese users is slightly different; the prevailing social dogma here dictates one shouldn’t cause any inconvenience to others by using a paper ticket or cash with the awkward consequence of being slower and holding the queue at the gate or at the store register (on this topic, I’ve found a great analysis on J.Chipchase’s book “Hidden in plain sight”). The Japanese user often measures convenience by the amount of inconvenience they avoid causing to others rather than solely the time or effort saved for themselves.
To better understand the differences in the way Japanese people interact with products and services, I invest a large amount of my time into observing people’s routines, which helps me to recognize my own western cultural biases and better understand the way people in this country interact with each other; what they feel as comfortable, convenient, awkward, socially unacceptable, ugly, delightful.
7 — Sometimes complexity is necessary
Japanese people are used to KANJI so they are also used to navigating their eyes through complex informational interfaces. On the other hand, minimalism and essentialism do not necessarily inspire trust in Japan, and instead could be perceived as lacking information. When walking on the streets of Tokyo you will certainly notice how the information is exploding around you, expanding both horizontally and vertically.
As western designers, we have the tendency to identify Japanese design with minimalism and harmony, which is true in some cases but it should not be taken as the only aspect of Japanese design language.
The reality is that western designers who can’t read Japanese (or languages that use kanji characters) won’t fully understand the logic behind a Japanese user interface. We tend to look at websites like Yahoo.jp, Rakuten, or Kakaku and believe that Japan is very behind the UX/UI standards of other countries like the USA.
The visual complexity of a Kanji, where changing a single mark or adding a point would create an entirely different meaning and context, has forced the brain of Japanese people to develop an attention to small details. This has essentially created a “decoding machine” that can quickly associate a series of information to a specific sign. What westerners may see as chaotic, messy, and unnecessarily complex, the Japanese see the context, information, and meaning.
As a western designer in Japan, the tendency is to compare those overloaded interfaces with minimalist Silicon Valley-style ones, which in Japan doesn’t reach the qualitative standard and doesn’t inspire trust.
Designing for Japan requires more effort and more attention to the cultural background than designing for any other country, and I haven’t met any designer yet who can fully understand this concept unless they have lived here for many years and can speak the language fluently.
8 — Understand the relationship Japanese people have with devices
Look at how Japanese people write sentences on their smartphones. Please pay attention to the 12 buttons digital keyboard they are typing on. Yes, that’s based on the analog keyboard of button-key phones. When smartphones became popular in Japan, mainly through the advent of the iPhone, people slowly transitioned from their analog 12 key “garake-phone” aka the old-style clamshell phones also popular in the rest of the world. Garake stands for galapagos-keitai, referring to their isolated state similar to the Galapagos Islands, or garake as everybody calls them here.
The typing system on a smartphone is still based on the “flick-input” layout, consisting of pressing and holding a character to open a submenu of the correspondent phonetic hiragana characters.
Some interesting technology such as QR codes or the introduction of Emoji were direct answers to specific Japanese user needs. In the era of the PocketBell, a “pager” device very popular among teenagers in the early 90s, (5.75 million pager subscribers in Japan), sending a message has a certain set of limitations such as the necessary use of keypads on public phones to text each other strings of numbers — numbers associated to predefined meanings.
Because of the unique nature of Japanese grammar, the “pokeberu” viewed an increased success in Japan.
To give a practical example, to say “what are you doing” in Japanese you would say 何してる (Nani shiteru). The numbers 7–2–4–10–6 reads as Nana-Ni-Shi-Too-Roku,
shorten Nani-Shi-To-Ro which sounds very close to Nani shiteru, enough to deliver the sense of the message.
The way Japanese consumers interacted with devices in the past represents an interesting field for researching how humans interact with technology in general.
9 — Designing for the Japanese internet
Approximately 71% of the Japanese population has access to and frequently uses broadband. According to a MIC Report, the Japanese access the Internet more through mobile devices (69 million) than through PC (66 Million).
Only about 1% of the Japanese population has enough foreign language skills to understand the content on foreign websites completely, and they tend to skip content they cannot read at first sight.
When designing products for a Japanese audience, I often noticed unexpected user behaviors, usually due to my underestimation of the required cognitive effort when reading the alphabet instead of kana. More often than I would like to admit, I’ve noticed that English is used solely as a decorative element in the layout, which made me reconsider the choice of using it.
Sometimes designers forget that building a website in English and then translating it into Japanese doesn’t work well. The best practice when designing products for Japanese customers is to design directly in the Japanese language.
Also, the indexing of websites works differently. Searching the same word on Google in English and in Katakana will produce entirely different results. This is very important to consider when working on a branding project and defining a set of keywords associated with that product. You’ll notice for this purpose, Japanese advertising posters always provide an illustrated “search bar” with the exact spelling to search on the web.
10 — Installing a new process requires time.
Agile development is still somehow new in Japan, where the Tech industry has changed a lot in the last ten years but still heavily relies on long and bulky waterfall processes. One of the problems I experienced on multiple projects was the structure of teams. Many companies used to outsource the development of their products using a “subcontractor system” with one client, multiple project managers, and several developers from different software houses, making it very difficult to share one goal across the team.
Nowadays, more and more companies, especially those who deliver heavily via internet browsers and mobile phones, hire in-house development teams and aim to adopt agile methods, which is a good step forward from the past.
Installing a new process is not hard but should happen in steps, where the effectiveness of a new method is carefully shared among the team.
Japanese people usually prefer to learn by example (western people instead are comfortable learning from more abstracted theories), showcasing successful case studies. Having a good shared understanding with the team would definitely make them comfortable giving it a try.
One last thing to keep in mind is the fact that many traditional Japanese companies are still very hierarchical, and often small agile teams have to deal with approval from their stakeholders. Including the person who has the power from the very beginning could be challenging, but not impossible.
Conclusion
These 10 things are just the “tip of the iceberg”; there is so much more to learn about Product Design in Japan, and even if Japan feels like a society averse to change, it has changed quite a lot in just the last 11 years that I’ve lived here.
I believe as designers we should be driven by seeking discomfort and finding problems we didn’t know existed before. Japan is a perfect playing field for this practice.
With this article, I wish to actually establish an open conversation with other Product Designers who already live in Japan or are intrigued to test their skills and expertise by working on Japanese products.
Thanks for reading! I’ve been living in Tokyo since 2010, I’ve just started writing on product design and user experience in Japan. Feel free to post a comment, share your opinion or drop me a line on my website.
Thanks to Elaine Westra for the usual support and proofreading.
