<p>Published on <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/a-designer-in-japan-advertising-service-design-and-culture-shock-f5538fc1ef0e?source=rss----eb297ea1161a---4">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> Maxy Lotherington <img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*abDlUqNmfg8Oqa2Ke19gKw.png">Some snaps from my trip.</p>
<p>I recently just returned to Melbourne after a wonderful two-and-a-bit weeks in Japan. Apart from the obvious fascination with shrines, ramen, and stationery, one of the most interesting things I noticed was the cultural differences in advertising, service design, and user experience. I’ve compiled a few (okay, a lot) of my observations below.</p>
<h3>The Good…</h3>
<h3><strong>Ordering food from a machine at a restaurant.</strong></h3>
<p>Okay, I’m a massive sucker for automation and also food, so this <em>had</em> to top the list.</p>
<p>Several restaurants we went to during our trip were focused on super quick service to support high turnover. One of the ways they encourage this is through ticketing machines. The style varied, but the concept was the same — simply deposit your money, push a few buttons to order, and the machine will spit out a ticket with your order on it that you can hand to a waiter.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*UdL8qn8YzzzzSFntNTzp6g.png">I love buttons.</p>
<p>Granted, I would’ve liked these even more if they all had English and pictures on them, but they were still very cool. The restaurant has to hire fewer floor staff, the presence of the machine usually is enough to communicate the quick-turnover nature of the restaurant, it minimises human interaction (introverts, rejoice!), and there’s no chance of there being a miscommunication about what you ordered. This is a fantastic example of how Japan’s <strong>improved upon an old service experience.</strong></p>
<h3>Vending machines that don’t suck.</h3>
<p>You’ve probably all heard about the weird and wacky vending machines in Japan — and yeah, they actually are just everywhere! While they weren’t <em>that</em> weird in terms of contents (at least, not the ones we found), they were significantly better than Western vending machines for two reasons: the price, and the variety.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*lcVXhhv2_dDngtGxYcQSlg.png">Oooh, choices.</p>
<p>I don’t know about you, but I only buy drinks from vending machines in Melbourne if I’m dying of thirst and there is no other store nearby — because it’s just ridiculously expensive. Surprise, surprise — if you have reasonable prices for your vending machines, people actually use them! Since we found that buying from a machine was basically the same as at a convenience store or supermarket, we were significantly more likely to just grab a drink from one, which is something I’d never have considered back here.</p>
<p>They also have so many drinks available, and some locations would have multiple vending machines in the same place just to give you more variety in options. There were many times when I’d purchase from the machine instead of a store purely because it had more choice.</p>
<h3>The packaging is fairly innovative.</h3>
<p>Weird choice? Maybe, but this absolutely fascinates me. We got hooked on having onigiri for breakfast every day, and at first, we thought it was the worst packaging design ever. It was wrapped in a triangle of plastic, but the seaweed was in a separate packaging sheet? How completely <strong>in</strong>convenient.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*6B6dcOjV3gRh9kZThjlYLQ.png"><em>So cute, so genius!</em></p>
<p>After a couple of days, I decided to not be an idiot and noticed that there were actually instructions on the plastic packaging. There’s actually a little tab at the top you pull, to unwrap a little strip around the whole middle, and then you can pull the sides out neatly. This leaves you with onigiri that is perfectly triangular, but also keeps the seaweed crisp and fresh! Proof: <strong>good packaging design can change your entire perception of the product.</strong></p>
<h3>They’re a lot more illustration-focused than Australia.</h3>
<p>Am I biased in thinking this is good? Probably.</p>
<p>Since Japan has a lot of love for kawaii culture, it’s only fitting that lots of adorable illustrations and animations make it into everything — ads, shirts, UI, everywhere! <strong>Illustrations let you communicate concepts in fun, delightful ways that photographs and videos often can’t, humanise companies by making them friendly and approachable, but also add elements of personalisation and creativity.</strong></p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*JOWm8Db_PpzAXvpz23x18w.png"><em>C’mon, you’ve got to admit it — this is just adorable.</em></p>
<p>Over in the West, illustrators struggled for a while in the 90’s and 2000’s, as demand for them plummeted massively. No longer were they as desired for print advertising, since that started dying, and it was too expensive for most companies to justify. We’ve had a bit of a resurgence in the last four or five years, as big brands like Duolingo, Intercom, and American Express have harnessed illustration fantastically and used it to build their brands or improve user perception in the market. I’m excited to see illustration in Australia expand from online into TV ads, posters, and other formats!</p>
<h3>The Bad…</h3>
<h3>The train system is… kind of terrible.</h3>
<p>Not the trains themselves, those are fine. Actually navigating the stations and purchasing tickets, though? That could really use an overhaul.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*mV_fXDecPCR8Dj3C3FmDvg.png"><em>The Tokyo subway map — seriously, does this look at all useable?</em></p>
<p>The stations themselves are giant giant giant, making Southern Cross look tiny. They have so many different exits, some have stores, and some actually join onto multiple shopping centres. Because of this, there are signs all over the place, but they can’t contain all information or they’d be giant — which meant that we got lost inside the stations a <em>lot</em>. If you’re going somewhere new for the first time, it’s really stressful.</p>
<p>Then there’s the actual structure of the trains. Not only do cities have their own subway line, there’s also JR lines — operated by a different company — and in Osaka we had trouble navigating since about six lines were the same colour on the map and just labelled ‘other trains.’ And unless you have an IC Card (like a Myki), you need to buy paper tickets for different lines, which means leaving a station, buying a different line ticket, and going through a different entrance.</p>
<p>The ticket machines were also monumentally confusing. We encountered maybe four different types of machines that sold the same type of tickets, and yet were all designed completely differently. Some of them had physical buttons for some items, but even those differed machine to machine. Some had you search for station names, some for station numbers, and some you just had to put money into and select a value from yet another screen.</p>
<p>I never thought I’d say this, but our public transport system in Melbourne is actually less confusing! A lack of consistency in design, a lack of good signage, and a lack of collaboration between the different train operators made this a very stressful and confusing experience.</p>
<h3>Travel apps that aren’t designed for actual travelers.</h3>
<p>Okay, so this one isn’t exactly Japan’s fault, but it’s never been as big of an issue overseas as it was here. We needed maps, translations/phrases, and other tools to help us communicate and travel around the country, but most apps that we found were lacking in a lot of important information.</p>
<p>For maps, just finding an offline map that worked and wasn’t outrageously priced was hard enough. Even the maps I tried that had positioned themselves as ‘perfect for tourists’ required wifi or data… somehow forgetting that many tourists won’t have data or internet access while wandering around a new city. One offline app that worked would only let us download one city for free, and we could have as much as we wanted… for $50 a year. Since I don’t travel frequently enough to justify that, I had to make do with Lonely Planet’s map, which doesn’t let you add your own markers. An offline map that had more reasonable pricing options, such as a cheaper monthly subscription, would have been ideal.</p>
<p>Actually communicating with the locals without carrying around a stack of guidebooks also turned out to be harder than expected. While we knew enough to get by for most interactions, we couldn’t read some signs, or understand some shopkeepers. Google Translate lets you download an offline dictionary, but of course, that doesn’t work if you can’t actually type the Japanese in because you don’t know it. And their image scanning feature requires, you guessed it, data. Our solution to this problem was just to nod a lot and assume that whatever we were being asked was something we should agree to.</p>
<p>Odds are, there are some great travel apps out there that <em>were</em> designed with travelers in mind, while they’re actually traveling — but finding some was close to impossible. <strong>Users usually aren’t opposed to paying what they perceive to be a justified price, so long as it actually meets their needs.</strong></p>
<h3>…and The Just Plain Different.</h3>
<h3>Advertisements are really people-focused.</h3>
<p>I saw tons of ads on my trip — on the walls of the subway stations, inside the actual trains, on billboards, everywhere! — and one of the things that stuck out the most is that the majority of ads feature a person’s face.</p>
<p>This makes a lot of sense, as humans process visual information very quickly <a href="https://www.canva.com/learn/visual-marketing/">and we’re hardwired to respond to faces.</a> Almost every print ad we saw had a face, and some even left out visuals of the product itself to focus on the face, contrasting massively to Australian print ads!</p>
<h3>Advertisements often show UI elements.</h3>
<p>I’m not talking about online ads here, but print and digital ads in the subway. One of the campaigns running during my trip was for Indeed, a job searching site.</p>
<p>Apart from having faces in every single one of their ads, the animated parts of their campaign showed the UI of logging in and browsing through job ads. No real clutter, just a plain white screen with some form fields being filled in. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ad like that in Australia, but in a way it makes sense — showing the potential users how to actually use the product alongside the advertising means they won’t be as confused when they visit your website and try to sign up!</p>
<p>Several other ads, overwhelmingly print, showed a particular UI element — search terms. They’d be a standard ad, but in the corner where you’d expect to find a URL, it would have a little search box including the terms you should search. I later learnt that this has to do with how the Japanese interact with the internet, such as using roman characters and having multiple potential domain extensions that are common. If you’re curious about this phenomenon, <a href="https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2011/08/17/digital/why-do-japanese-advertisers-suggest-internet-search-keywords/#.Wlv4H5P1XOQ">check out this article</a> — it covers it in a lot more detail!</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*MMRRsr4-92i3SYFhqI5LWg.png">What’s more important than advertising difference cross-cultures? Food differences.</p>
<p>Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please give a 👏 — it’ll help me overcome my jet lag.</p>
<p><em>This post was originally published on the 15th of January in my company’s internal portal for readers in APAC.</em></p>
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<p><a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/a-designer-in-japan-advertising-service-design-and-culture-shock-f5538fc1ef0e">A Designer in Japan — Advertising, Service Design, and Culture Shock?</a> was originally published in <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io">Prototypr</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.</p>


A Designer in Japan — Advertising, Service Design, and Culture Shock?

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