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Effective usage of English in 'Japanese' business application UI design

Junichi Okamura2014.4.11

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About Me

Name: Junichi OkamuraJob: Software EngineerRole: R&D Manager in SHANON, Inc.Interests:

- Functional programming, PAAS, huge data analysis, O2O with new devices(iBeacon, wearable..)

- Multilingual application, messaging software- API driven business

Hobbies:- Drawing, playing rocks, drinking (party)

IDs:- Twitter&GitHub benzookapi

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About My Job (Company)

Name: SHANON, Inc.Business: All-In-One Marketing cloud service

SHANON MARKETING PLATFORMCustomers: About 300 companiesEmployees: About 120 people (Tokyo, Miyazaki, Shanghai)My Job:

- Product planning (new features with new technologies)- Team handling (scrum master)- Development (code review, testing and documentation)- Product evangerising (to sales staff)- NOMIKAI (drinking party) arrangement

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Today's topic is ...

Small TIPS I feel in Japanese business application UI design with my team mates

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Known Issues [1]

Japanese have KANJI and less characters can express more meaning than English

- e.g.)

最終登録失敗時の通知先：

Notification target in the last failure of registration:

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Known Issues [2]

Business application (BtoB) needs more complicated (precise) UI than consumers' one because it covers companies' complicated business activities

- e.g.)

VS

*Images are just for example! (not blaming)

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What Happened In My Team?

UI designers (developers in our case) have been lost in deciding field structures and labels (re-naming, changing positions and styles again and again...)UI design given by teams is difficult to explain to business owner and sales staff and describe in documents

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Why this happened?...

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Because Japanese has

So flexible meaning in short terms(comes from known issue [1])

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And our team product has

So complicated features in one screen(comes from known issue [2])

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What Developers Did?

They started UI design by Japanese sentences and try to stuff whole meaning to each field and labelsThis made each field meaning and purpose uneasy to understand

最終登録失敗時の通知先：

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What is solution?

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Think in English and express in Japanese

Because system is inflexible

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If Our Customers Use English...

The UI may be restricted in small labels and inflexible termsThis enables developers to focus on refining structures and simplifying the terms, not depending on Japanese flexible expressionThis makes each field meaning and purpose easy to understand

Last Registration:

Notification Target:[Only in failure]

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Conclusion...

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System design needs 'ITTO-RYODAN'!

'Cutting (fuzzy thought) in two with a single stroke of one's sword' (by weblio)

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At The End

Our products already support multilingual (English) and avoid these problem before releasedThe captured images are just for example (used applications are both great!)Japanese is a great language itself with good culture, I think

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Thank you!

Junichi Okamura