Junichi Okamura discusses issues his development team faced when designing the user interface for a Japanese business application. The team struggled to concisely label fields and structures due to the flexible meaning of Japanese terms and the complexity of features in their product. This made the UI design difficult to explain to customers. To solve this, Okamura recommends thinking of designs and labels in English first before translating to Japanese, in order to focus on simplifying terms and structures rather than fitting whole meanings. Following this approach helped avoid similar problems when the product was released with multilingual support.

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LibreOffice Productivity Suite
Effective usage of English in 'Japanese'
business application UI design
Junichi Okamura
2014.4.11

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LibreOffice Productivity Suite
About Me
Name: Junichi Okamura
Job: Software Engineer
Role: 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 PLATFORM
Customers: About 300 companies
Employees: 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 labels
This 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 terms
This enables developers to focus on refining structures and
simplifying the terms, not depending on Japanese flexible
expression
This 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 released
The 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