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Yuki Tanaka

UX & Research at Signal · Tokyo, Japan

I studied cognitive science at Kyoto University and then spent a year at the University of Michigan as a visiting researcher, studying how cultural context affects decision-making in digital interfaces. That research became the foundation of everything I've done since: the idea that "good UX" isn't universal; it's culturally constructed, and most of what passes for UX best practices is just "what works for English-speaking Americans using iPhones."

My first industry role was at LINE, Japan's dominant messaging platform, where I joined the UX research team in 2018. LINE is used by 90 million people in Japan, more than any Western platform, and the design patterns are radically different from what you'd see in a Silicon Valley product. Sticker-based communication, timeline-integrated commerce, multi-purpose super-app interactions. I spent three years conducting research that informed features used by tens of millions of people, and almost none of it would make sense if you tried to apply a Nielsen Norman framework to it.

In 2021, I moved to Mercari, Japan's largest marketplace app, where I led user research for their cross-border commerce initiative, helping Japanese sellers reach buyers in the US and UK. This was where I really saw the collision between Western UX assumptions and East Asian user behavior. Trust signals that work in the US (star ratings, verified badges) meant almost nothing to Japanese users, who relied on detailed seller descriptions and communication style. We redesigned the entire trust framework based on research, and seller-to-buyer conversion increased by 22%.

I started writing in English in 2023, partly to bridge the knowledge gap between Japanese tech and Western tech discourse. My piece on why Japanese apps look "cluttered" to Western designers, and why that's a feature, not a bug, did 300K views and changed the conversation in several design communities.

I joined Signal because I believe most product writing ignores the 4+ billion internet users who don't live in North America or Europe. I want to write about UX and product research with the global context it deserves.

I live in Tokyo's Shimokitazawa neighborhood. I ride a fixed-gear bicycle, I'm learning to make soba noodles from scratch, and I have a possibly excessive collection of Muji stationery.

Experience

Articles by Yuki Tanaka (6)

The Activation Rate Fix Worth More Than Your Entire Paid BudgetMost growth teams spend 80% of their time on acquisition and 5% on activation. The math says this is exactly backwards. A 15-point activation improvem · Mar 13, 2026The AI Tourist Trap: ChartMogul's Data on 3,500 Companies Shows Why AI Products Lose 77% of Revenue by Month 12Budget-tier AI products retain 23 cents of every dollar by year one. Enterprise-tier AI products retain 85 cents — nearly identical to traditional Saa · May 24, 2026Crypto AEO: Why DeFi Protocols Are Invisible in AI Search (And What to Do About It)ChatGPT cites CoinDesk and CoinGecko for crypto queries. Individual protocols, wallets, and DeFi platforms barely register. The AEO gap is structural · May 25, 2026Building a Prompt Testing Harness for AEO Citation TrackingService workers were designed for offline users, not AI crawlers. The cache-first patterns that ship fast first paints to humans are quietly serving s · May 25, 2026Coworking Space AEO: How Flex Workspace Discovery Shifts From Coworker.com to ChatGPTClaudeBot, GPTBot, and PerplexityBot each have per-page time budgets. Pages with First Contentful Paint above 2 seconds get incomplete content extract · May 25, 2026Right to Be Forgotten in AI Search: GDPR Article 17 Meets LLM Training DataOut-of-state crews spin up landing pages 48 hours after NOAA hail warnings and dominate ChatGPT citations. Local roofers are invisible. Here is the AE · May 26, 2026