Snapdeal Vernacular
Our initiative to help every Indian user gain access to e-commerce with a single tap.
Why Vernacular?
We at Snapdeal have been working on making our platform accessible to every citizen of India.
In order to reach that goal, we have been experimenting with vernacular for almost a year now.
Google’s Rajan Anandan quoted it is time for companies to cater to the 3Vs of the digital medium — voice, video, and vernacular language.
After analysing the initial data from when we launched an option for our users to switch to Hindi and browse the whole experience, we saw positive results. With time we decided to introduce the app in many different local languages of India.
Here is some food for thought — According to the recent reports by KPMG in partnership with Kalaari ‘#India Trends2018: Trends Shaping Digital India’ currently, there are an estimated 521 million Hindi language speakers and 500 million people who speak other Indian languages in the country. Even though there are over 125 million English speakers in India, less than 0.3 million of those speak it as their first language. The rest speak in one or more of the 22 vernacular languages.
Another report published by KPMG said that by 2021, there is a projection of 735 million internet users in India and 536 million (~73%) of them will be Indic language internet users, meaning 9 out of every 10 new internet users will be vernacular users. As a homegrown company, it was important for us to cater to the needs of this new segment.
Challenges
Technical Stack:
- Different languages have different scripts, different string structures, word sizes, LTR, and RTL.
- Introducing vernacular support involved changes from the ground up as the app was not developed with this in mind.
- To make the app vernacular in a way that in the future it is scalable and flexible enough to incorporate more languages, a huge effort was needed.
Typing:
- Most of us use the English script while writing in our native language.
- We wanted our users to write seamlessly in their native language script.
- Typing in native languages is quite difficult (Matrayein in Hindi keyboard)
Font Issue:
- Vernacular was to be designed and developed for both m-site and App and we had different fonts on both platforms.
- To cater to these many languages we needed one or more typefaces available in a maximum number of languages/scripts to be used.
Process
User Research
After launching in one regional language(Hindi) we wanted to understand our audience better especially the ones who use other platforms in their regional languages, some interviews were conducted which helped us build better features and design for our users.
Extensive user research was carried out for the project, involving a lot of questions that we had in mind and wanted answers to, in order to build a seamless experience.
Thanks to our Customer Connect team for making it seem so easy!
We chose different media channels for the research including telephonic interviews and in-person interviews for depth analysis spanning various cities.
In-App Surveys
Demographic data
Age, languages known, region, marital status, education, employment status, etc.
Category interests
We asked our users what categories they like to buy or browse for.
We got qualitative insights about our users and their needs from different age groups. The relative Product Manager and I further kept a track of data to customise the experience after checking the vernacular app usage by new users to consume, share, and ultimately buy products from the e-commerce.
Tone of Voice
Inspirational language for a new India
Our tone of voice is a very important tool for the Snapdeal brand.
We believe in unboxing a new and aspirational India and so the way we speak is always aimed at capturing our brand spirit of progression, audacity, and endless possibilities.
Our messaging is expected to have a positive and optimistic outlook. Monsoon season shouldn’t be something to worry about or avoid, but an opportunity to unbox your brand-new wellington boots and play in the rain.
Our goal is to make the consumer realise that items on Snapdeal aren’t merely ‘for sale’, but are waiting to be unboxed to take someone on their next adventure through an in-app experience.
If a company’s voice expresses how it thinks of itself, its definition of “clarity” expresses how it thinks of its users.
Nuances
- Technically it is almost impossible to create an app that is purely in Hindi or any native language.
- Users usually use voice input or regional languages written in English script.
- Colloquial, e.g. in the case of “bag”, very few in Hindi would call it “बस्ता” (Basta) but “बैग” (bag) is a more commonly used word.
The language, while syntactically clear, will be opaque to many people with a stake in the information it pretends to convey.
VISUAL DESIGN/FLOW
Interactions:
Results
- As per our old data when we launched the platform only in Hindi we saw 58% of users interacting with the touch points to change the language until November 2019
- Because of this high success, we went for more languages for the second phase.
- Our new data reference until March 2020, 73% of our users (existing + new) are using/interacting in different languages after the launch.
- There was a 4.2% incremental transactional conversion.
- Posts responses (like sharing the product) were larger in the Hindi app as compared to English.
Way Forward…
With all our features for localization including the regional languages we are ready to roll out more languages if needed and are trying to help our users in the best way possible or say the way, they want to use the platform.
With each new language we support for Bharat, we aim to build digital confidence through accessibility, awareness, and assistance. The new users we welcome can enjoy the benefits and convenience of online shopping in their own languages. We hope that making our platform easy to use will remove friction in using e-commerce. After all, we know that all we need to do to anticipate our next language is follow where the water flows.
Appreciations
Achieving the research done at such an extensive scale takes a lot of effort and time. We’d like to thank Anchal Dawar and the Consumer Connects Team for their contribution to making the research possible. Thank you, Kriti Nayar, for constantly helping us with the UX copy of this and many other projects. Thanks, Soham Majumder for the constant pep talk and for stressing the importance of making the insights shine. Also, kudos to all the product and engineering team without their hard work and perseverance this project would not have been live.
If you have worked on a vernacular project or are working on it in your workplace, please do share your experiences with us and keep the conversation going in the comments…
