Online shop is in Hindi!? A great April Fool’s Day prank

WOVN's April Fool’s Day prank started with a Slack post from the Localization team.

At WOVN, we have an online shop exclusively for members, and the post told people to check out the new spring-themed items being added.
(All the items on WOVN’s internal online shop are free.)

I hadn't purchased anything from the shop recently, and when I tried to open the site from the WOVN Portal, something crazy happened...

I couldn’t read anything on the online shop

The moment I opened the page, I felt super uncomfortable. I thought about closing the page immediately.
What language IS this...?
I had no idea what language it was. If it were English, I would have been able to understand a bit, but I had never seen these characters before. “I need to switch languages.” I panicked but couldn’t find the widget. I went to another page just to see a different language displayed. (I couldn’t read this page either.)

Россия.
ไทย
हिन्दी

Can you all read this text?
I was told later that it was Russian, Thai, and Hindi, from top to bottom.

"Is this website bugged?"
Members also started commenting on Slack.

• Why is everything shown in...Russian?!

• What language is this?

• So everyone is seeing the same weird dashboard. Waaa almost had heart attack thinking the widget or backend library bugged out!

I was pretty sure I was being tested. First, I tried finding the new items based on the photos and then went through the purchase process.
I guess I still can’t read any of the text... The dark green button seemed to mean "click here," so I decided to press it.

I was able to jump to the purchase page.

I had made purchases from the online shop before, so I tried remembering what information I had to enter.

To be honest, I had no idea and tried to just go with my gut. Fortunately, the predictive input function offered some suggestions, so I could automatically enter my personal information into each field.

When I pressed what looked like the “Complete purchase” button at the bottom of the page....

It came back with a ton of errors in red.
I couldn't even read the error messages.

Still, I managed to continue on and complete my purchase.

"Thank you for playing along with our little April Fool’s joke.”
So it WAS an April Fool’s prank... You got me...

It took me five minutes to buy a COO T-shirt that I really didn't even want. (If it were in Japanese, it would’ve taken 30 seconds.)

I had to spend more time because of the language barrier.

The point was to remind members about the importance of WOVN

So how did this April Fool’s Day project come about? I sat down with the masterminds behind this prank, Mariko and Aleksey from the Localization team.

• The Localization team usually takes care of translation and interpretation requests. How did you come up with this idea?

Mariko: During one of our regular meetings, we talked about maybe doing something related to April Fool’s Day. Aleksey came up with the idea to take over our online shop.

Aleksey: It started with wanting to play a prank, but we also wanted to give it a purpose. We came up with the idea of having members experience browsing a site that’s not in their native language. We at WOVN don't often encounter situations where we have to deal with language barriers, whether we're on the sales or product side.

Mariko: Many of us on the Localization team have lived overseas extensively and have experienced language-based inconveniences. We wanted to explain what we had gone through.

• It was an excellent opportunity to see what problems and challenges our services can solve. Would you like to say anything to the members at WOVN?

Mariko: The point of this project was to get people talking internally, not necessarily to get a lot of people through the checkout process. I hope everyone enjoyed it! Did you encounter any issues? Let’s talk more about what we thought and noticed!

Aleksey: Did you enjoy being in the position of customers who need a site localized? We hope this experience deepened your understanding of our customers!

The conversion rate was 7%, and it was usually the language barrier that hindered purchases

A total of 127 people, including our CEO, accessed the internal shop to make purchases, but only nine completed their purchases. Many people just closed the page immediately after launching the site.
The survey results revealed that even the nine people who completed their purchases used translation engines like Google Translate and DeepL.

It was a great opportunity to raise awareness among our members about the importance of what we at WOVN do. I think we were all able to experience the confusion and helplessness of being faced with an unfamiliar foreign language.

Thank you, Mariko and Aleksey from the Localization team, for the awesome prank!