CXL’s Digital Psychology and Persuasion Minidegree review [part-10]
Tags: Cxl Institute, Neuroscience, Psychology, Trust, Web Development

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Today I am going to continue my discussion on my previous post (part-9), so please go through it first.

Today I am going to cover an important topic that can be very helpful in Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and it is about Trust.

“Trust takes years to build, seconds to break and forever to repair.” — Dhar Mann

Just like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, experts characterized a Pyramid or Hierarchy of Trust which helps in defining trust in relationships between two people (and in our case between web application and a user). Here also like in Hierarchy of needs, a person or even a website needs to gain basic trust to advance the person or user to the next level of the hierarchy.

When we talk about web applications or simply websites, Trust is a extremely crucial element for the success of any website and it is also one of the least worked out part while designing and developing it. Unfortunately, many good products fails because they don’t meet trust criteria of the users.

Mostly, either website designers starts demanding actions from users too early or they ask for too much and too sensitive information for the level of trust users gained in the website. For this reason it is crucial to understand the trust hierarchy and user levels, for better web experience and seamless trust building.

The above figure depicts the pyramid of trust, where a site needs to move each of its user from all of these levels starting from the bottom to the top. Below I am going to explain briefly all of these levels listed in this pyramid, before that here is the list of all the levels:

Level 1: Baseline Relevance & Trust

Level 2: Interest and Preference

Level 3: Trust with Personal Information

Level 4: Trust with Financial / Sensitive Information

Level 5: Willingness to commit to an ongoing relationship.

Like in real world, at the start of any relationship no person trust the other, but with time and right actions we can gain the trust of the other person. Similarly, when we deal with a website visitor, never expect any level of trust from a new visitor who is visiting your site for the first time.

Before presenting any demand first accept that their can be no trust established yet with any new user, think like a website user and decide on what would you do when a website starts asking for information from the very beginning of your visit.

Definitely, we need to build the initial trust first before we can ask a user to perform certain task and for that we have to make sure that the need of the user is met for his level of trust so s/he can advance to the next level of hierarchy of trust.

Let’s start with the first level:

Level 1: Baseline Relevance & Trust

This is the step where we convert a website visitor into a user and for doing that we have to focus on the needs of the user. In the absence of trust, we need to first address basic fears or questions of a user, like:

How can this website help me?

Is this website safe?

Is the information presented credible?

Can I trust or depend on this information?

A website need to focus on eliminating these fears as well as minimizing the number of questions a user is having it his head with the help of simple design, authority placement, relevant information and trust signals.

Level 2: Interest and Preference

At this level we already converted a visitor into a user, now our task is to improve the user trust by helping them develop their interest in our product so they can prefer it over similar other products, for that we need to address some new questions, as follows:

Should I choose this site?

Can this be the best fit for my purpose?

Is it better than other options?

We need to take care of these and many similar questions before we gain further trust of a user and help in advance to the next level.

Level 3: Trust with Personal Information

At this level, we already gained enough trust of the user for them to believe that our platform is useful as well as safe. Now, we can approach them for requesting to register an account with us.

Users may find it difficult to understand why they consider registering but we need to counter every question or doubt of our users with positive and beneficial replies. Here are some questions that may arise from users end at this level of trust:

Can I trust this website or company with my personal information?

Do I need emails from them?

Why should I register?

Why I invest my time and energy for registering?

We can counter these doubts with meaningful and beneficial messages like for example in case of Why I invest my time and energy for registering? we can simply say that by registering a account with us you can save your progress or manage your subscription or even get free stuff etc depending on your sites purpose or type.

Level 4: Trust with Financial / Sensitive Information

Now, at this level when user is already trusting us with his personal information like full name, age, gender or email, we need to work on gaining their trust for convincing them to share their financial or other data with us.

This is a arduous task as it requires a lot of efforts from our end. First we need to make sure that we have such a infrastructure to store this kind of information, after that we can try convincing the user and gaining their trust in the hopes of desired action. Some questions that can come in users mind at this level are as follows:

Can I trust this site?

Can I take this risk?

Is it or the service/product they are providing worth it?

Taking care of these and similar questions help users in developing trust levels that ultimately leads to our desired action. Once a user become positive about our reliability and starts trusting us at this level, the chances greatly improves that they will share their sensitive information with us.

Level 5: Willingness To Commit To An Ongoing Relationship

This is the ultimate level of trust and gaining users trust at this level is very challenging. First we need to make sure that we are offering something that the user wants to have again, it could be a service or product.

What ever we offer we need to make sure that user want that again and again, this simply enable users trust in us for commitment and ensures that they take our desired action. Some questions we need to address here are as follows:

Do I need a recurring service from this site?

Should I establish a continuous connection with this site?

Can I enough trust this website? Should I link my other accounts with it?

We need to take care of these as well as many other similar questions before we can put our ultimate demand for a continuous connection in front of our user.