Design for trust-building products
By: Kirit Lakhani
Tags: Product Design, UX, Product Management, Privacy, User Research

Human values and emotions have been always amplified by technology in the past and will continue to do so in the future with an exponential rate of disruptive innovation. The increasingly accelerated advancement of technology is putting our values and vulnerabilities as a society into sharp relief. For this reason, thinking about trust across all forms of digital access and activity levels has become quite imperative and the need of the hour. It is essential to optimize the human-machine trust so that it aligns with our humanity, ethics and fair social contracts.

With the increasing number of digital and physical products in our day to day world claiming to solve all sort of problems and even the ones you never realized you ever had, the world around you is becoming more complex than ever. Out of all these products, only a few really stand out impacting your lives and rest all other fail to get their desired results. The success of a product is a function of many parameters like target users, market positioning, timing, user delight, customer satisfaction, business models, easy to use design among several others. But even after nailing such core KPIs we have seen that not all products succeed. The invisible force at work here is that of the ‘Trust’. Products should be designed in a way that they can gain the trust of the users using it. It becomes more important where the products are trying to help the users make a personal or business decision. Trust becomes a major factor behind the decision making process.

So what are the factors that help a product to gain user trust where people are trained to not trust easily?

That’s rule no. 1

This is where design comes to help. Need not to iterate the fact that:

‘Design is not how it looks, Design is how it works’

Good design can help a product gain user’s trust which also gives the designer a moral and ethical responsibility to use design responsibly as design if used in its right might have the power to impact human decision-making process which can be boon or a curse depending on how it is being used.

Trust is the secret ingredient to any successful product thus designing for it cannot be an afterthought. It’s not an easy task, but it will absolutely make your product stand out and could mean the difference between a visitor engaging with your product or leaving it after a few seconds.

Here are some of the parameters which can help you design good trust-building products:

1. Mental models: User’s, Designer’s and System’s

For those of you who can’t relate to this, users have their own way of solving a problem and they have a mental image of how a solution to a certain problem would look like which is called as the user’s mental model. Similarly, there is a designer’s model (also known as a conceptual model) which is how a designer would solve a problem. Ideally, a system model or more commonly called as a System’s image is a combination of both the user’s mental model and the designer’s model which creates an optimum system image which is both innovative and intuitive at the same time.

It’s important to remember that every user’s mental model is constantly evolving and subject to change. It’s influenced by new experiences with your product, other technologies, and day to day life. While mental models are unique to each individual, you’ll be able to uncover common patterns in your customers. Identifying these at the start of your project will increase your chances of designing an easy to use and successful trust-building product.

2. The product does what it claims to do

This is what is called as holding on to your end of the rope. It’s a bare minimum requirement that the product solves the problem it claims to solve in the best possible way. You immediately lose a potential customer once he realizes that the claims made in your product’s marketing campaign were fake.

So, make sure you focus on the core functionalities of the product with the objective of solving the core problem of the user for which he is using your product or services.

3. Avoid clutter by giving clear actionable(s)

Cluttered interfaces and hindrances are the major blockers that stop the user in trusting the product. Designers should here also consider the cognitive load for the users and should display only the limited amount of information which can be easily consumed by the users. All call to actions and next steps should stand out and should be clearly visible to the users.

4. Choose your color palette wisely

Colour wields an enormous impact on our attitudes and emotions. When our eyes take in a color, they communicate with a region of the brain known as the hypothalamus, which in turn sends a cascade of signals to the pituitary gland, on to the endocrine system, and then to the thyroid glands. The thyroid glands signal the release of hormones, which cause fluctuation in mood, emotion, and resulting behavior.

A recent study has shown that adjusting color, among other elements, can increase conversion by as much as 24%.

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So, the bottom line is:

Use the right colors, and you can win the trust of the users and making the user interface much intuitive to use at the same time.

5. Holding the product accountable

Your product or service should aim at becoming more accountable towards its offering. There is nothing wrong in accepting the fact that you messed up and give the users clear ways to restore their tasks. It is these human traits of honesty and accountability that would get you the trust of the users. A product should hold the back of the users if they fail and, it will protect its users and make them successful in whatever the users are trying to achieve. People want to feel confident in their choices and we all want to feel confident that our digital devices are quality products that will safely hold important data.

6. Empathy with personalization

Empathy is nothing but the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. In the world of designers, it is called ‘stepping in the shoes of the users’ to understand user’s perspectives and pain points. Empathy, when combined with personalized user experience, becomes a powerful tool to gain the trust of the users using your products and services. For eg, a simple ‘Good morning’ can turn into ‘Good Morning Rebecca’. The more humanly your products or services are the more trustworthy they would be.

7. Test and iterate before you launch

I always say this ‘Design is nothing but an opinion of the designer of how it should be’. Design is something where everyone has an opinion, and everyone can give you suggestions and pieces of advice in terms of design, but no one knows what is right. In fact, there is nothing called as right design or wrong design. There is only one design which works for its users and it is the best design.

To understand what design works and what does not, it’s important for the designer to get in touch with different stakeholders and users of the product or services to understand their perception of how they look at the offering. Designers need to go more and more agile in terms of user testing and doing design iterations that all the designs are tested with the users even before a single line of development has taken place. This way the chances of you shipping a bad product reduces by a multitude times.

Conclusion:

Broadly speaking there are two main steps of winning the trust of the users, first is the users believing in the competence of the product. This means that the product if the users are able to achieve their goals they are looking for, the initial level of trust is achieved. The second level of trust is established when the product provides the best solution than any of its alternatives. If users believe that your product or services are honest, committed, transparent and has the best intentions at the heart of the creator, they are more likely to trust you with sensitive information. A good user experience via a delightful user interface and interactions will help the user to continue and extend this connection of trust and make them net promoters of your product or services.