8 UX Surefire Ways to Design for Trust
The best way to build trust from your customers is through experience. But that’s not the only way.
Building trust online is no easy feat.
As an Experience Designer, I work closely with brands everyday in order to create meaningful experiences for their customers both online and offline. A massive part of building those seamless exceptional experiences is the sum of the many interactions and touch points that a brand has with their customer that helps you build trust. Trust is the newest and strongest currency in our growing sharing economy and it is a key ingredient in building a successful product.
Defining Trust
Trust is more than just about being credible or reliable in the eyes of the user. According to Rachel Botsman, it is a confident relationship to ‘the unknown’.
It’s about making that step into somewhere that you’ve never been to or by taking a leap of faith.
And when you launch a new product, what you are getting your customers to do is to take a leap of faith by getting them to use your product.
How can we make that experience less terrifying and easy for the users? You start by designing for trust. Here are 8 UX Surefire Ways that you can use to start using to Design for Trust.
1. Borrow Trust
The easiest way you can do to build trust is to borrow from your customers, peers or other reputable brands through social proof. When used effectively at the right customer touchpoint, social proof can drastically and swiftly improve online conversions and build the overall credibility of your product.
The Currency Shop, an Australian currency comparison site, strategically displays other well known and recognisable brands in Australia such as ANZ, OFX and Commonwealth Bank within their landing page, which helps to build trust among their customers whom may not be familiar with them.
2. Appearance is Key
We all judge a book by its cover, whether we like it or not. Nielsen Norman describes this phenomenon as the ‘Aesthetic-Usability’ effect, in which beautiful things are generally perceived to be easier to use and are regarded as more valuable than ugly ones.
So why not use this to your advantage? Adding security seals such as Norton and McAfee would really help in providing assurances of your product’s overall security and of how you’d handle your customer’s personal information. Baymard Institute conducted a study that showed which seals customers trust more:
The visuals you use, the tone and language you use all impacts how your brand is perceived. To earn the respect and trust of your customers, you need to convey an image that you are professional and reliable.
3. Be obsessed about your customers
Being obsessed means placing customers at the heart of your business and that should be the foundation of everything that you do. Customer centricity revolves around putting your customers needs ahead of your business. It’s not just about building a product that they want. It’s more about building a solution that they need, which ultimately delivers more value to them.
Start by mapping out your customer’s emotional journeys and celebrate their accomplishments together with them. And they don’t always have to be ground-breaking solutions. For example, MailChimp recognises that it can be stressful for their users to send out their first email campaign. But as soon as their users click that button, they get rewarded with a fun high five screen.
4. Be transparent
Customers like to know what they can expect from you and by being transparent — about your team, customers, activity on the site, company’s motives and beliefs, and pricing — can greatly improve trust.
Don’t make it difficult for your customers to find information, as they have a short attention span to look for what they need, and will quickly go to the competitor if it ultimately provides a better experience for them.
UXPin, an online collaborative UX design tool, has a dedicated Testimonials section, where they feature the success stories of how top design companies from all around the world are using their product.
5. Empower your customers
Always remember that your customer is the hero, not you. And every decision they make by using your product should enable them to be better versions of themselves.
Evernote, a popular writing software, can’t remember everything for you. However, it offers features within its software that enables you to collect and organise your work. These features enable their customers to become better versions of themselves, which allows them to ‘remember everything.’
6. Disempower your marketing team
And the reason being that the conversation surrounding your brand and/or product has already started. Customers are already telling brands who they are and what they do thanks to social media.
Understand that trust is now moving sideways, rather than a top-down authority. Customers are starting to judge brands through collective experiences. No longer can marketing teams control the conversation in a top down way through social media.
It no longer matters what you say, it matters what you do as a brand. Customers now have the mindset “You can tell me this is good for me. and I’m gonna look at other information and recommendations and decide for myself.”
7. Believe in the power of recommendation
You know your customers fully trust you when they are recommending your product to their circle of network. If people are recommending you, another customer who may not have heard of your product before are more likely to trust or recommend you.
According to a research done by Nielsen, 92% of people will trust a recommendation from a peer, and 70% of people will trust a recommendation from someone they don’t even know.
8. Design for the social pressure that comes with trust
Designing for trust can have its own consequences too and you have to be mindful of the social responsibilities that comes with it. Every decision that customers are making online/offline — we hold them accountable for by constantly rating and reviewing them.
Anyone who has ever taken an Uber before knows that they have to engage in small chats, whether they like it or not, in order to ensure that their overall rating stays positive because having a negative rating impacts any decision that they might make in the future.
Conclusion
Trust is a human emotion that can be designed for and establishing it is important within the sharing economy.
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.
What are some other ways that you can design for trust? I’d love your insights and hear from your perspective on how trust can be established from any product.
Thank you for reading!
