Designing UX for Trust

“User-Centered Design is surprisingly difficult. One of the biggest issues…is a lack of appreciation of how users think and work.” - Reduced Empathizing Skills Increase Challenges for User-Centered Design

The easiest things are hard to do. We interact with so many products and companies everyday, some of which we can’t live without but few we deeply trust. The playing field is narrow, but the path to get there is wide open. Building products and technology people trust is an outcome any designer can have if they thoroughly evaluate the nature and merits of every detail they ship.

Practice empathy in your process

Empathy is an easy buzzword, but it takes real intentionality to practice. Science doesn’t support the idea that some people are born with empathy and others without. It’s nurtured. Empathy is the ability — and the willingness — to understand and share in the experience of someone else. Beautifully basic and especially important at a time when tech and social media encourage us to be at the center of the storyline, the focus of every photo, and the subject of every update we share.

Flexing and growing our empathy muscle (i.e., literally using our imaginations) is a natural antidote to our solipsistic daily habits.

It also feels good. Studies show taking time to imagine another’s experience — even through reading fiction — increases happiness, creativity, and connection.

If we want to build empathy into the UX of our products, we have to imagine and visualize ourselves AND others using the product, day-in and day-out. We have to consider where and when we’d use it and if our designs hold up.

For example: Is your user having to do a bit more visual gymnastics to focus on your custom font after a long day of looking at documents in Times New Roman? What is the call to action on the page, is it clear to anyone and everyone, and executable in a one-handed thumb-swipe as they carry bags on their commute? Where does an original interaction or component add real value and delight and where is it adding a microsecond of a user making sense of a non standard design? And my favorite: what value have we created with this micro interaction to earn the right to a users’ valuable time and attention? Always give them something.

You don’t need otherworldly creativity to think this way. It’s a practice. It’s like going to the gym everyday — and that gym is around you at all times.

Talk to your Lyft driver, put your phone away during your morning commute, ask people an unexpected question from a place of curiosity, survey magazine covers, scroll Netflix’s top shows, watch, listen, ask and observe. You are looking for your own limitations — for things and customers you hadn’t considered, new points of view, diverse experiences to weigh, and scenarios to test.

Visualize Others’ Experiences

If the user of our messaging app is rushing to get on the subway, where the WiFi tends to cut out, and she loses the entire message she was typing, then we haven’t adequately challenged our imagination to anticipate that situation. If we’re repeatedly asking a customer to provide the same information he’s already submitted several times, we’re not being empathetic. Can we display his saved preferences — at the perfect time in the right context — and earn goodwill instead?

Products and services have to bend around the humans they serve, which means considering many scenarios, conditions, and people.

In an ideal world, empathetic UX would have the massive design challenge of considering and evolving with every person it touches.

This is one way we’ve learned to build hospitality into UX (h/t Dylan Watt, one of Alfred’s senior software engineer).

UX holds the megaphone

UX has an outsized impact on our our collective expectations. Designing for trust can rewire the world if we take on the challenge. Just as UX design is an expression of our capacity to empathize with our users, it’s also a measure of whether or not we deserve their trust.

We need to ask ourselves if customers *should* use our products.

Empathizing and earning trust also comes from asking ourselves whether or not our customers should use them. When we disregard the second- and third-order consequences of making our product so sticky that time spent engaging with it is frighteningly high, we fail to consider the opportunity cost we are usurping or the serendipity of the real world forgone when people have their heads in our apps.

In the end, a successful UX isn’t about boosting MAUs or winning design awards. It’s about building a REAL relationship where you deliver value to your customers that will endure beyond whatever tech you build. Trust calls for our commitment to earn it across touchpoints, scenarios, time, and unique human experiences.

Interested in designing for trust? We’re hiring at Hello Alfred!