Building Trust with Your Users

If you want to build trust with you user, first, don’t call them users. We call them humans, which I know can sound a little stiff, but it is a general term that jolts you enough to think about the fact that real live people are going to use your product. Another more endearing way to name your target audience is to know them well enough to can give them a special name, maybe even a nickname. Here are some suggestions, depending upon your specific industry:

• Partners
• Moms
• Entrepreneurs
• Families
• Fishermen
• Golfers
• Members

If you want to build trust with your humans, start by thinking about them as playing a specific role in the organization that you are building; remembering that your purpose is to serve them. Thinking about users in these two capacities will help you in more ways than just UX.

There is large cross-over between the information that is an input for user experience design and the information that is needed for marketing. The output of marketing and UX has large crossover, as well, such as what words we use and what style we use. Although marketing and UX are distinctly two different business activities, we can gain more ground by using inputs about our humans for both UX and marketing and aligning our outputs. We can both speed up our design-development process and simultaneously create a more cohesive solution for our humans.