Designing Trust
I have never come across a service design project that didn’t involve trust in one way or another. From Banking to Retail and even Public Sector: every project has a direct or indirect component of trust and trustworthiness.
This is not surprising if you think about it, as trust lies at the basis of nearly all human interaction and relationships. It is a requirement for our society to function and move forward: we place trust in other people, companies and governments every day, either consciously or subconsciously, in order to go about our everyday lives. If we didn’t trust we would probably never leave our homes.
Trusting in the age of Internet
Placing our trust in others means that we accept vulnerability and risk. For the greater part of history, this has been done in person and relationships were built on face-to-face interaction. Due to that, words only make up for 7% of how humans usually communicate with each other. Personality traits like honesty and fairness are linked to particular kinds of non-verbal signals, and people can recognise them, on a conscious or unconscious level, when they interact with each other in person. Clues including body language, gestures and facial expressions, as well as tone of voice (pitch, volume, rate of speech), help people assess a person’s intentions and trustworthiness.
In a digitalised world, we increasingly interact and transact online rather than in person; services like Facebook, eBay, Amazon and Netflix define how we socialise, shop and entertain ourselves. Companies face the challenge to prove their trustworthiness in the context of the internet, and for designers this means that they have to develop new mechanisms, norms, and social traditions to facilitate trust-based interactions in digital environments.
Is trust in crisis?
The leap of faith that we take when we trust has been disappointed publicly and frequently in recent years. Just think of Yahoo’s data breach in 2013, the Volkswagen Emissions Scandal from 2015 or the recent Facebook x Cambridge Analytica Scandal. People feel betrayed and politicians, media outlets and large corporations, have all experienced a significant loss of the public’s trust.
Many voices go as far as saying, “trust is in crisis”, but interestingly it seems that trust has merely shifted. The same survey results that report a loss in trust in large corporations, governments and the media, observe a significant increase of trust in “a person like yourself”. The popularity of services like Air BnB, Uber and eBay speak to that. Services that let strangers share rides and stay at each other’s homes, would’t work if there wasn’t a strong willingness to trust.
In order to understand why that is and how designers can utilise this to design for trust we need to answer one question first of all:
What is trust?
In its most simple sense trust can be defined as the “firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something” (as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary). Thus, we are looking at trust as an action by a trustor (the person that trusts), as the response to the characteristic of trustworthiness of the trustee (the person who is being trusted). It is as a choice to believe in a future to happen that will deliver benefits, and the suspension in the belief of a negative outcome.
Most importantly though, trust can be subject to betrayal. This is what differentiates trusting from relying and what makes our relationships with humans different from our relationships with inanimate objects:
If your alarm clock fails to ring in the morning it didn’t betray you, it simply failed you. If a person you consider a friend shares your secrets with others, they have betrayed your trust. Trustworthiness implies responsibility for behaviour and willingness to make good for failures, and is therefore stronger than reliance, as it encompasses responsibility and guarantee, which only people (or organisations) can offer.
Assessing trustworthiness
How do we assess if someone is worth our trust then? There are three main components to trustworthiness:
- Competency to perform what they promised
Is the person able to fulfil what is promised? Do they have the skills, tools, knowledge and time that is necessary? Are there external factors that may influence their abilities? - Commitment to the trustor and the task
Is the person committed to fulfil what is promised? It won’t help you if someone is perfectly able to do something but they are not bothered to actually do it. This is a judgment of the trustee’s character, and is influenced by rational as well as emotional aspects. - Motive or reason of doing so
Does the trustee have a motive for fulfilling what is promised? Motives can reinforce commitment. All our actions as humans are directed by some sort of reason (logic driven conscious thought) or motive (emotion driven). Different types of motives include self interest, good will, moral integrity and following social norms.
Hence, to be trustworthy, people and companies need to display competence and commitment and, if they want to reinforce their commitment, in some cases a motive. This is true irrelevant of which industry they play in or their size. Companies need to develop tools and rituals to facilitate trust.
The next article in this series will be looking at different mechanisms that can be used to design trust into digital products and services, utilising the principles of commitment, competence and motive.
