Bay Area DFA Alumni + Friends Explore Trust in Design

Inspired by the DFA Alumni + Friends and Airbnb: Locating Trust in Design, members of the Bay Area DFA Alumni Network gathered to continue the conversation and untangle what trust means to them. DFA Alums Devika Patel, Nina Ligon, and Claire Jacobsen (DFA Stanford) offered provocative lightning talks. Read Nina’s “Reflections on Trust in Design” and Claire’s “Reflections On (A) Trust in Design or (B) Designing for Trust,” below. Read Devika’s key takeaways and learning points here.

Reflections on Trust in Design

Nina Ligon
Nina Ligon is currently a Product Designer at Thrive Global, building digital products and services to end the rising stress and burnout epidemic in the workplace. Before joining Thrive, she was a Product Designer and Design Researcher at Headspace and a founding member of Pair Eyewear (a project launched by DFA Stanford) for which Nina is now an Advisor.

For our conversation on locating trust in design, I wanted to share some personal experiences that have shaped how I think about and approach designing for trust. As design thinkers, we’re always taught to dig deeper and uncover the insights that lie beneath the surface of what people say (or even think) they want. I feel this same process applies to building trust.

I chose to share a story where trusting that process helped the Pair Eyewear DFA team get to the heart of what it means to build trust with our customers.

Pair Eyewear began with a lofty mission to bring delight into a child’s eyewear experience. Through extensive research and testing, that mission solidified into the final vision of creating continuously customizable glasses frames that allowed kids to change the look of their glasses every day with easy snap-on covers.

We learned early on that establishing trust with parents is a critical part in any successful children’s product. Through interviews and testing concept sketches, prototypes, and finally, our first manufactured pair of glasses, the team discovered that while parents care about the safety and quality of their children’s glasses, they ultimately want their children to be happy and healthy. By understanding this core need, we could focus not just on creating high quality, safe glasses, but on building an experience that would make kids smile and show their parents that we were a brand they could trust who understood both their child’s needs and their own.

Testing our first prototype at the 2015 San Mateo Maker Faire. This was the first time we saw kids get excited about the concept; laughing, smiling, and taking lots of selfies. We knew we had something really special.

Key Takeaways:

Trust is a mix of facts and emotions.
Credentials and stamps of approval are important, but so is connecting with each other on a human level. One without the other can erode trust.

Transparency is key.
Trust has to be built on a shared understanding and empathy for each other.

Trust constantly evolves and changes with new advancements and discoveries.As new technologies develop, we’re faced with new problems when it comes to building trust and accountability, and our definitions must adapt to respond to those changes.

Reflections On A. Trust in Design or B. Designing for Trust

Claire Jacobson
Claire Jacobson is digital app designer at Accenture Interactive working on a variety of projects from the proof-of-concept phase to end-to-end delivery across industries. In her spare time, she teaches barre and is passionate about encouraging healthy balanced lifestyles. When she grows up, she dreams of working for Cirque du Soleil as a performer & eventually a designer.

In preparing my content for this talk, I decided to A/B test my title to engage my audience from the onset and better understand the mental model they were using to view the topic at hand. For the record, all but 2 voted for B.

A huge component to getting customers of a new app or service in the 21st century lies in delivering personally tailored and aesthetically appealing experiences that entices a customer’s choice to buy into your service. The selection of apps, web experiences, and other digital services grow increasingly more like choosing the right shoe or suit jacket — each must fit its users’ lifestyle, aesthetic taste and hopefully add something of value to the user’s life.

When the design standard is set by the social media apps that connect us to our friends or network (Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn), the apps we use to log personal health data in our watch or phone (Apple Health or Fitbit), or the apps we use to listen to our favorite music or television shows (Spotify, Netflix, HBO), we realize the bar is high for all digital design, be it customer facing or enterprise. Design is meant to represent everything from the pixel forms of the images on the screens, to the user flow, to the experience of interacting with the business and its employees in real life. It is a metric of how comfortable we can make the customer feel throughout their experience, how likely they are to use the product or service again, or their loyalty metric.

Another topic I’ve faced while working with technology design is the need to use mobile devices, IOT, or web apps to augment human capabilities instead of replace them. With several project I’ve worked on, I realized that the most valuable work we provided to our client was the suggestions on how to use technology to improve the existing user flows and reduce their screen time. For example, enabling blue collar workers to track issues live during their workflow and report these via an iOS/RFID IOT device freed up their time to work on the more complex or physically demanding parts of their job to ensure safer practices and devoting more attention to the work at hand. Furthermore, using the technology to report issues allowed the business to reap the benefit of having more real-time feedback to correct the issue and communicate early with customers if the issue would cause a delays in their shipment. This helped our end users free up time to work with their hands, solve more complex problems, or spend more face time building a relationship with a colleague while helping improve the bottom line for the business.

As Paul Daugherty, CTO of Accenture mentions in his latest book, Human + Machine, “A key lesson here is that companies can’t expect to benefit from human-machine collaborations without first laying the proper groundwork. Again, those companies that are using machines merely to replace humans will eventually stall, whereas those that think of innovative ways for machines to augment humans will become the leaders of their industries.”

-Paul Daughterty & James Wilson from Human + Machine

As you can see from the diagram above, the future of work will look drastically different in the automation era, allowing humans to fit into the category where their skillset adds the most value to their work either in the human-only or human + machine categories.

As designers, we have the autonomy to design systems (UI, new products, robotics) that mimic the work humans do to add value to a business. Like Charlie Aufman, a design manager at AirBnB says, “As product designers, we play the role of the mutual friend who invites you to the party.” When designing for the employees of a client’s company, design consultants must think, what would I do if I were the mutual friend of this employee and their manager or direct report? How might I make their experience at work more enjoyable, more efficient, more effective? I must design partially to the KPI’s of the business, but I also know employee engagement is crucial to business success which leads me to ponder….How might I figure out what they enjoy most about their job? How might I unlock their potential to do even more of that in their job by eliminating what they find tedious in their work?

Defining how to build trust is dependent on client, context, location, and duration of work for most of my client projects. Here are a few of my key takeaways we as designers can use to develop trust with our clients/companies, colleagues, and the end-users to build better products for the future world we want to live in:

• Budget in face time with your client to establish trusted relationships.
• Use real anecdotes from end users in your creative pitches to your business stakeholders (anonymous to protect your users).
• Use unbiased data and thorough, documented analysis to show your users reaction to any product launch and its subfeatures.
• Transparency over secrecy in methods and approach to design. If design were easy yes your client could take your tips and do it themselves, but it’s not. Design will always be hard.
• Open up the black box. Show your work and process where you can to back up your design and show your thought process. This goes for data-driven design especially as we move into the world of designing for AI.

Interested in convo like these?
Join the hundreds of other alumni in the DFA Alumni Slack. Find out about different career opportunities, ask for life advice, and build the network in your city. Join here!

Interested in connecting with the alumni network in your city? Email alden@designforamerica.com to be connected to folks like Devika, Nina, and Claire!

Resources:
The Edelman Trust Barometer
Design Better Co. Podcast: Alex Schleifer
Ted Talk: How Airbnb Designs For Trust
AI and the Future of Design By Rob Girling
Valerie Casey to Lead Walmart’s Aggressive Design Push
Walmart Made an Incredibly Sharp Move Hiring VC