Can we be trusted?

Exploring a conceptual model of trust for designers

Trust. It’s an essential quality in any service and underpins the user’s interactions, influencing motivations, emotions, and actions. As service designers, we should be considering how our services build and break trust. The problem is that trust is hard to define — and, consequently, hard to design.

Understanding trust

McKnight & Chervany (1995) outlined four beliefs that a person must hold before they will exhibit trusting behaviour. These definitions help to make the concept of trust more manageable. Also, phrasing these beliefs as “How Might We” questions may inspire more actionable ideas.

Here are short descriptions of the four trusting beliefs (what I’m calling the elements of trust). There is much more to McKnight & Chervany’s framework, and you can read more here. I’m simply offering an introduction and some examples of how these might aid the design process.

Competence

“Competence means one has the ability to do for the other person what the other person needs to have done.”

A service needs to deliver on its core proposition. This might seem obvious, but basic trust is built upon it. And precisely because it’s so basic, it’s sometimes taken for granted. Yet, we all know the simple pleasure of using something that’s just really good at what it does. Think of a good pair of headphones or a nice restaurant. They fulfil the user’s primary objective so well that they’re just a joy to use and experience.

How might we ensure that we can deliver our core proposition well?

Integrity (honesty)

“Honesty means one makes good faith agreements, tells the truth, and fulfils any promises made.”

Honesty, as defined here, is more than just strictly telling the truth. It’s acting in an honest way, which involves admitting mistakes, operating above board and taking responsibility for one’s actions. Integrity starts with defining the moral principles that are important to your company and then sticking to them.

How might we embody integrity?

Predictability

“Having predictability means that one’s willingness and ability to serve others’ interests does not vary or change over time.”

Predictability is not just consistency — it’s also the ease with which the user can follow what’s going on. If things diverge significantly from what they’ve come to expect, trust can be damaged as a result. This sometimes happens intentionally (like rebranding) or unintentionally (like when a service is stretched by unseasonal traffic).

Change, even for the better, can be unbalancing. This is why big brands don’t change their branding too drastically or too often, andwhy refreshed websites let you revert to the “old version” for a while.

How might we ensure the dependability and predictability of our service?

Benevolence (kindness)

“Benevolence means one cares about the welfare of the other person and is therefore motivated to act in the other person’s interest.”

Benevolence is the quality of character that leads to mutually beneficial exchanges with users. More than just being nice, benevolence means empathising with users’ needs and sharing their concerns. You can start by listening to the stories behind users’ interactions — what they are trying to achieve and why.

How might we act in the best interest of our users?

The bigger picture.

Looking over these questions, there is a wide breadth in their scope. As a designer, some of these areas are outside of our ordinary skillset, but they can lead to productive collaborations with other disciplines. Trust — and indeed the customer experience as a whole — is not just the responsibility of the designer.

So what?

As designers, we can apply these elements of trust as a diagnostic aid or ideation tool. You might even try it as a user survey, where you are looking for is a positive response across all the elements. Although there may be elements you consider to be more important than others, being proficient in one area does not compensate for being weak in another.

Humans are messy and complicated, and no model will account for all behaviours and motivations. Take care to understand this research in relation to what trust means in your context. I hope that this will prove useful as a starting point for more in-depth exploration.

Thanks to my colleagues Grace and John for helping me pull this together.