5 strategies for building trustworthy products
Over the past three years working as a product designer at Included Health the notion of trust has always been closely related to goals we have for producing a great member (user) experience. It’s not a novel observation to say that gaining trust is something every product seeks. While establishing trust in a grocery app or e-commerce website may be helpful to the experience, we (Included Health) understand that trust is a necessary precursor to generating any kind of engagement with our product. When you take a minute to think about why, it makes sense. The fragmented and complicated US healthcare system is extraordinarily frustrating; therefore, it’s our job to serve as the trusted guide that navigates people through the murky and treacherous landscape.
Having designed products in two industries (online dating and healthcare) where trust is central to the success of a product, I thought it would be useful to write about a few tangible strategies to help ground the often nebulous discussion around how exactly trust can be built in digital products and services. Here are five strategies with examples that highlight tangible ways to build trust with your users.
Trust through precision
Consider a hypothetical centered around money. You drive up to the gas pump with your SUV and you’ve heard prices are rising because there’s a shortage of gas across the world. When you look at the price per gallon of gas, it displays $4-$8 per gallon. What would your reaction be? Would you have faith that the price would be on the low end near $4 or closer $8? There’s a lot of uncertainty there, which is hard to trust.
Let’s take the hypothetical a step further…let’s say you’re wealthy enough to pay $8 per gallon without it impacting your savings. After you fill up your SUV, you head to the airport for a flight. When you get through security, you look up at the board of departing flights and see Flight 2041 — Departing today. How would that make you feel? You probably wouldn’t want to fly that airline again because the lack of precision in your departure time could result in a lot of wasted time.
There’s clear personal value attached to time and money, but what about something a little less tangible like your health? As a thought exercise, imagine a doctor was able to tell you the moment you got cancer. How wild would that be? If the doctor could prove with data the exact time stamp your cancer started, ask yourself, would you then trust them with treating your cancer? I don’t feel like I’m going out on a limb by suggesting that would be an emphatic YES!
Many companies have figured out how to leverage precision in a way that turned trust into a competitive advantage for their product or service. Here are two memorable examples I’ve seen in the wild:
Whole Foods
Providing exact date/time cheese was packed on.
Delta Airlines
Sending a push notification the moment my bag was loaded onto the plane.
Trust through listening (to preferences, interests, goals, etc.)
The Trust Edge, a leadership institute that does research on trust, put it best when they said, “Listening is a fundamental skill of genuine success, and it’s hard to be great or trusted without it.” When we think about listening it’s generally in the context of two people communicating with one another. A less talked about medium of listening is through the lens of products. Do the products you use feel like they listen to you and get you?
As peoples’ use of technology for communication has evolved, the standard of listening has transformed from can you hear me? (in a literal sense, can you audibly receive what I’m communicating?) to do you understand me? (can you not only hear me, but can you interpret what I’m saying and understand me?). The shift in expectations has raised the bar for how people now expect products to not only be useable (I see you Neilsen) and useful, but also personalized. Below are a two examples of products that don’t just inquire about preferences, but also ask for preference input in a delightfully interactive way that relinquishes control and gives agency in the process.
Casablanca
In my opinion, the Casablanca real estate app example below offers the highest ceiling for trust building in this entire post by pulling off the trust triple threat™. When asking the prospective property owner what’s most important to them, the app listens to preferences while providing the agency (drag/drop controls) to express preferences with precision (through stack ranking).
Beats Music (pre-Apple music acquisition onboarding)
Beats Music offered a playful interactive bubble experience during onboarding where tapping on a genre of music would allow you to express how much or little you liked a genre. Tapping a few times to make the bubbles big implies you like a genre more than the other small bubbles.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the business implication of listening. As a product designer, I’ve often been in the inauspicious position of deciding whether injecting a potentially trust-building preference question into a flow is worth the friction that it introduces. Yes, asking people to state their preferences generally involves adding extra steps/questions that can be hard to justify in a world where frictionless, ultra-fast flows are the norm. Rather than dwell on the risk, why not consider the upside? A colleague of mine (Grace) put it best when she said,
“You can’t have traction without friction.” — Grace Bell
The potential trust built by listening gives people an opportunity to get invested in the experience. Nobody has done this better than online dating companies like Match.com who ask a copious amount of questions during onboarding because they know that investment (effort) up front makes the cost of switching to a different product daunting. Exhausting people so they don’t feel like switching may not be the most people-centered approach to engagement, but I’d argue that the pattern becomes less dark when a person feels like the work they’re doing will lead to a more personalized experience.
Trust through education
Take a minute to inventory the people in your life you trust. Are they family? Parents? Maybe friends? What about teachers? A common thread across many of the groups I just mentioned is shared knowledge. I can say without hesitation that everyone in my life who I trust has taught me something at some point. Dr. LaKimbre Brown (former instructional superintendent of Teach for America) outlined in her article “The Importance of Trust” how central trust is in school culture.
“…an essential component of meaningful relationships is trust. Trust is safety. Trust is comfort. Trust is feeling that someone has your back. Trust is an environment where individuals can be their best selves.”
There’s an element of respect and reverence that comes from learning from someone. Teachers are trusted by parents and students in large part because of the knowledge they get to share as a part of their job
Ask yourself, are you more likely to trust something that has made you feel smarter? Of course you are, feeling empowered, educated, and smart feels good. Despite the obvious upside, teaching is one of the least utilized of the five trust building themes mentioned in this article. As mentioned in the listening strategy above, the risk/reward calculation is challenging because trust gained as a direct result of adding content (friction) isn’t an easy thing to measure. It’s difficult to justify adding extra content to an experience when the information is new, novel, and useful to the audience. When there isn’t 100% certainty that the content checks at least one of the new, novel, and useful boxes, it can be a steep challenge to get cross-functional alignment on including the information.
Here are two education examples that stood out to me:
Prose
Prose, a highly personalized skincare service, dedicates a step in their intake flow simply to teach you about the aspects in your local environment that impact your hair.
Oura
Oura is an app that displays data monitored by their ring wearable tracking sleep and movement. They way the app explained in detail new and novel concepts (like Sleep latency) that impact overall sleep quality made me trust their product more.
Trust through transparency
Have you ever visited a website where all you see are products with 100% satisfaction or have 5 star rated people who can help you? Whenever I see all 5 star ratings on products or experiences my antennae go up and turn from optimist to skeptic. “How could every one of these things be so perfect?”, I ask myself. My skepticism generally leads to the conclusion that they’re either fabricating the data (lying) or choosing not to show me the other things that aren’t perfect. Either direction is a quick signal for me to distrust and a reason to consider going somewhere else for help.
If lying and hiding information is the opposite of trust, what would the flip side be? Enter transparency. Transparency in digital products generally comes down to having the courage to show ugly or potentially negative data. In more concrete, healthcare terms, it’s displaying a provider’s negative reviews or showing how much it will cost to receive care from them, regardless of costly it may be.
It’s not just about displaying data, though. Some platforms that rely heavily on trust (looking at you online dating) have set the trust bar high in the past decade by mandating video and rich media be the medium for digital introductions. Video is an appropriate vehicle for expressing authenticity and vulnerability through transparent communication. It’s a lot harder to hide or obfuscate information when its recorded via live video. Think about it, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to watch a video introduction of anyone that you were about to meet and interview with (looking at you LinkedIn)? Platforms that are build on trust (i.e. Airbnb — experiences) have doubled down on trust when by allowing people to utilize a combination of reviews and introductions to drive decision making. Video introductions aren’t new, but I’d venture a guess that any platform that relies heavily on trust have considered investing in implementing it as a means for building trust with people who use their product.
Below are two great, non-video examples that demonstrate how transparency can be leveraged in a product:
Thumbtack
Thumbtack is a platform where you can hire any professional to do a job for you. On their site, they provide cost estimates for some professionals. Transparent cost up front allows people to incorporate cost into their decision making process of who to hire.
Two Chairs
Two Chairs, a service that asks preferences to match you with a therapist, doesn’t hide the fact that their services are billed as out of network, which can be costly.
Trust through agency
“Agency is the capacity of individuals to have the power and resources to fulfill their potential.” — Wikipedia
In the realm of digital products, the core aspect of Wikipedia’s definition of agency centers around giving up the power of decision making. Besides, why should we assume we know the route to someone fulfilling their potential? Are your products personalized enough to confidently tell people what’s best for them? To give up control, you have to be both humble (“you know what’s best person, I don’t need to tell you what to do”) and confident that a person is going to use the data in your product to make the decision that’s best for them. Having worked on a few products that rely on behind the scenes insights to influence decisions around content and hierarchy, it’s incredibly difficult to resist forcefully guiding people to the “right” decision.
Especially within healthcare, creating an environment where control can be relinquished while still remaining confident in decision quality is a huge challenge. To ground it in an example I grapple with daily, how many controls (i.e. sort/filter) should people have when searching for a doctor? Giving complete control of data can be fraught with risk when a person, for example, could hypothetically do a search for doctor and zoom into their exact location and select the doctor nearest to their location. Sure, the convenience upside for the person is undeniable, but what is the likelihood that the nearest doctor is the one who can provide the best care? Giving up complete control in this way can be dangerous and lead to a bad outcome for someone seeking care.
Without similarly trustworthy and important measures like doctor quality or patient reviews, the risk of people over-indexing on one particular data point (like convenience) increases. I mention this example as a cautionary tale to highlight that giving full agency without appropriate context can lead to really bad outcomes for both people using the product and the company. Stan Lee put it best when he said, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Two examples of products that do a great job at providing an empowering amount of agency are:
Apartment List
Apartment List relinquishes control (agency) of how the results list is displayed by providing the ability to sort the list of apartment results up front.
Casablanca
Checks-in mid-onboarding to see if the customization of preferences is taking too much time/effort. If it is taking too long or requiring too much effort, they can skip ahead to the results without further customization.
Wait…what does content strategy have to do with design?
If you’re a designer, I know what you’re thinking. This isn’t design, these are all content driven strategies! What does content strategy have to do with design? To that I’d answer, yes, much of the secret sauce of the strategies above rely on talented content strategists (shout out to Braulio Ramirez at Included Health) to deliver the right words and content to move the needle on trust. But I’d argue that content has to be delivered in an appropriate, timely method to fully achieve the trust you’ve set out to gain. Consider the “your baggage is on board push notification example from Delta. I’d argue the timing (immediate) and delivery method (push notification on mobile) is just as crucial as the specific, trust building content within the message. Imagine if there wasn’t anyone monitoring the exact time of the baggage boarding the plane and the information was sent 10 minutes later as an email (instead of instant push showing on the lock screen). In that case, the person has most likely put their phone on airplane mode and will receive the email when they land, rendering the (at the time) important news, useless. “Great..my bag was on board the plane during the whole flight, who cares?”
So I’ll end this post with a challenge to you, fellow designer, to take an active role in content strategy while owning the timing (when) and execution (how) of how the content is delivered. Why? Because nailing doing all three of those things can 10x the impact of great content and exponentially increase the trust potential. All you need to remember are these five bullets:
- Lean into precision when your systems allow for it
- Ask for and listen to peoples’ preferences
- Take the time to educate people…being mindful, but not afraid of adding friction or steps
- Be transparent with people who use your product by proudly display data that isn’t pretty with explanation and context rather than hiding it
- Pick spots to give people control (agency) of decisions in your product, empowering people to be confident rather than lost)
Now…go architect that beautifully crafted interaction that creates trust and leads to sustained engagement from your customers.
