Don’t Forget, People Use Your Product!
We live in a world where you can connect with people and share information instantly and effortlessly. Video calling. Screen sharing. Messaging. All possible at the touch of a button (or a ‘Hey, Google’), from your home, your office, or anywhere in between. At LogMeIn, our teams are helping create this connected world by focusing on unlocking the potential of the modern workforce.
What does unlocking the potential of the modern workforce mean? As a user researcher focused on collaboration and online meeting products, it means finding ways to improve how people work together. On the practical side, it means helping our product teams design experiences that make it easier for people to connect and share with coworkers and customers. On the aspirational side, it involves learning how people work today and exploring how that will change in the future (i.e, shifting from offices to coworking spaces, or traditional roles to the new gig economy).
As you can imagine, exploring and building online collaboration products in our super-connected world (e.g. virtual assistants, screen recording, audio transcription) leads to technology that treads a thin line between totally amazing and totally creepy. So, how do you navigate to amazing and away from creepy?
Trust. Are we increasing or decreasing the trust of our users with: this new technology, this interaction experience, this visual design choice, this overall experience with our product? Asking this question, at each step along the way, has helped our team deliver amazing user experiences.
Our team is not alone in taking up trust as a guiding design philosophy. As an example, you can look to organizations like SimplySecure, which provides education for user experience designers, researchers, and developers working on privacy, security, transparency, and ethics. Or, look to a company like Hello Alfred, that prioritizes trust over possible friction with its personal services app. Maybe you or your team are already doing the same?
The principle of trust can mean different things to different people. It’s important to make sure your team defines and understands what trust means for your products, your experiences, and especially your users.
Three Tips on Using Trust to Guide Design Decisions
To help inspire that conversation within your team, here are three tips based on how our team works at LogMeIn:
1: Create a foundation for trust
It sounds like a cop-out to say trust starts with good design, but having a capable and usable product experience is essential for trust building. If the experiences with your product confuse people or fail them when it matters most, trust is lost.
Example: One of the great things about online collaboration products is the chance to conduct a show-and-tell by sharing your screen. But… you need to be confident that you are sharing the correct screen (and not your email)!
As we look at the interaction design and messaging related to screen sharing, our team asks: Are we increasing or decreasing trust with our decisions? Trust starts small.
2: Be as transparent as possible
For people to place their utmost confidence in a product, to truly rely on it, expectations need to be clear. Setting meaningful expectations requires openness. If products fail to to enable people to make clear, educated choices, it will fail to earn the trust of people. People stop using products they don’t trust.
Example: Today, online collaboration technology makes it super super easy for people to record and distribute meeting information. Think about it: voices, audio transcripts, shared content, faces, location/surroundings (webcam)… these all potentially live on after your meeting. (Remember that line between totally amazing and totally creepy?)
The starting point for trust, clearly, involves awareness of what is happening (like opting in/out of recording). Transparency and understanding are critical to trust building.
3: Be human (avoid the doom & gloom)
Conversations about trust and technology always seem to come with a bit of a scare-factor. The scariness is partly based on what we’ve seen in the past (e.g., “stolen identities”); partly on what we hear about the future (e.g., “the machines are coming”); but mostly on our lack of true understanding. To build trust, we need to make privacy and security far more approachable for our users.
Example: Within the online collaboration space, a very simple starting point is informing and educating users about product capabilities in friendly, plain language (and occasionally, with a friendly robot). As people take on far more complicated privacy and security decisions, this same humanness empowers them to make decisions that are best for them. Trust requires empathy and understanding.
As our online collaboration team works to create and empower a more connected world, we are turning to trust as the guiding philosophy for our product and research efforts. That leads us to: creating a foundation to build on (i.e. starting small); being as transparent as possible; and always doing so in an empathic, human way.
What are some of the ways you and your team use trust to empower and guide your product decisions?
