Trust is the new experience
Today we are unveiling our new brand and I am so excited to share it.
Projects by IF has been operating for 8 years. Over this time, we have gained a profound understanding of what trust in technology means and what it takes to create it. Our new identity takes inspiration from that journey.
It’s about relationships, parallel activities and well designed seams that make the complexity and interdependency of the systems we use more legible and easy to engage with.
The work of creating trust is something special, and it’s a sign of the times too. Trust could not be more important than it is now.
The world is more complex than ever
Do you know if you are talking to an AI or a human? What can you rely on? Is that result fair? Every single one of us are already navigating complex ethical issues relating to technology in our daily lives.
When it comes to designing systems, organisations face higher stakes due to global regulatory uncertainty, security breaches, and advancing technologies like AI. Risks are emerging more rapidly, with greater impact, and are often difficult to understand. Digital services now encompass layers of data, technology, relationships, and rights, yet they often lack transparency for those who depend on them the most.
That means it is harder for us to make good trust choices for ourselves, the organisations we work for, and the people we care for.
I don’t have to scroll far in our internal Slack to find stories that illustrate these points. From AI generated cookbooks that omit ingredients in their recipes, to car manufacturers sharing driving behaviour with insurance companies. And then there’s the research that I see every year, that says the same thing. We are still not giving people power. This time it’s that fewer than half of people find the content controls effective. History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes…
Business as usual is not enough
No one sets out to be untrustworthy, but in reality, many start that way.
They use technologies that aren’t fully understood and deploy them in a way that isn’t truly transparent. There is a focus on reducing compliance risks at the cost of user experience, all of which result in brand damage.
We need a gear-change, now.
From transactions to trusted experiences
The past 10 years have been about moving from transactions to user experience. The next 10 years will be about moving from experience to trust.
Trustworthy organisations are more innovative and make more revenue
The organisations delivering the products we can trust are making more money, sustaining higher levels of innovation and benefiting from higher productivity from their teams.
We can make this a tipping point
Especially with AI taking the spotlight. But whilst we all can agree that trust is important, we see that it’s often only prioritised after there has been a crisis or as a result of regulatory change.
We have a hypothesis: that trustworthiness in products and services is essential for companies to succeed and grow, but there’s a gap in practical knowledge about how to apply trustworthiness in products.
We help you make that leap
We are experts in design, regulation and policy, digital strategy, product and experience design and technology architecture.
To show what that means, we have published new case studies of some of our client work. So much of our work is under NDA. It’s a real pleasure to be able to have a small but mighty selection in the wild.
Deep-dive further into our work
- We helped DeepMind Health earn enough trust to launch in 5 hospital sites, saving 1 life a week.
- Trust unlocked adoption of a new global standard that secures a $2B marketplace.
- Our design patterns catalogue helps teams design products and services that people trust. We recently added 16 new patterns for AI UI.
Acknowledgements
Like any rebrand and revised proposition this has been a whole team effort. So thanks to everyone who has been involved in this journey, you know who you are.
A special thank you to David Marques, the G.O.A.T, who finally got to complete his multi-year ambition to revive the IF logo and brand identity. And thank you to Rod McLaren for his help pushing our proposition over the line, making the copy crisp and being a generous collaborator.
