Trust is a critical design material

Many product or services, especially in areas such as health, finance and government, play a deeply intimate role in our lives. They hold our history, our wealth and our health. They may keep our secrets and our memories. For services that play these roles, trust is a key material in their design. In this post, we'll share some ideas we've found useful for designing trust into products and services. As a shorthand, we'll refer to both as services throughout this discussion.

Trust isn't binary

Our starting point for thinking of trust is through the concept of social capital. In this framing trust is a stock, like wealth, that can accumulate or deplete. Social capital is a feature of social networks that enables members to work together more fluidly by leaning on stocks of trust instead of purely contractual ties. Such bonds allow relationships to develop and information to be shared through a belief in mutual reciprocity, and can facilitate both bonding or developing closer relations (with a potential dark side of in and out groups) and bridging (connecting previously unconnected entities across a network).

Thinking of trust as a stock that can accumulate or deplete suggests an approach to design for it. A service that wants to be trusted should aim to build trust over the lifetime of its relationship with a service consumer. Trust can also be eroded, as often happens in interactions that have come to be known as deceptive patterns. As evidenced by the longevity of services that utilise deceptive patterns, an erosion of trust may not cause immediate flight from a service, but it does remove a crucial foundation that protects a service from purely functional comparison.

Building trust through trustworthy interactions

If building trust is so important, how can we increase it? In classic service design, you improve a service through the explicit design of "touch-points", or interaction features across the lifetime of a service relationship. Touch-points can be designed to bring the essence of a product or service to life and embody the qualities its designer aims to achieve.

Much like service design creates a service through a portfolio of touch-points, our approach to trust seeks to create a portfolio of "trust points" or intentional interactions that are explicitly designed to add to the stock of trust between the provider and consumer. No one trust point guarantees trust, however an accumulation of trust points builds a stock of trust and supports a deepening relationship.

Different types of trust

Not all trust points can be considered equal. An example from years of working with financial services customers is that despite trusting a large banking brand to keep their money safe, many customers wouldn't trust that same bank to provide advice in their best interests.

David Maister's Trusted Advisor framework has helped shape our thinking about these tensions. Maister describes trustworthiness as an algebra of credibility (whether our advice is seen as true or valuable), reliability (whether we do what we say) and intimacy (whether we are likeable), underpinned by self-orientation (whether we act in our interests or our clients).

We can see how that large bank accumulates trust when they secure your money (your money being there when you check your account is a critical reliability point), whilst depleting trust when they try to sell you a new product when you call them about something else (demonstrating their own self-interest over yours).

How we work with Trust Points

This framework can be used to design trust-increasing experiences into services. Throughout the service, alongside other features, over-index on proof-points in each of Maister's categories. For example, communicating and delivering on clear service levels demonstrates reliability. Providing honest guidance that show the pros and cons of our service provides a proof-point that builds self-orientation trust. Whether these features are fundamental aspects of the service, or simply experiential moments, they develop trust.

Trust points can be designed to appropriately increase trust across the lifecycle of a service. Someone experiencing a service for the first time has low stocks of trust and so we can't expect them to confidentl share intimate secrets. We can offer trust points such as reassurance about security practices, or their right to leave and take their data with them. Attention to privacy and consent are key early trust points.

Of course, the stock of trust can also be eroded by failures related to each category of trust, and even more so by the use of deceptive patterns, so mitigating against those is also critical.

Use Trust Points to increase trust in your service

We've introduced Trust Points as a specific type of feature, designed to help grow the stock of trust each time they are experienced. Improve the experience of your products and services by determining key elements of your experience that can increase or destroy trust and seek to amplify the good and mitigate the bad. You can't increase trust instantly, but you can build it over time with consistent actions.