Trust Is More Important than Good UX

A guest column by Valeria Adani, Projects by IF.

Brace yourselves; today you are in for a treat. I have invited the one and only Valeria Adani to share her thoughts on Trust and Technology. I have known Valeria for over 10 years, she is an outstanding design leader. Valeria has recently made the bold move to join as a partner at Project by IF, a strategy and design firm that specialises in trust. The company is at the forefront of the thinking and experimentation on trust and technology, and it is also female-founded, which makes it just impossible to ignore.

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Happy reading!

Marzia

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It’s Time to Design for Trust

Design has been focusing a lot on creating “better” experiences for people to “better” respond to their needs. Over the years, user experience efforts converged with the pursuit of seamless, effortless, painless interactions. The work of designers focuses on making things not just easy, but enjoyable and even delightful for users.

However, as we advance, it’s becoming evident that good UX/CX alone will no longer suffice. We need organisations to design for trustworthiness too¹.

Can you trust a person? Can you trust that a restaurant will serve you food that doesn’t harm you? Can you be sure that the personal details you’ve just entered into a healthcare app will go to your GP, and not a scammer?

Trust is a feeling² - is the liminal space that defines our relationship. It cannot be saved, or stored, and certainly it can’t be built. Trustworthiness, which is the quality of being deserving trust, is perhaps more important when it comes to organisations. You can not force someone to trust you, but you can demonstrate that you can be trustworthy: for example you can always meet expectations (e.g. always showing up on time) or you can strive to always be accountable (e.g. taking responsibility for your mistakes). Most importantly trustworthiness can be designed and measured.

In an era marked by growing concerns over security³, privacy⁴, and authenticity⁵, being trustworthy emerges as a crucial component for success⁶ (and survival too).

This Isn’t a New Problem

We are living in an era where organisations and businesses need to be intentional about trust. This is not just the right thing to do it; it’s critical to commercial success too⁷. What is your company doing to reduce the trust gap between you and your customers?

Nowadays there are more and more people and organisations to trust: the world is becoming more connected, more automated and more complex. We are increasingly asked to trust people and organisations that we have never met, and may never know - for very important things.

Technology Is Making Things More Complex

We increasingly rely on, delegate to and depend on technology: it is setting new expectations for what is possible. All of this, while we don't really understand it, know in whose interests it operates, or how to put up appropriate guardrails.

Trust in technology⁸ is needed. But it can be vague⁹, overwhelming¹⁰, inaccessible¹¹ and impractical¹² too. With artificial intelligence systems permeating various facets of our lives, the intricacies of trust¹³ are evolving into a systemic challenge. Discerning between reality and fabrication becomes increasingly challenging¹⁴.

Mind the (Trust) Gap

There’s a big gap between trustworthiness and the products and services we are designing today. For businesses, a lack of trust translates into very tangible, commercial outcomes. To name a few: reduced customer loyalty, declining sales, and damaged reputations¹⁵. For society it can lead to a loss of faith in public institutions¹⁶, reduced civic engagement¹⁷ and polarisation¹⁸.

The trust gap refers to the disparity between the level of trust people have in certain organisations or people and the actual level of trust that those entities deserve or have earned. The trust gaps¹⁹ widen when there is a significant difference between the perception of trustworthiness and the reality of an entity's actions or intentions. Things like broken promises²⁰, unaligned expectations²¹ and lack of transparency²² contribute to this.

This gap manifests in many ways: from the inherent distrust you feel when you click a cookie banner, an automated fine that you are helpless to correct, or the app that doesn't work for you because its algorithm is discriminatory.

• For businesses, the gap shows up in a myriad of critical risks from algorithmic bias, to regulatory readiness, to being left behind by the next technology wave.

• For product teams, it's the blocker of wanting to do the right thing, but being faced with KPIs that prioritise conversion rather than comprehension, or how to prioritise trust when your backlog is already full?

• For regulators, the trust gap looks like how much harder it is to stay ahead in a market continuously disrupted by exponentials, to understand nuanced and changing user behaviour and know how to translate that into impactful guidance.

The Time to Design for Trust is Now

At IF, we believe there has never been a more important time to design responsibly. The reason I joined IF this year²³ is exactly because I think, as designers, we can and must play a crucial role in shaping a more trustworthy future. As designers and design leaders, we are accountable. We shouldn’t behave as if we were outsiders or victims of the system that creates potentially harmful, unethical and untrustworthy products and services.

Much more needs to be done to ensure care for people is always at the heart of products and service development.

Responsible Technology by Design Framework

To guide our work in this space, at IF we created the Responsible Technology by Design Framework²⁴. It helps us organise and guide our work in designing and creating trustworthy products and services. It provides us with a shared language around responsible technology needs, principles and patterns.

The framework is a work in progress and it continues to evolve as our thinking evolves. It helps us assess and design products/services that deliver human experiences that make people feel safe, respected and empowered.

Filling the Gap by Looking at the Trust Stack

At IF we believe trust influences every aspect of a product/service. We think that building trustworthy experiences requires system change- or 'full-stack²⁵' change- which is why we work across experience (research and design), tech and data, organisational change and policy. Building trust also requires clear intention on how the different elements play with each other: from new user interface patterns that give people agency, to innovation in the underlying technical infrastructure, and real accountability.

Trust needs to be entrenched in how a product or a service is designed, delivered, maintained and scaled. That requires an evolution of how design teams work with other parts of the organisation.

Regulators Can Be Useful Co-Designers

Following regulations shouldn’t be perceived as a necessary hurdle or a mere compliance tick-box exercise. It’s time to see regulators as co-designers, especially in a time where design affects not only trust but even safety²⁶. In the past years many regulatory efforts are emerging in EU, US and UK as a direct result of a lack of trust (for example GDPR²⁷, DSA²⁸, DMA²⁹, ICO & CMA joint paper on harmful design³⁰) and more regulatory actions are materialising with the raise of AI (EU AI Act³¹ and US Executive Order on AI³² to name a few)

That said, regulations can only provide a certain level of guidance, but it deliberately leaves grey areas. Very often the final user experience is crafted by designers with very little guidance. Most design and product teams lack confidence and require new tools, new design principles³³ and frameworks to cope with this complexity.

Collaborating with regulators as co-designers is an organisational change that we will see more of in 2024. As design leaders you need to ask yourself:

• How well does your design team understand the value of regulation?

• Are they equipped with the right tools?

• How do you work with your legal, safety and compliance team from the start?

Closing the Trust Gap Can’t Wait

Trust, transparency and accountability aren’t new problems, but organisations need a new approach. And designers can play a crucial role in it. .

We need to solve trust challenges and make trust intervention actionable by looking at the full trust stack, from UI to policy, from organisational change to technical architecture - and be organised for that. In this shift - a shift is not merely procedural but a cultural transformation that strengthens internal bonds with other departments - design leaders can play a fundamental role. It’s time to start designing for trust, with intention.

1. Why Trust Is More Important Than Good UX, Sarah Gold, Medium, May 2023

2. The Power of Trust Is in Your Hands, Rachel Botsman, LinkedIn, December 2023

3. 23andMe Confirms Hackers Stole Ancestry Data On 6.9 Million Users, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, TechCrunch, December 2023

4. Dropbox’s AI Integration with OpenAI Turns into a Messaging Mess – As Amazon’s CTO Apologises over Data Protection Post, Ed Targett, The Stack, December 2023

5. Google Admits AI Viral Video Was Edited To Look Better, Tom Gerken, BBC News, December 2023

6. Trustworthy Companies Offer Superior Investment Returns with Less Risk, Barbara Kimmel, Medium, July 2022

7. Trust: How To Measure It and Why It Matters For Business, Francesca Cassidy, Raconteur, August 2022

8. Companies Need to Prove They Can Be Trusted with Technology, Daniel Dobrygowski, Harvard Business Review, June 2023

9. Trust in Tech Has Eroded: Here Are 3 Ways to Rebuild It, Michael Miebach, World Economic Forum, January 2023

10. Edelman Trust Barometer, Edelman, 2022

11. Six Ways Tech Leaders Can Build Trust in Their Customers, Francis Dinha, Forbes, February 2023

12. Big Tech is Still Struggling to Earn the Public’s Trust, Taylor Barkley, The Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University, August 2022

13. The AI Trust Crisis, Simon Willison, December 2023

14. AI and Trust, Bruce Schneier, December 2023

15. The Trust Crisis in Business, David Michels, Forbes, June 2019

16. Trust in Politicians Reaches its Lowest Score in 40 Years, Michael Clemence & Laura King, Ipsos, December 2023

17. Lack of Trust is a Barrier to Civic Engagement, Charles Thomas, Knight Foundation, November 2018

18. Distrust, Political Polarization, and America’s Challenged Institutions; David W. Oxtoby, Henry E. Brady, Tracey L. Meares, Lee Rainie, Kay Lehman Schlozman; American Academy of Arts & Sciences, January 2023

19. Trust, Populism and the Psychology of Broken Contracts; Eric Beinhocker, Edelman, 2023

20. Private UK Health Data Donated for Medical Research Shared with Insurance Companies, Shanti Das, The Guardian, November 2023

21. Sainsbury’s Boss Defends Decision to Sell Customers’ Nectar Card Data, Alex Lawson, The Guardian, December 2023

22. Adobe Faces Big Fines from FTC over Difficult Subscription Cancellation, Amber Neely, Apple Insider, December 2023

23. Trust Matters, Valeria Adani, LinkedIn, May 2023

24. Introducing IF’s Responsible Technology by Design Framework, John Ridpath, Medium, August 2022

25. Full Stack Service Design, Sarah Drummond

26. Tesla Recalls More than 2m Vehicles in US over Autopilot System, Reuters, The Guardian, December 2023

27. General Data Protection Regulation

28. The Digital Services Act

29. The Digital Markets Act

30. ICO and CMA: Harmful Online Design Encourages Consumers to Hand Over Personal Information, ICO, August 2023

31. EU AI Act: First Regulation on Artificial Intelligence, European Parliament, June 2023

32. Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence, The White House, October 2023

33. Design Principles for a New AI World, writingprincess, Medium, January 2022