Show the tool that can help you to understand “what is trust?” in your product We had the initial assumption that if we understand ‘trust’ in social sciences and what it means e.g. in psychology first, then we will be able to apply those concepts to digital products. First I reviewed the literature (details in the ‘References’ section or linked while reading), then started assembling a narrative which may incorporate the different trust approaches of social sciences, may explain this abstract concept called ‘trust’ and hopefully, will make the narrative applicable in the world of digital products. If you stay with me in the next couple of minutes, you will find below a definition of trust, what it means in the social sciences, and why trust exists at all in our every day life. I’ll also try to guide you through a process on how people build trustful relationships, how such relationships are challenged by every day interactions and will try to model the possible evolutions of trustful relationships (the concept called ‘the three phases of trust’). And finally, I will craft a practical approach called a ‘trust map’ that will hopefully help you in translating the abstract concepts to tangible, measurable next steps with your own digital product. Defining through a metaphorStory inspired by Simon Sinek’s TED speech; illustrations created by the author in Paper appLet me invite you for a couple of seconds into the life of an African tribe. It is the middle of the night. Most of the tribespeople are fast asleep, the tribe is surrounded by various types of dangers, and there are guards whose job it is to protect the life of the sleepers. What is the mental relationship between the sleepers and the guards? The sleepers made themselves vulnerable towards the guards, because the sleepers believe that the guards will protect them. So, the sleepers have positive expectations towards the guards and even if they are physically vulnerable in this situation, they believe in the guards and they sleep peacefully. In the social sciences, trust is defined mostly as a relationship and described as a relationship between the trustor and the trustee. Its definition has four critical elements: decision, vulnerability, positive expectations and the belief that the trustor will act as expected.
Why do we need trust in our everyday life at all?We face many decision points in our everyday life. Many of them seem just ‘natural’ and we accept them unconsciously (e.g. we believe that the traffic light at a crowded junction is set properly and we move forward accordingly). Or we decide to rely on simplified solutions, because we are trying to optimize the use of our mental resources (e.g. standing at the bus stop and the screen says that the bus will arrive in 5 minutes — we believe that ‘those minutes’ are calculated properly and we do not start gathering inputs to recalculate that). We can mention many frequent (‘everyday-like’) and infrequent life situations where we all are faced with the world’s complexity. In order to use our mental resources wisely and deal with complexity quickly, we have no other option than to simplify. It’s not just simplification in the sense of reducing cognitive load, but also that we try to cope with uncertainty. This mental process is centred around our thoughts and intuitions (more on this: here and here). The three phasesTrust is a relationship. But it is also a journey of experiences with different phases which all introduce a different layer and add a different meaning to the relationship. Phase #1: Phase #2: Phase #3: Phase #1 Previously, this was friend or foe. In modern terms, it is whether to trust or not, and thereby became a more complex assessment process. By combining Cuddy — T. Fiske — Glick’s warmth and competence model with the ‘trustworthiness and trust propensity model’ mentioned by Colquitt et al. and also adding Matt Kohut’s approach, we can describe this ‘screening and building’ phase through a two-step mechanism. Step #1: our intuitions drive us in this step and our ‘unconscious algorithm’ poses questions one after another:
Defining ‘good’ and ‘moral sense’ may lead us to philosophical debates and they may also contain subjective elements, but their relevance in the context of trust seems appropriate. Considering ‘warmth’, it is also highly dependent on personal preferences, personality traits and past experiences, but as Matt Kohut says, “warmth is actually critical, it’s the glue that binds us together — if you’re warm, people find you likeable and relatable and they trust you and ultimately, they want to join forces with you.” Amy Cuddy’s and Matt Kohut’s examples on warmth may make this aspect more tangible:
Just to illustrate how quick and unconscious this ‘screening & building phase’ is, let me refer to a study conducted by Daniel Benjamin and Jesse Shapiro. The research team showed 10-second-long videos of US gubernatorial election candidates to the research participants. Each participant watched a 10-second clip of both a Democrat and a Republican candidate (who were candidates between 1988 and 2002). At the end, the participants were asked to guess who won the election based only on these 10-second videos. The study concludes that “naive participants can accurately predict election outcomes based on short selections of video”; and the researchers also added that “Participants’ forecasts seem to rest on judgments of candidates’ personal attributes (such as likability) rather than inferences about candidates’ policy positions.” Of course, this research does not mean at all that this approach is a 100% accurate method of ‘election prediction’, but it could nicely illustrate the importance and impact of warmth and could also help demonstrate the presence of this ‘screening & building’ phase. Step #2: Okay, so we have screened the trustee in terms of warmth, benevolence and integrity, and they successfully passed our first checkpoint. Now we unconsciously move on to the ‘second step’ in which other questions come to the forefront:
Screening is done and we quickly weigh all these aspects up, mostly unconsciously. Depending on past experience and personality, trust could reach different levels after this ‘2-step mechanism’. On a scale from 0 to 10, it could be anything — “Yep, I trust her.”; “Well, I trust her, but I have reservations, so I will keep monitoring.”; “Well, I don’t really trust her”; “I do not trust her at all.” Phase #2 In general, all our relationships face ‘trust situations’ when the question comes up whether we would like to remain vulnerable towards the trustee and whether, in the future, we retain our current expectation as to how the trustee behaves and whether we feel secure in that relationship. In a ‘trust situation’ we usually notice that the trustee does not act and/or does not communicate in a way which conforms with how we believe they should. The aforementioned aspects (warmth, benevolence, integrity, competence, ability, strength) all come into question in these moments and we weigh up whether the relationship is ‘still okay’ in terms of trustworthiness and we make a ‘yes’ / ‘no’ decision. One aspect of the trust situation is all about our trust propensity. The outcome of our decision correlates with our past experiences, with the strength of our emotional relationship with the trustee, and also correlates with our personality traits. The other aspect of such situations is around how the trustee acts in a stressful trust situation. The trustee’s reactions/actions are considered as evidence and this evidence could confirm our ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision. We all fail. We all face trust situations every day. That’s human. The question is how we act and we how communicate in these situations. The questions of Phase #1 are all appropriate here as well, but let me mention one method of resolving a ‘stressful trust situation’ by focusing on some keywords (inspired by this study): As a trustee… listen with openness, react with honesty and caring. Justice is important, and being loyal, supportive, constructive and fair could strengthen the relationship. At the end of the day, competency and determination also count, but don’t forget kindness, consistency and promise fulfillment neither. Phase #3 If the reply is ‘yes’ in Phase #2, the trustful relationship could remain and the level of trust could even increase, through ‘trust situations’ functioning as ‘exams’. If the relationship feels positive from a trustworthiness point of view, then the ‘trust situation’ and its outcome could function as a reconfirmation of the relationship (‘trust cycles’). If the reply is ‘no’ in Phase #2, the quality of the relationship declines, the trustful relationship could be ruined. The speed of this declining period could correlate with personal experiences / preferences of both the trustor and the trustee, but it could also correlate with the perceived pain endured by the trustor. It’s worth highlighting these words ‘perceived pain’, because it may occur that the action taken by the trustee, objectively, does not seem as ‘severe’ as the trustor perceives it. Talking about the trustor’s perception, we can quote two descriptive phenomena:
Theory in practice — The Trust MapWe’ve learnt that trust is a relationship between the trustor and the trustee. Vulnerability and positive expectations are keywords. We’ve also discussed the three phases of trust and their characteristics (screening & building, challenging, increasing or declining), and we have become familiar with the ‘two-step screening mechanism’ (warmth-benevolence-integrity and competence-ability-strength). But the question now is, how can we introduce this ‘trust concept’ into the world of digital products. Each and every product is different, because they serve different needs and their users live in different contexts. That’s why it could be more meaningful to create a process which could enable autonomous product squads to define trust in the context of their product and enable them to act accordingly. Step #1: creating your product’s trust map A physical experience map that provides a ‘trust overview’ of your product could have a significant impact (the original idea of an experience map was inspired by Steve 'Buzz' Pearce). It could mean that you consciously look at your product, list all the ‘positive’ and ‘negative trust moments’ which a user faces while using your product and put them on an experience map. This way, you’ll have…
How to identify these ‘trust moments’? There are the three phases which might help us formulating the relevant questions. Let me illustrate with some examples, which are intended to help with starting the discussion, so of course, the list is not exhaustive. Phase #1: screening & building
Phase #2: challenging
Phase #3: increasing or declining
A physical trust map on your wall could consist of very specific user moments addressing such questions which we could derive from the concepts discussed in this essay. The number of such questions is unlimited. Step #2: prioritizing, building and testing This is pretty straightforward. Based on both qualitative (reviews, support tickets, feedbacks, user tests) and quantitative findings (analytics), you should be able to prioritize the elements of your trust map. Then comes ideation (discovering alternative solutions) and finally, the testing phase. Step #3: measuring trust Taking into consideration that the meaning of trust is complex (just to mention the 6 components of the ‘screening & building’ phase), I tend to believe that measuring trust using only a single metric wouldn’t be possible. But looking at it in a composite and multidisciplinary way, that approach outlined above could help improve our understanding of the users’ trust-related emotions and decisions. As first steps, I would consider the combination of the following techniques:
Closing thoughtsIn a study of the Pew Research Center, conducted by Keith N. Hampton et al., we read the following conclusions: “Facebook users are more trusting than others [compared to other internet users or non-internet users].” and “Facebook users get more social support than other people.” An interesting correlation: Facebook users may trust more, because they get emotional support in the product from other users (e.g. advice, information, understanding). Facebook users may trust more, because the form of the support could become really tangible (e.g. if they are sick, they can find somebody to help them via Facebook). And Facebook users may trust more, because on Facebook, there is always somebody with whom they can spend their time.
László Priskin, User researcher at Skyscanner, based in Budapest, Hungary, working as a team member on Skyscanner’s renewed mobile app available on Android & on iOS. Started sharing his thoughts, because passionately believes in discussions. He thinks whatever is written above will be outdated in a few weeks’ time, because building products means that we inspire each other, criticize each other and continously exceed our way of thinking. László is happy to get in touch with you either on Linkedin or Twitter. Views are his own. References Anderson,
Kare (2016) Botsman, Rachel (2015) Botsman, Rachel (2012) Benjamin — Shapiro (2009) Capps, Rob (2012) Claro Partners (2015) Colquitt et al. (2007) Cuddy et al. (2007) Design Council (2015)
Giddens, Anthony (1991) Hampton et al. (2011)
Kahneman — Tversky
(1974) Kohut, Matt (2015) Lambert, Craig
(2010) Lillie, Ben (2012) Lillie, Ben (2012)
Olk, David (at David Olk) (2016) O’neill, Onora (2013) O’Neill, Onora (2013) Sengupta, Saurabh (at Saurabh “Sobbi” Sengupta) (2015) Simpson, Jeffry A. (2007) Sinek, Simon (2014) Zak, Paul (2015) Zak, Paul (2011) Zhuo, Julie (at Julie Zhuo) (2013) |