Building Trust

It’s easier to lose trust than it is to build. Earning trust is something that takes a period of time. In this blog I will take you through different stages your users interact and form a relationship with your brand. Understanding at what stage of the trust funnel your user is will allow you to appropriately match level of trust in your website. Your website must meet users’ basic trust needs before they can demand them to enter information or engage them. The trust pyramid has 5 distinct levels of user commitment, each contains different design requirements before users will give a website what it wants from them.

The Trust Pyramid

According to Abraham Maslow hierarchy of needs, individuals must have basic needs such as food and safety addressed before moving to other needs like love, esteem or self-actualization. Just like the Maslow’s pyramid of needs, in pyramid of trust there is a trust between the user and the site. Before progressing to more substantial interaction with your site, individuals must first form a basic trust first.

Establishing trust with first time site users on your website is gradual. Doubt is overcome as the relationship improves, until new demands can be made. The relationship evolves through different stages of commitment, each built on top of the previous ones. Higher levels of commitment cannot be attained before the lower ones are attained.

Users-site relationships progresses through the following 5 levels of commitment, starting from below as they progress to a higher level, all the levels below require satisfaction. It starts at no trust, then we progress to the baseline relevance and trust that needs can be met.

In base line, relevance and trust need to be met first. When the users interact with your site for the first time, they ask themselves if your site is credible, could help them accomplish their goals and is the information dependable. Does the site seem to have the customer’s best interest at heart?

At the second level consideration is put on interest and preference over other options. The user asks themselves why they should choose your site for their task, and if they consider it better than other available options?

As things progress, they ask themselves if they can trust your site to securely use and store their personal information. Does the site offering valuable enough to justify the time and effort to register? Do they trust your site with their personal information? Do they even want to receive email from your company?

Once trust with personal information has gone through, they next step is whether they can trust you with sensitive information like credit card and their street address.

Finally, they have done a transaction with you, what makes them comfortable enough to establish a connection with your site. What makes them want to return in future and perform a recurring transaction? The level of commitment starts from the very first interactions. Without building an appropriate foundation, level by level, further efforts to persuade or convert are trending on fragile ground and you are left standing in the sand below the pyramid of trust.

Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility.

BJ Fogg and his collogues at Stanford University have identified 10 factors that have repeatedly proved to boost your website’s credibility?

1. Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site. You can build website credibility by providing third-party support (citations, reference, source materials) for information you present, especially if you link to this evidence. Even if people don’t follow these links, you have shown confidence in your material.

2. You have to show that there is real organization behind your site. Showing the legitimacy of your organization boosts your site credibility. You can do this by listing a physical address, embedding a google map showing your physical location on the map, membership with a chamber of commerce.

3. Highlighting your organization’s expertise and in the content and services you provide. Prove that you have an expert team. Try to associate with contributors or service providers who are authorities.

4. Show that real people that are trustworthy and honest stand behind your site and the organization. Be sure to give their credentials.

5. A simple way to boost your site’s credibility is by making your contact information clear. List your cellphone, physical address and email address.

6. People quickly evaluate a site by its visual design alone. When designing your site pay attention to the layout, typography, images, consistency issues, and more.

7. Research shows that site wins credibility points by being both easy to use and useful. Some sites operators forget about users when they carter to their own company’s ego or try to show the dazzling things they can do with web technology.

8. Update your site’s content as often as possible since people assign more credibility to sites that show they have been recently updated and reviewed.

9. Try as much as you can to avoid using adds on your site. If you must have ads, clearly distinguish the sponsored content from your own. Avoid pop-up ads, unless you don’t mid annoying users and losing credibility. As for your copyright try to be clear, direct and sincere.

10. Typographical errors and broken links hurt a site’s credibility more than most people imagine. Your site must be functional.

Improving photographs

One way of increasing trust is through your photos found either on your website, LinkedIn profile or Facebook. One finding from research is that larger pupils make you more attractive and trust worthy. When taking photos while you are subjected to bright light, it tends to make your pupil smaller. If you can while your photos are taken try reduce the amount of the light, this will help the photographer to maximize the size of your pupil.

In an experiment that was evaluating how people would evaluate photos based on their level of facial expression. In this case what they found is that the most trustworthy expression was a very slight smile and slightly upturned eye browse while a photo with an angry expression with a frownier mouth and eye browse that went down was the least trustworthy. So, make sure when you are taking fairly trustworthy looking photos of people to use for your website, make sure they give a small smile, and a slightly raised eyebrow.

If you are trying to convey intelligence and trustworthiness presenting a photo with smaller smile is appropriate but when you want to express dominance and friendliness then use a photo of a person expressing a big smile. When presenting photos of opposite sex in a dating site, photos of women looking happy looked more attractive to the opposite sex, while men who looked happy looked least attractive to the opposite sex.

Another finding is the direction the character on the photo should look! In this case forward gaze was rated the most attractive.

The moment users engage with your site they want to be sure they are navigating a trusted site. You have to make it known that you are reliable and secure this will help your site thrive. You can achieve site credibility by incorporating trust symbols which will help increase your sense of security.