I’ve been giving quite a bit of thought lately to the concept of trust in business. Not so long ago if you went to town to buy a cow, you went from seller to seller, looked them in the eye, talked a bit. If your gut told you something was a bit off you’d walk on to the next seller. Eventually you’d settle on a cow, a seller and a price – maybe a couple of nice chickens or your firstborn – and shake hands on the deal. That thing with the gut was called trust.
Fast forward a few years and we started exchanging little discs of metal for our goods and services, removing ourselves from the actual things we were trading. Then came companies and stock markets. It’s pretty safe to say the whole trust part of the transaction got pretty strained for awhile there.
Now here we are in the 21st century: paying for goods and services with pieces of plastic that represent the amount of little shiny discs a bank is willing to lend you. We buy books from Amazon, music from iTunes and everything else on eBay – all without once speaking to another human being. We entrust our identities and finances to brands; PayPal has our credit cards, Google our email and Facebook our personal information. No eye contact, no handshake – it’s a bit flaky sometimes but we still trust.
So what does this have to do with design? Actually, as it turns out, quite a bit.
The reason we still trust is because we make those gut decisions based on our perceptions. When we are buying or banking, when we are interacting with a brand, we are evaluating their trustworthiness. And the further we get from face-to-face contact, the more we have to rely on other factors to make that evaluation.
The roofing company with the poorly printed flyer using 12 different fonts and lots of starbursts is probably less likely to get your business than the company that took time to craft their message, paid attention to the presentation and print quality. The investment website that looks polished and professional makes us more comfortable than the site that features a 12-page essay in all caps on the home page and a photo of a guy with a bad tan and too much chest hair.
A Stanford University study found that, rather than using rigorous criteria, nearly half of all consumers determined a website’s trustworthiness by “the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes.” None of the other criteria in the study even came close. It turns out we rely on design as an indicator of trustworthiness.
This doesn’t just apply to the Googles and Nikes; this applies to carpet cleaners, menswear stores and mortgage brokers. In short, if you’re doing business in the 21st Century, this applies to you: business is, and always will be, based on trust. In a world where brands have replaced people, where logos and websites have become the faces we deal with, design has become a fundamental tool in creating and maintaining trust. And without trust, there are no transactions, no commerce. It’s a big responsibility – and with $30 website templates and stock photo agencies selling pre-fab logos, it might just be the last key differentiator for professional design.
Matt Politano, MGDC, runs Oculus Design + Marketing in Victoria, BC. He once traded a cow for some magic beans and has had trust issues ever since. If you want to subject yourself to more of his ramblings, you can follow him on Twitter.
Good article.
-Andrew McCarthy
So if anyone can have a well designed site then what is the differentiator? It is not in professional design but in content. It is about consistent messaging and about providing value for your customer. It is about building a relationship through shared experience and story. Content is the currency of the web. A beautiful professionally designed one-of-a-kind website is worthless if I am accessing your content through RSS. In that moment, the only thing that you've got is your word.
You're absolutely correct that many templates and pre-fab design solutions are 'good enough' for many businesses – but you don't really need a designer if you just want to run a me-too brand. However, if you want to differentiate and establish a presence in the market, then you need to be strategic and use design to help position yourself.
Design is not just how something looks; it includes planning the user interaction and experience, emotional connection, etc. that creates a relationship with a brand. No knock against content here; but content requires a framework to help it 'speak'. Not too many people are going to subscribe to that RSS feed if the site looks shifty.
The difference between a $3 bottle of hand soap and a $20 bottle is probably only about 1% content (ingredients); the rest comes down to design (positioning, story, visual design of the packaging). The same can be applied to any highly successful online store, product, service, business.
I totally agree that content, consistent messaging and value are also vital – no one's interested in porcine lipstick; but the best content, product or service doesn't stand much of a chance without a compelling (and trust-engendering) presentation.
Like Seth Godin says: "There's not a lot of room for slightly-out-of-the-ordinary". Nor is there room for "slightly trustworthy".
However, I fear you are still missing my point when you bring up the example of the hand cream. I'm sorry but ingredients is not content. Content is about which of the two bottles was produced locally; which one is organic; which one was not tested on animals; which one benefitted a rainforest tribe in S. America. The presentation of a Life branded handcream is not compelling but it does deliver a certain brand promise: that through a lack of design and marketing, we can deliver a equally strong product to you for a cheaper price. Its more ornate, more prettily packaged $20 cousin on the shelf only offers a superficial return on the customers investment.
I again put forth that "compelling presentation" is only one component. And screw semantics, what we are talking about here is not design; it is brand promise of which design is an important and essential tool.
My closing statement was that, with the erosion of many of the traditional components that make up professional design's value, creating a sense of trust is one of the components that I feel has kept (and perhaps even increased) its value. How does your eco-friendly, locally-produced hand cream compete with the cheaper, toxin-laced version? I'm not saying it's the only way, but design is one of the key tools you use to create the trust necessary to make the sale.