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