Design for Trust.

The most valuable part of any business is the trust that customers put into the product and services. the growth of the early-stage startup is directly affected by the amount of trust that users have in the company.

Trust can be delivered through the combination of good quality products, great user experiences, honesty, or through marketing tactics like social proof. However, in many early-stage startups, it is hard to capture that trust to gain and retain our first set of users.

In this post, I will discuss a few design principles that will improve your product’s trustability that will help your customers to make faster, better decisions, and will lead to a better conversion rate and user accusation for your product.

Several studies have shown that it only takes 0.05 seconds for users to form an opinion about your product or service. As an entrepreneur or a product designers, we have less than a second to capture our visitor’s trust and convert them into our users. it is human’s common behavior to form a long-lasting opinion about things based on the very first encounter. Either it is love at first sight or it will be a lot harder to make them love you on the second try.

Particularly, for early-stage startups with no reputation or brand identity, or product, it’s hard to gain the visitor’s trust, so your landing page (the first thing most of your users will see) is a powerful tool that can be used for experimentations, user development and to create trust when you are in the humble beginnings of your project.

There are many ways that design can be used to gain trust and attention, we will discuss some of the ways that I have personally used in several projects and have proven to improve user accusation rates. I hope that it can be helpful for your current and future projects too.

Simplify Your Design

It’s no secret that simple is often better when it comes to product design. Simplicity creates honesty and at the same time, it’s not distractive. It helps the user to focus and understand your product better. UIs that are filled with features and elements create distraction and confusion. Over-designed products are like steaks, The longer that you cook them they tend to become hard to chew and consume, but with the right amount of cooking on high heat, your steak will be juicy and tender. a similar principle applies here, by removing the non-essential elements and features in your product you will let the design breathe and your users will be able to have a more productive experience, and better understanding while using your product. Here is a great quote by German industrial designer Dieter Rams explaining the importance of balanced design.

“Good design is as little as possible. Less, but better, because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.” ― Dieter Rams

Create Space

This might seem very trivial but it can have great effects on the visitor’s first impression of your product. it is a very simple practice to create breathing room for the elements of your product. To give everything its own space and to avoid cramping features or elements together. Similar to music, the spatial silences between each musical note are as important as the notes themselves, Imagine a song with no space between the notes or without silences. There are places where there must be spaces, white spaces, and emptiness (purposeful spaces between elements).

Cohesive Design

having a core design and brand identity throughout your landing page or main product is one of the ways to create trust within your potential customers. Creating a cohesive design pattern around your product is very important. By having a set of design elements and colour pallets that are in harmony with your brand’s identity and are being used across all of your products, you as a designer can create a sense of uniformness and matureness across all of your products and services.

Be Bold but Honest

After all, Being unique and different will enables your product to stand out from the crowd. The human that visits your landing page has probably visited many of your competitors’ pages and products who also claim to solve their particular problems, by being bold in your design and unique in your approach you can stand out from the competition while gaining the trust of the visitors and turning them into your users.

have some uniqueness about your design or elements, and do something bold that most other competitors in your market are afraid to do. what makes you different in a competitive market is honesty and not being afraid to try new things.