Tags – Build Trust Through UX Design
Building trust online is not easy.
But, trust is the most important ingredient when it comes to the success of your business.
However, it is much more than just being credible or reliable in the eyes of your audience.
Rather, it’s about creating a relationship with the “unknown”, where your potential customers take the leap of faith when investing in your product or service.
And, this falls down to creating a meaningful user experience (UX) for every visitor that lands on your website.
In other words, to create a flawless experience you need to combine various interactions and touchpoints of your brand with your users, which in turn will instill trust.
Not to mention, millennials are 7 times more likely to give a brand personal information if they trust them, that includes signing up to newsletters and mailing lists; crucial information you need to convert these leads into customers.
So, how can you make this experience less terrifying and easy for your users?
Well, here are our top 3 tips that can help you build trust through UX design and secure customer loyalty for the long run.
1. Consistency
It’s important that you are consistent with your design, colours, fonts, language, tone and so on.
Doing so will build trust with your audience and provide them with a smooth, easy journey when navigating through your website.
Here, a style guide will come in handy as well as your brand guidelines, so try to limit the amount of fonts and colours you use.
Furthermore, everything you do needs to be consistent with your values and message, which can be communicated through UX to build trust; this includes all landing pages too, so users can recognise that it’s yours and they’ve found the right page.
To put it differently, users enjoy experiences that are predictable and live up to their expectations, and brand consistency will affect your company’s reputation as it shows users they can rely on you to stay true to your original message.
To do this, ensure you use the same tone across all forms of content, use the same logo across different platforms and match third-party elements to your native brand.
Anything less, and your users will be left confused and second guess your company’s motives.
2. Transparency
It’s been found that 94% of consumers are likely to stay loyal to those brands who offer complete transparency.
In fact, 73% of consumers are even willing to pay more for a product or service that is open and honest across all attributes, so don’t even try to pull the wool over your customers’ eyes.
Today, online consumers are incredibly savvy and have zero tolerance for dishonest brands.
Essentially, customers want to know everything they possibly can before they commit, which includes, where the product comes from, what it’s made from, if it’s sustainable and so forth; they’re hungry for information.
Not to mention, most consumers today will insist on gathering as much information as they possibly can before they decide to support a brand.
So in order to gain loyal customers, you need to be transparent about everything you do; transparent branding creates trust and can generate long-term customer loyalty.
To achieve this, your website must be clear about who your team is, the company’s objectives and goals and what your prices are, and this information needs to be easy to locate, otherwise users will become impatient and head off to your competitors instead.
3. Appearance Matters
I’m sure you’re familiar with the saying: “Don’t judge a book by its cover”.
But the truth is, appearance in web design matters; Nielsen Norman describes this as the aesthetic-usability effect, whereby beautiful things are perceived to be easier to use and are regarded as more valuable.
So, you should use this to your advantage through visuals, tone and language, which will all have an impact on how your brand is perceived by your users.
Think about it, if a store on the high street had a dirty window or outdated decor, you wouldn’t feel inspired to go in and look around right?
The same can be said for your website.
Of course, usability should be a focus also, but if the website doesn’t look right, users will see this as a usability problem. Going back to the aesthetic-usability effect, even if the website doesn’t “work” properly, if it looks good, users will assume it does.
Lastly, Google reports that users judge a website’s design within 50 milliseconds before they even start using it.
For this reason, you must invest time in picking a winning colour scheme and choose elements that will keep visitors on the page for longer.
By doing so, you will create a positive experience for them, which is the first step to building trust between you and your potential customers.
Finishing Thoughts
Trust is the key to every successful business and it must be embedded in every single interaction your users have with your product, service and brand.
Overall, a trustworthy brand will make people feel confident in revealing their personal information, such as contact or payment details with you.
Through design, you can convince your potential customers that if any issues crop up, you can be trusted to sort things out.
If you’d like to know more, please get in touch today.
In the meantime, take a look at our Web Design services.
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