Trusting Design
Reflecting on how great design fosters trust in users
Physical and digital products are something that we all rely on and interact with on a daily basis in some shape or form. As a millennial born into the digital era, I was using digital products without thinking about how they were created and the process that went into designing the product that I was holding in my hands. After working closely to product management, I realized how much goes into designing the user experience for products. The experience is the product and ultimately what the customer is buying.
When I use a great product, I remember that experience — how useful the product was in achieving the task at hand, the ease of navigation and seamless integration, the beautiful UI, and the blood, sweat, and tears of detail. All of those interactions taken together make up the total product experience and the details are the difference between a good vs great product. I trust a great product to get the job done and to help make my life easier in some way.
Let’s take the canonical example of the iPhone: it was the first device to truly bring a mobile computing experience to something you could put in your pocket and take with you anywhere. There is no keyboard, no stylus. Instead, an operating system that uses a multi-touch interface in which simple gestures operate the device, and the user is able to have access to more than 2 million iOS apps. Today’s iPhones are computational Swiss army knives that are also intuitive and easy to use, making it the most revolutionary product of its time.
“Good design is good business.” — Thomas Watson Jr., businessman, second president of IBM
Most of us can’t live without our smartphones and use it for so many different things that it’s hard to keep track. According to the latest report from IDC Research, which examined habits of smartphone users, 79% of adult smartphone users have their phones with them for 22 hours a day. The average American spends around 5.4 hours a day on their phone. We are so addicted to them because they are designed to fulfill so many of our needs like allowing us to be more productive while also being a source of entertainment.
Great design is a key ingredient in building trust between your product and your users. We have grown up being told by parents and teachers not to sit in strangers’ cars or live in their houses. Yet Uber and Airbnb have made these common in our times. We know design is a key element in this mindset shift.
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, Inc.
