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An interesting piece on usability, trust and loyalty got me thinking on two specific questions, a simple one - how does user-experience create trust? Slightly less simple one - are there other ways of creating trust than a great user experience?
Human nature: Our loyalty towards anything (living person or a non-living product/ service) is born from repeated, consistent and predictable interactions or experiences. If these interactions are positive, we start to enjoy the interactions and slowly these interactions (digital or otherwise) become our habit – become parts of our lifestyle. We repeat them because we have actually started to enjoy them! Like it or not, a very large majority of us just love the "auto-pilot" (full control, predictable outcomes) mode of living with low to no risks or surprises!!! Being in an "auto-pilot" state is also popularly called "habit" and this is the first sign of loyalty and trust . We normally trust things with which we interact most often with, interact with great ease/ predictability and in these days of social communities, even share our experiences around. To sum up, great usability drives interaction frequency which builds our habits, our positive biases, our loyalty and ultimately trust. Habit in using a particular service also means that it has become natural part of our lifestyle, and we do it without friction.
Building trust through great user experience is proven, but it is also fast becoming a "little traditional".
That is where the second question posed at the outset becomes relevant - Are there ways other than user experience to create or drive trust? I see at least three other ways (which are related to usability but solution-wise, very different):
Usability is indeed an entry point to drive trust, but it is "just" that – a starting point in a long journey. Usability is much simpler, trust is far more complex.
The limitation with "user experience-only approach" is that it is still transactional in nature, driven by automation and elegant design/ look-and-feel. It delivers comfort and efficiency, but stops there. Humans need more than that - they want to use their time more effectively, more smartly, they value near real-time advisory and banks reaching out to them. Just imagine if Apple phones, despite their great stand-alone user experience features had no service ecosystem around, offered no choices to users to pick-and-choose free and cheap services (empowerment) - but only allowed them to call and send content? Banks have a more complex service portfolio than Apple so they can go way beyond what Apple has done, into advisory, OBO and other services.
This content is provided by an external author without editing by Finextra. It expresses the views and opinions of the author.
Damien Dugauquier Co-Founder & CEO at iPiD
30 October
Kyrylo Reitor Chief Marketing Officer at International Fintech Business
Prashant Bhardwaj Innovation Manager at Crif
Philipp Buschmann Founder & CEO at AAZZUR
29 October
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