How To Create Trust Through UX Web Design
These days, ‘trust’ is about more than just being credible and reliable in the eyes of the customer. Building trust with your website user means demonstrating honesty, value, and authenticity in order to create a successful ongoing relationship. In fact, a recent study shows that millennials are 7X more likely to give over their personal details to a brand they feel they can really trust.
Effective web design helps to build trust through every step of the user journey, from service pages to secure check out, encouraging long-standing customer loyalty. Here are our top tips to help you get started.
Don’t be a Faceless Brand
The first step in building trust is developing a real ‘face-to-face’ relationship with your customers, and your ‘About Us’ page is the perfect platform. Painting an honest and down-to-earth picture of your company will help the user relate to and engage with the rest of your content.
As well as your company mission and values, help your customers get to know you by giving them some inside information into how you got started. The key is to provide them with reasons to feel good about supporting the brand.
Lastly, avoid using stock photos to represent your premises and team members. Pictures of real staff members and friendly biographies go a long way.
Be Transparent
In today’s world, it’s no longer acceptable to pull the wool over the customers’ eyes in order to land the sale. Customers now value transparency above all else, with recent studies showing almost 3 quarters of consumers were willing to pay more for products that provide openness across all attributes.
Gone are the days of customers blindly staying loyal to a few brands throughout their lifetime. Value and authenticity are now key components in the users purchasing decision, so it’s vital that you provide customers with as much information as possible. Be sure to include things like: how and where your products are made and whether they are ethically sourced, as well as clear and accurate pricing.
Consistency is Key
Be consistent in all areas, from your logo, color scheme and font to your tone of voice and messaging. Nothing makes consumers warier than an inconsistent experience from one platform, or the pages of your website, to the next. The customer wants to know they can rely on you to be true to your promises, so it’s vital that you present a united front. Steering too far off track can even cause users to believe you’ve been hacked, which can have catastrophic effects in the long run.
Showcase Your Credentials
One of the easiest ways to build trust is through recommendations and testimonials from happy customers. If possible, feature a selection of your best testimonials across the key pages of your site, and if you can integrate up-to-date reviews from a trusted third-party source such as Google Reviews or Trustpilot, then you’re onto a winner.
But it’s not just about showing off the customers you’ve helped. Displaying logos of other reputable companies you’ve worked with shows consumers and potential business partners alike that you’re in demand.
Build Authority Through Effective Content
The more up-to-date, relevant and engaging your content is, the more trustworthy your company will appear. This not only applies to the user, but to Google too, as regularly updating your website content helps you rank higher in search results.
Staying in touch with your customers via consistent communication that adds value, such as a blog, social media updates or a newsletter, can help you establish a more personal relationship and tells the customer that you’re reliable and always poised to fulfill their needs.
Never Underestimate the Importance of Web Design
Ultimately the trust you build with your customers rests on the overall design of your website. Appearance and usability can make or break the users’ experience and could be the difference between constant conversions or a high bounce rate. Trust-oriented web design relies on clear, relevant and engaging content and optimized user experience.
We hope you enjoyed this promoted piece as much as we did!
