It's Design from Trust, Not for
The differences matter.
Design from Trust is not the same as Design for Trust.
The latter is design with the intention of getting users of the good or service being designed to trust that good or service more, for example by entering factual information while using the service.
Joe Gebbia, one of Airbnb's three founders, describes Design for Trust well in his 2016 TED talk. His example is the dialog box on Airbnb's website that many of us used in the era before Instant Book (added around 2023), where people asking to stay at someone's property have to describe why they would like to stay there. Make the dialog box too small and applicants won't say enough. Too large, and they might go overboard, revealing more than they should, or they might feel like the task is too daunting and not follow through with the booking.
UX (User Experience) design choices such as finding the Goldilocks-sized dialog box are what Gebbia means by Design for Trust. Tuning design so it facilitates trust is a useful practice and likely increased participants' trust in the system, as well as the number of transactions the system attracts. But it doesn't shift the usual producer-consumer relationship.
Thoughtful Design for Trust (like Goldilocks-sized dialog boxes) is a useful tactic within the larger, systems-level framework of Design from Trust.
Design from Trust is a systems-level intervention. It begins with the assumption that most (not all) people who will use the good or service are trustworthy. Starting with the assumption of good intent leads to radically different designs such as the Wikipedia, which allows anyone to edit, rather than relying on traditional editing structures. These designs are often uncomfortable to humans raised in an environment where distrust is the norm, and where distrust permeates the design of most of the institutions we take for granted.
If that last statement saddens you, join the club. It doesn't need to be that way. I'll explore this phenomenon in future posts.
In 2018 I posted this video explaining the difference between using for and from:
Ultimately, the shift from for to from is the shift from a feature-level improvement to a fundamental redesign of human systems.
#trust #design #designfromtrust #designfortrust
This article is cross-posted on Substack here, Medium here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.