Council Post: You Need To Design Trust Into Your Technology Product: Here’s How

A 20-year company veteran and tech leader, John Machado is Ultimate Software’s (recently merged with Kronos Inc.) Chief Technology Officer.

Never before has work in America changed more drastically than it has in the last few months. Pre-pandemic, employees' trust in their employers was trending higher than ever. That's the good news. Consumer trust in companies and the general public's trust in institutions like the government and the media, however, is lower than ever. The dust hasn't settled from the COVID-19 crisis, but you can be sure that the relationship between employee and employer, and between user and tech company, will undergo significant changes.  

That's why it's more important than ever to consider trust a part of your design process. It can never be an afterthought — it must be intentionally included from the outset. Having now made HR software for a few decades, I know it requires the same amount of forethought and intention as security or data architecture — or even user experience (UX) design. And research shows that investment in building trust — both from employees and customers — is an investment in your bottom line. Here are some key considerations to make sure you aren't leaving trust out of the equation.

Universal Accessibility 

Just as HR software needs to work for every employee, your tech needs to work for anyone who might want to use it, without exception. It's not enough anymore to think about "accommodations." Instead, focus on adaptations. By building in configurability and flexibility from the beginning, we can avoid many of the product and design flaws that exclude or frustrate users who fall outside what you may be narrowly defining as "typical." And when problems do arise, the product will have enough adaptability in its structure to handle evolving needs.  

This is a place where even the best of us can have trouble seeing around every corner. I strongly recommend bringing in outside expertise to help your organization ensure the highest levels of accessibility. Our organization partnered with such a business for just this purpose, and it has helped our team consider scenarios and solutions we might not have realized on our own. The fact is that, no matter how hard we pretend, we can never truly have an outside view of ourselves (a good life lesson, too). Our unconscious biases are indeed unconscious, so there should be no shame — and no question, really — about bringing in that external perspective. 

Culture-Inspired UX

Take steps to ensure your UX is people-first, intuitive and designed with empathy toward the user. For different work cultures, this will mean different things (note the flexibility described above). In a conversational, less formal culture, employees might be looking for open-ended questions and responses when it comes to HR software rather than being confined to a scale of one to five. Your user base, as you probably have researched deeply, has its own cultures and values. Product design should reflect that. 

How does this translate into trust? When users know they are listened to, they know they can trust a brand to continue to work to understand them and their needs and subsequently take steps to address those needs. There is a balance here: Too much direction or nudging can be seen as condescending and patronizing. On the other side, when users feel the onus to figure out your product lies with them, it's frustrating and can cause friction. 

Use Artificial Intelligence To Make Human-First Decisions

I like to call this concept "mindful AI": It must always be in the service of people, and never work against them or seek to replace them. As AI commoditizes and broadens in usage, it will increasingly become the place where tech and trust are most deeply intertwined. Any AI should be designed to understand what drives your people and your business and help those people do their jobs better. 

There will never be trust if there are AI black boxes. There must always be a way to see how decisions are being made, and there must always be a human "in the loop" for decision-making. It's absurd to ask consumers or employees to trust a machine outright, no matter how smart we say it is. Humans are, ultimately, the decision-makers, while AI empowers them to make better decisions with much broader input than they could do on their own. Users must know that, while we have confidence in the AI and its capabilities, we always have a hand on the controls and their best interests at heart. That might mean ultimately adjusting the way our engines work or even disregarding recommendations if they run the chance of disadvantaging any human or group of humans.

Enable Altruism

Why make people opt-in to kindness? In this time of need, as millions are reaching out to help one another, we see these types of capabilities being hastily added to everything from food-delivery apps to enterprise software. At Ultimate, our tool (and now product) UltiPro Giving gives employees an easy way to donate to their favorite causes. We, as tech leaders, all have a choice to design these types of "paths to kindness" into everything we build. It should be a very easy choice. 

With consumer trust in brands waning in general, and the lasting effects of the pandemic still to be seen, simply giving consumers this option engenders trust that the company is trying to do the right thing — especially when consumers are wary of grand but intangible promises about corporate social responsibility. 

Trust seems to be in short supply. It doesn't have to be if we approach it as seriously and foundationally in our technology as we do security or compliance. It's ultimately even more important than those pillars and deserves consideration from your first blueprint all the way through to your production code. Design trust into your products and technology, win over users by showing them they can put their faith in you and you will reap the benefits, both fiscal and reputational.

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