Designing for Trust (with notes)

(Full slides, without notes, are available at https://speakerdeck.com/mvboeke/designing-for-trust/)

The technology industry is on a quest to build frictionless, seemingly magical, experiences for our users. In the effort to design the simplest experiences possible, we exploit troves of personal data, to make important choices for our users. Unfortunately, simplicity is often at odds with transparency. If we don’t tread carefully, we can obscure critical context from users, and our magical experiences can start to feel creepy. So how do we build trust directly into the UX of our products?

In this session, we will review some of the factors that engender trust, like reputation, transparency and consent. We’ll also explore some real world examples of products that do a great job of establishing trust, and some others that...miss the mark. We should walk out with a better understanding of the issues surrounding privacy and trust, as well as some practical tools for making our own apps and software products more trustworthy.

Transcript

1. Designing for Trust Michael Boeke UXD CHICAGO 2016 Hi I’m Michael Boeke. I’m a product designer and the co-founder of Synap, a software startup in Chicago. I’m here to share a few things I’ve learned about designing for trust.
2. What elements of design and UX help you to trust a website or app? When I was first putting this talk together, I asked the twitterverse “What elements of design help you to trust a website?” Lots of people replied with the same answer…
3. …locks. A lot of sites seem to agree with this, and if you Google for lock icons, you’ll find hundreds of thousands of options. I’m not going to talk about putting lock icons on your website today. Instead I want to take step back and look at trust from a broader perspective of user experience. So let’s start with what is trust? Why does it matter?
4. Image: Michael Boeke When we are babies, we have no choice but to trust our parents completely, because we are reliant on them for everything. As we grow, we begin to have choices about who to trust, and we learn how to decide who is trustworthy. And this is a critical, because it is the entire basis of how we interact with new people. It’s the basis of transactions we make in the marketplace. And when you have it, wonderful things can happen. At the macro level, societies that have a high level of social trust tend to have better commerce and economic prosperity. At a micro level, teams with a high degree of trust tend to get things done more effectively.
5. Sources: Gallup, Pew Research Center 20% 40% 60% 80% '73 '75 77 79 81 83 85 87 89 91 93 95 97 99 01 03 05 07 09 11 Media Religion Government We live in an interesting era. In America, trust in institutions and individuals, as measured by data wonks, has been falling for a long time. We see that public trust in institutions like government, media, and religion are all way down over the past 40 years.
6. Source: NORC General Social Survey 33% 42% Adults who trust most people 2012 1972 And we see that trust in individuals is down, too. The number of adults who reported they trust most people has dropped to only about a third of the country. And yet, all around us, people are engaging in all sorts of new exchanges based on trust.
7. Image: Ebay Because while trust has been declining over the last several years, we haven’t retreated back into our caves and shut out the world. To the contrary, we’ve been increasingly willing to buy and sell things from strangers online. Witness the rise of Ebay and Craigslist (which Craig Newmark has called a social experiment in trust).
8. Image: Uber But people aren’t just buying and selling things through classified ads. We’re also getting rides from strangers we find online.
9. Image: AirBnB And we’re opening up our homes to strangers who find our places online.
10. Image: Simple We’re sending our life savings to institutions where we’ve never met any the employees face-to-face.
11. Image: Tinder Finding (ahem) dates with strangers we find online.
12. Maybe even finding mates among strangers we meet online. This is a Craigslist personal ad posted by my goofy little brother. [read ad] What kind of guts were required for him to put this out there and trust that someone might respond. What kind of woman would trust the person who posted this crazy ad? Nobody, right? Actually one person responded. They hit it off, and 18 months later they’re married and I have a new sister in law. All because of online trust (and Sausagefest).
13. I’ve been thinking about trust in design for a long time, due the types of products I’ve worked on. I’ve basically spent my career working on bringing sensitive information onto the internet, working in healthcare, investments, and online payments. I’ve worked at several Chicago technology startups going way back to the primordial ooze of the dotcom era. I was the designer of an early social network for hospitalized patients and their families, called Carpages, which is still in use at many childrens' hospitals. Then I was the first designer at another startup, that made some of the first SaaS software for hedge funds and other investors. After that, I moved on to Braintree, where I was a product manager for the platform that accepts payments for companies like Uber, AirBnB and Basecamp, and which was eventually acquired by PayPal.
14. synap I’ve been thinking about trust a lot lately, because I’ve been working on something new (and no, it’s not a dating app).
15. At Synap, we are building a platform to help account managers and customer success reps to guide and grow their customer relationships. Our platform helps them collaborate better, with each other and with the other teams at their company.
16. Synap connects to the tools you already use, and automatically organizes your customer communication. Synap automatically organizes your customer communication at every stage in the relationship, by connecting to the communication tools that your teams already use. Our software connects to your email, help desk, and CRM platforms, and automatically builds a Facebook-style feed of all the interactions your company has had with a customer.
17. </> Sales + Solutions Accounts + Support Product + Engineering With Synap, we are inviting our users to interact with a higher level of trust with each other, in order to accomplish incredible things through collaboration. For example, we enable users to see the emails that everyone sends to customers. This is fantastic for Customer Success, account managers, who collaborate on projects for clients. Because without Synap, that information often ends up trapped in one person’s inbox.
18. And since Synap organizes users’ messages and information for them. They have to trust our app to make good choices that make their lives easier. We also need them to trust us to connect to their systems without screwing up any of their data, all while maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of their communications. It’s a tall order, that’s why I’m thinking about trust again lately.
19. Go to GetSynap.com! But don’t worry, the rest of this talk won’t be an infomercial for Synap. I’m going to draw on some examples of what we’ve built along with examples from lots of other places. Buuuuut…if you want to go to getsynap.com, you can sign up for a free trial and someone cool from my team will be happy to show you around.
20. Cool 20 Creepy I want to share a project that really shaped how I think about the subject of trust. While building the Venmo Touch product at Braintree, my colleague John Sturino came up with the concept of the cool/creepy line. There was a lot of discussion about how we could provide the right information and messaging to make sure we ended up on the cool side of things.
21. Cool 21 Creepy We realized that if a user sees their sensitive information show up somewhere unexpected, and they’re not sure how it got there, they are going to find it disconcerting and creepy. That feeling may overwhelm any magic or benefit they receive from the feature.
22. Cool 22 Creepy If a user sees that their sensitive information is being used to make their life easier, they understand how the information got there, and they trust the company or app, then they are likely to think it’s cool.
23. 23 Transparency Control How do we achieve this? Transparency and control. We offer our users transparency about how their information is being used, and give them control over their information, including intelligent defaults.
24. Control Transparency What does that look like in practice? Here’s and example from the Venmo team. Venmo touch was a way to store your payment information for later use in other apps. The team that designed the Venmo Touch UI, applied both of these principles. It clearly states what is going to happen, and offers a link to more detailed information (providing transparency). It also offers the user a choice about whether to participate or not (offering control).
25. Be transparent about People We are going to talk a lot about transparency today. It’s the foundation for everything else in trust. The more information you have about the person or company you’re considering trusting, the more confident you can be you are making a good decision. Starting off with some good questions like: Who are the people behind this app? Can I talk to them?
26. One of the things a smaller organization can do is show the actual people who build the product and support the customers right on their website. One of my favorite examples of showing this is Kickstarter’s team page. Not only do you see the people behind the product, but you get a strong sense of the flavor of the people, and how that finds it’s way into the product experience.
27. It’s one thing to show the people behind a product, it’s another thing to actually be able to talk to them. People often inherently distrust larger organizations because there isn’t an actual person to talk to. Make it easy to contact those people. Zappos is renowned for their support, and you can see they stick their contact information in the most conspicuous place possible - right in the top left corner. Rackspace is another company that built it’s reputation based on what they call “fanatical” support, and they also include phone and chat links right at the top of their home page.
28. At Synap, we tried to employ a bit of both of these approaches. Our team page lists everyone on our team, but it also includes multiple ways to contact us directly. So for me, you can get in touch with me via email, Twitter or LinkedIn.
29. So how do we incorporate this into the experience of our products, and not just the website? I think Uber has thought about how being transparent about the people involved should really be part of the app experience. It’s important because you’re hopping in a car with a stranger, and safety is a real concern.
30. When a driver accepts your request, you get both their license plate number and a picture of the driver. It helps you make sure you’re hopping in the correct car, building confidence in the Uber service, and trust that your ride is going to be a good experience.
31. Be transparent about Customers I know this might sound a little weird. You probably wouldn’t want to post your customer list online, and your customers wouldn’t like that either. Depending on the type product you offer, that could be deep breach of trust. However, there are some ways to do this with an approach of “Social Proof”.
32. Social Proof is the phenomenon of being persuaded by the actions of others. It’s especially powerful when those others are someone the customer respects and trusts. One way to achieve this is through testimonials or endorsements. It can be as simple as listing a handful of logos from your best-known customers, as Basecamp does here. Of course, you’d better get permission from your customers first, and give them control of whether they are included. However, lot’s of people and companies are willing to do this for trusted vendors, and they may even appreciate the extra marketing exposure.
33. Testimonials are another great way of being transparent about your customers, but there are a few things to keep in mind. A lot of viewers will just discount reviews and testimonials that are just attributed to customers they don’t know. So there are a few techniques to help keep them feeling authentic. The first is to use celebrities, if you can. Customers know these are real people, and they’re probably trusted as authorities on the subject. We can see that in this example from Shopify. People know Tina Roth Eisenberg from her SwissMiss blog, and Daymond John from“Shark Tank”.
34. Image: Signal v. Noise So, you may not have the ability to nab celebrity endorsements on your site. Another approach is to use customer photos. They give users a sense that the testimonial is from a real live human. Highrise found this out when they modified their landing page to use customer photos, and their conversion rate went up more than 100%. That was powerful boost in trust (and sales too).
35. Another way to approach this is through referrals. There’s been lot’s of hoopla about so-called “growth hacking” techniques, which usually offer monetary incentives for referrals. The prototypical “Give $10 get $10!” promotion, or in this case from Dropbox, get free storage space by inviting friends. But the often unspoken benefit of referrals is that they are super targeted social proof marketing. The referrer is explicitly endorsing the product, but their endorsement is perfectly targeted to the group of people who would trust that person’s opinion the most - their friends and family.
36. Be transparent about Motives Business models matter. As designers and developers, we sometimes don’t want to get our hands dirty with business-y stuff. However, business models affect the motives of the organization and manifest themselves in our products and designs. Users need to understand how the app is making money. Lest the old adage ring true “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”
37. Image: GoldenShores Technologies The extreme example of this is the Flashlight app stealing customer data. Famously, one of the top free flashlight apps on Android was capturing user’s location data and device IDs and selling that data to advertisers, without informing users. Bad examples like this one make users wary and distrustful of other free services.
38. For example: Sunrise was an awesome calendar app, but I got nervous using it after a while. It had been more than a year, and I didn’t see them charging money for anything. I know a little bit about startups, and I was thinking they must be burning through their funding, or maybe they have a revenue stream that isn’t obvious. As user trusting them with my data, I wanted to know about their business. I tweeted to them about it, and they quickly tweeted back letting me know that they were planning to charge for services in the future. Of course, I was right about them burning through funding, and instead of charging for their app they were acquired by Microsoft’s Outlook team, which shut down the app. I still miss it.
39. 1 2 Sometimes motives can get muddled. I’m not sure that even the people at Ticketmaster know what their motives are on this page. After purchasing tickets for an event, they hit you with two separate lightboxes, when the whole point of a lightbox is to focus the user on one thing. One is to post on Facebook, and the other is take a survey. And if I dismiss those lightboxes, there is a barrage of other calls to action on the page behind this to buy more things and post to social networks. If Ticketmaster really cared about this survey, they should give it the spotlight it deserves, but because the user is getting pushed in different directions here, it calls into question the motive behind any of these things. There are a lot of pop-ups here, if I click one, am I going to go to a scammy site that takes over my browser? Do they really care what I think, or are they just going to try to sell me something more? I’d be willing to bet it hurts their conversion rate on the survey and limits the feedback they receive.
40. All of that aside, those of you with keen eyes may have noticed that I was purchasing tickets to Monster Jam. People who don’t know me well are often surprised to find out that I would be into monster trucks.
41. If you don’t think this is AWESOME, than you and I have very different definitions of that word.
42. Be transparent about Pricing Next, I want to talk about pricing. Of course, if you want people to trust you, you can’t bait and switch them with hidden fees and other shadiness. I’m going to assume that you already know that. If you engage in those kinds of dark patterns, then this entire presentation is probably wasted on you. But I do want to talk about something much more common, and slightly less shady.
43. Jakob Nielsen, The Nielsen Norman Group We have hours of video of users asking “Where's the price?” while tearing their hair out. The venerable Jakob Nielsen, wrote a a piece ages ago, entitled “The Top 10 Mistakes you can make on your website”. One of the things he called-out was sites that don’t list their pricing. As he rightly points out, price is one of the most critical pieces of information a user has for categorizing and making decisions about your product. If you withhold such a crucial piece of information, your site visitor are bound to be distrustful.
44. As is perfectly illustrated in this cartoon Nielsen included in the post. Where the tactic is compared to shady used car salesman. The crazy thing is that Nielsen was writing about this in 2003…
45. …but fast forward more than a decade, and it’s still a problem today. Evidence: this tweet storm from PJ McCormick, the UX Lead at Amazon Creative Services. I picked just a couple of choice tweets from his barrage. You can hear the frustration bubbling up here, just like Jakob Nielsen found in his research subjects. So why do companies do this? I think often times, there is the idea that a user might be frightened by the cost of the product, but if they try it out, or if a sales rep articulates the value to them, then they will keep moving down the sales funnel. But I’m not convinced by that.
46. Now, I also know from experience enterprise software pricing is hard. The costs for you as provider can vary greatly based a on a ton of different factors. That’s why a lot of companies, Synap included, have got with a hybrid approach where we offer plan pricing that gives users a general ceiling on how much they would have to pay, but giving them a threshold at which we could discuss customized discounted pricing. I think this keeps customers moving through the sales funnel while giving them confidence that the product will fit their budget when they eventually decide to purchase.
47. Missing pricing is a problem, but a related one is complicated pricing. as I mentioned earlier, I worked in the payments space for several years. And payments companies are notorious for having confusing and complicated pricing. When I started at Braintree, we listed our pricing, but it was very complicated and filled an entire screen. Getting started required emailing or calling a sales rep. We moved to an instant signup process and simple pricing we could articulate in one line. The result? Well, I wish we had kept more detailed data on each of the changes we made, but overall, our signups increased more than 10x and continued to grow. That was due to variety of factors, and not just our pricing change, but we had a enough positive feedback about the approach that we knew we were on the right track. And we eventually moved pricing right up to header of the home page.
48. Give users control of Sharing Now we are going to shift gears and talk about control. Obtaining consent from users to do something with their private information. Giving them the control over what information they want to share and what information they want to keep private. Recently iOS has done a lot to improve control and transparency. It shows bars at the top of the screen, alerting the user when features like the microphone and GPS are in use in the background, and giving users the chance to turn those things off.
49. But some apps still overreach with permissions or other requests for information. For instance, this Fandango app wants to use your location. That makes sense, because it wants to find theaters near you, and offer relevant showing times. However, the permission it asks for is to use your location at all times. That seems a little crazy, especially since iOS has built in the concept of just using location services while the app is in use.
50. Image: Dave McClure And wherever we ask users to take control of what they share, we have to do our utmost to make certain they can understand the consequences of their choices. Facebook is a company that has gotten it’s butt kicked over privacy issues, and sometimes deservedly so. A few years ago, their privacy controls were so laughably bad that, that Dave McClure of 500 startups offered this translation on his blog. Trying to explain the things your boss, your mom, or your girlfriend would actually be able to see.
51. Rawr! To Facebook’s credit, they do a lot better these days. This screen is simplified, and it’s certainly friendlier with that little dinosaur guy at the top. But these are still a list of settings that a user needs to go and adjust in the background. I think there is more they could do while you’re using their service.
52. One of the standards for control and sharing these days is the OAuth process we are all familiar with from social sign-in for services like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
53. Control Transparency Taking Google’s flow as an example (which we use to connect to Gmail in Synap) we see how they clearly show the permissions, and explicitly ask for consent. This is a good step in the right direction, but only if users already know what they’re getting into. Synap users can invite their teammates to join them, and start sharing emails and contacts with their team. Now, we could start them off right at this screen, but without any context, most users would hesitate or run away screaming. So, we prime users for this screen in the invitation process, to make it likelier they will join Synap successfully.
54. For starters, they first get an invitation email that tells them who invited them to Synap and then explains what it it is.
55. When they click the link, we reinforce the value of what we are offering and tell them just what they are going to get from the experience. Only then do we ask them for permission to access their Google account.
56. View your email address View your basic account info When you prime your users to with the reasons why you want to access their information, you’re not only doing the right thing, but you’re also likely to increase the number of users who make it through the process. In our case, almost everyone who receives an invitation accepts it and creates their Synap account in a timely manner. But there are still a few users who need to be chased down by the person who invited them. So while we’re doing a good job with this process, we know there is room to improve.
57. In Synap the story doesn’t end there, because we are inviting our users to share their emails with the rest of their company. So we really had to think though our sharing controls. We started out with an all-or-nothing sharing mechanism that we used for early testing with internal email. It basically sucked all the email out of your inbox, organized it, and made it available to others on your team. It was fine for us because we were a new company and we knew this was how our email was going to work from day one. As you can imagine, that didn’t really fly past our alpha stage. We had to give our users control over which emails they shared, but without asking them to make decision about every. single. message. Other CRMs have gone that route, and since users are only human, a lot of important messages get missed that way, and you end up with an incomplete picture.
58. So we talked to our test users, and built a few things, and landed on some boundaries for automation. Users can choose to share their messages from individual relationships, or for all their relationships at a certain company. They can take an extra step and automatically share emails from new people who contact them from a given company. This powerful and gives the users a lot of control, but you can see that it gets pretty complicated when users are sorting through all the contacts in their inbox during onboarding.
59. So, we also sprinkled these sharing buttons around the app where they are timely and there is a lot of context for making a decision about whether or not to share. You have the option to share when viewing a contact that someone has already added to Synap. Also Synap notices when you’ve emailed a new contact for the first time sends you a notification with the option to share the new contact. Or even when your not in Synap. With our Chrome plugin for Gmail, you can share while reading an email message from one of your contacts. With different options in different contexts, we aim to make it as easy possible for users to get their information into Synap in a way that is very comfortable.
60. Give users the control to Undo Another important element of control is to give users the tools they need to modify the choices they’ve already made, to undo actions they’ve already taken. I heard a fantastic talk from a couple of women on Google’s Android UX team. And they pointed out that the dialogs asking a user “Are you sure you want delete this?” were damaging to the user experience. They plant this seed of doubt, and make the user feel as if their judgment is suspect. And so what the Android team decided to do was eliminate those confirmation dialogs, and instead offer “Undo” functionality in its place. And this has since found it’s way into many of Google’s products.
61. Like their wonderful Inbox app. Across the browser, and mobile app, pretty much every action you take in Inbox results in the opportunity to Undo what you just did. This builds trust with the user, because they know that an errant tap is not going to permanently delete something important. And that trust enables the user to get more done, because they can interact with the app quickly, and without fear of mistakes.
62. Relationship management you don’t have to manage Link your team’s email accounts and other communication tools. Synap finds the people and companies your team talks to. Then automatically builds a feed of your interactions. 1 2 3 Sometimes we need to give users a chance to change not only the choices they’ve made, but also the choices that our products make for them. With Synap, we automatically link up contacts and companies we find in your inbox. It’s a powerful and (we hope) magical experience, but we know we can’t get it right every single time.
63. So we know it’s critical to give the user the option to change those associations later on. Now it fairly common for other CRMs to have a merge function to bring duplicate contacts together. The problem is, that’s a potentially destructive and irreversible action. For the designers in the crowd, it’s like flattening the layers in Photoshop. Everything gets mixed together and once you make edits you can’t take them apart. We wanted to do better than that with Synap. So instead of merging contacts we link them.
64. One you link contacts together, we sort of stack them up in layers. We take the different bits of information from each contact and merge them into one view, but importantly, we still keep track of which original contact record contains each piece of information. That means a user can always come back and separate the original contacts, like pulling Lego pieces apart. This is a big deal for our users because they can confidently merge together contacts while using our app on daily basis. Instead of doing it the old fashioned way, where they might hesitate to clean up their data for fear of making a mistake that they couldn’t undo.
65. Transparency Control From the beginning, I’ve been talking a lot about transparency and control. And those concepts are crucial to trust. However, I don’t think they are enough. There is a third element that has to exist - that holds everything else together.
66. Transparency Control Integrity That element is integrity. Depending on your point of view, that statement probably either sounds obvious or pretentious. But what I mean here, is simply this: do what you say you are going to do. The more often you do just that, the more trust you will build with your users and customers. If you don’t follow through on what you promised, you may never get another chance to repair the trust you’ve damaged, because your users can just move on to another app, or another vendor.
67. Prove your integrity through Consistency How to we demonstrate our integrity? One of the ways to do it is through consistency.
68. Image: Uber Uber got themselves in trouble a while back, when it got out that certain executives at the company were accessing something named “God Mode” to see where individual named passengers were in real time. Now, Uber says they have policies in place that limit use of “God Mode” except by the few people who need it to operate the service, or to support customers. And I have no doubt that’s true, the problem is they got caught applying the policy inconsistently. You can’t make a promise and then just keep it most of the time. You have to remain consistent.
69. “God Mode” Also, on a side note here, if you're building a product that raises serious potential privacy concerns, do not name your admin screen “God Mode”. It’s creepy as hell, and it will come back to bite you. If you take nothing else from this talk, remember this.
70. Prove your integrity through Quality Quality is really just another word integrity. Except with quality, you’re answering the customer’s question of _can_ you do what you say you will do? If you have poor quality, it’s a sign that you may not be able to do what you say, even if you want to. If an app shows carelessness with bugs and typos, can users trust it with their money and personal data?
71. Customers implicitly rate us on our quality, whether we like it or not. EBay makes a big deal about seller ratings. Presumably, buying from a seller with great ratings should give customers a lot of reassurance, but studies have found that website quality is just as important to whether or not customers trust a seller on eBay.
72. Journal: Electronic Commerce Research “Sellers with poor website quality are not perceived as trustworthy even if they have a high eBay reputation score” The effect is so profound that all sellers with high-quality websites are perceived to be equally trustworthy regardless of their eBay rating; and sellers with poor-quality sites are perceived as untrustworthy even if they have a great rating. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10660-010-9044-2
73. So how does this play out in app or service? As an example, my wife and I hate doing laundry. It’s a time consuming and never ending chore, especially with kids. So we were really excited to try a new on demand laundry service. However, neither of us could successfully sign up in the app, and we had to go to a laptop to get signed up. It was a bad first sign. And when we tried to schedule our first order, the app kept throwing errors. But we wanted to try the service so badly, that we kept trying until the order finally went through. The result?
74. Image: YouTube user legocamps Honey, where are my pants?! They lost all of my pants, delivered someone else’s underwear to us, and ripped several pieces of clothing. And when we called their perfectly pleasant support rep, he said “wow, you’re being really calm about this”, and I realized that I wasn’t even mad because their app told us what to expect from them. It was our fault for trusting them, when they clearly didn’t have their act together. They were a big deal startup with millions of dollars invested in them, and they recently went out of business. I don’t if that was due solely to their quality issues, but I know that they lost me as customer.
75. Prove your integrity through Oversight One of the most powerful ways to prove your integrity, is to submit to the oversight of some outside, disinterested party. It’s not always palatable, as it usually requires busywork, and letting someone else literally get all up in your business. But this is the reason why it carries weight with users.
76. Now, we were making fun of lock icons, and many of us who work in technology don’t place a lot of stock in these kinds of security badges. After all, they often just mean that you’ve met the bare minimum from a security perspective. “You run your app over an encrypted connection. Woohoo!” It would be crazy NOT to do that, and it’s table stakes for most developers. But from the position of a new user who might not know much about how the internet works, these kind of badges can encourage trust. It’s perfectly suited for an app like Mint, which is asking relatively unsophisticated users to provide their most sensitive financial information.
77. This can also be tackled outside of the app at the company level. B Corporations, or B Corps, are for-profit companies that inlclude having a positive impact on society or the environment listed as part of their legally defined goals, in addition to making a profit. They can choose to go through a certification process, and as part of the process they have to provide an annual report of how they fared in reaching all of their goals, and have to submit to a certification review of their processes and outcomes. And we are seeing more and more companies who value trust and transparency go through this process, including respected companies like Etsy and WarbyParker. Which I think is a positive sign.
78. You are directly responsible for what you put into the world. Mike Monteiro, Mule Design So we covered a lot of ground, so let’s go back to why we should go to the effort to do any of the things I’ve suggested today. Mike Monteiro gives a fantastic talk titled “How Designers Destroyed the World”. It’s a tremendous call for ethics in design, and a reminder that as we are exploiting all of this contextual information and personal data we can glean from our users, we have a responsibility to handle it carefully. And yes, we want our products to be successful and make money and all of that jazz. But in the end it boils down to what Monteiro says: as designers, as the makers of stuff, WE are responsible for the things we build, and how those things affect the people that use them. It’s not only good for business, but it’s good for the soul.
79. Transparency Control Integrity So what are a few key takeaways from this talk: -Give your users a view into what you are doing, and why. -Enable your users to control how their data is used in your app. -Do what you say you are going to do. If you design these aspects into your website, your app, and your business, I think your users will reward you with their trust and willingness to share.
80. Thank You. @mvboeke GetSynap.com Please avoid being creepy. Thank you for coming out to join me today, and for letting me share a little of what I’ve learned with you. I’m happy to take a few questions from the crowd, if there are any. You can also find me on Twitter or at GetSynap.com if you want to learn more. I will also stick around if people want chat. Thanks!