Design Principle 4 – We Will Design for Trust
Studio Notes | Short Reads
This post is part of a series exploring the Design Principles for Government in Ireland. If you’d like to start from the beginning, check out our introductory post here.
How might life in Ireland feel if we trusted the services we rely upon – if we felt confident they had our best interests at heart, and that there was a low likelihood of errors or problems?
Wouldn’t life be better if, when filling out a form, we didn’t feel like it was designed to deny us access to something? Or if, when an application or request is being processed, we are kept informed, and don’t need to keep chasing for updates?
Principle number four calls for our public services to be designed so that people really feel these services can be relied upon. This is a difficult principle to encapsulate in a short blog post as it encompasses so much.
Trust Must be Earned
We may sometimes take for granted that the public trusts in government, or in a particular service, but this is not true. Trust must be earned, and at every stage of any service we must keep in mind the question “Are we building trust? Or harming it?”.
Examples of how trust is earned might begin with operating services in a transparent manner – making it clear and easy for people to understand what to expect from a service, how it works, and what might be expected from them. This can include expected timelines, information or payment that might be required, or something as simple as knowing the opening hours.
We like to use David H. Maister and Charles H. Green’s “trust equation” as a memory aid in design for trust. It goes like this…
T = (C + R + I ) /S.
T = Trust
C = Credibility (can people believe what the service says)
R = Reliability (does the service do what’s expected)
I = Intimacy (can people share openly and comfortably with the service the information that’s needed)
These are divided by, or undermined by…
S = Self Orientation (is the service mostly self-interested, or deferential to the service users)
Best Interests
By extension, trust is also about reassuring people that their best interests are protected and upheld, and lie at the heart of service delivery – that might be important, for example, if a service is collecting personal or sensitive information. Services should never collect unnecessary information, and when information is collected it must be treated with utmost care.
Best interests are especially vital when a service is taking care of vulnerable people or children.
It’s also important to be truthful with service users – GDPR is not something we can hide behind when a service is not meeting expectations! Making excuses is a sure way to undermine hard-earned trust.
Broken Promises
By contrast, trust is ruined, sometimes irreparably, when a service does not meet expectations, or worse, brings someone harm. This might seem obvious in areas of public service such as healthcare, policing, or road safety, but it extends to all kinds of services – such as social protection, grants and funding mechanisms, passports and licencing, the list goes on.
Because public services are so interwoven with how the population takes care of each other, earns money, travels, raises children – trust is always essential, and always fragile.
So how do we design for trust?
Designing for trust means everything from understanding needs, right through to adequate resourcing, design and development of resilient systems to support service delivery. Transparency is vital, clearly communicating how things work and what people should expect, extending to acknowledging and admitting when things go wrong, and putting them right.
Designing for trust means embedding trustworthiness in policy, in behaviour, in systems, in forms, in communication, in security, in every aspect of a service. It extends to the ways we design services, including adequate involvement of service users, and staff in that process too. It doesn’t happen by accident.
In our experience, an important thing to look out for, are moments when there are “handoffs” within your service. This might be between departments or sections within your organisation, or the handoff of a task to a system, or an outside provider. These “handoffs” are often the moments when mistakes are made, and trust is harmed.
To get started – it might be useful to consider the trust equation above. How does that apply to your service? How is your service doing on credibility, reliability, intimacy? Is your service perceived as very self-oriented? Then think about ways to improve…