October 2003

Usability testing is all very well, but what about trust?

Robin Houghton

The usability debate carries on. First we have the purists for whom happiness is a blue underlined hyperlink. Then the accessibility campaigners who hope to see legislation create universal access to the web.

There's something about the term usability that bothers me: it reduces human beings to users. Usability testing is fundamentally about observation. How quickly does the user navigate around the site? Which elements do they click on? Where do they go next? How long do their eyes hover on something? What are their reactions to what they're seeing and doing? How long before they give up waiting for a page to load?


A website is not a door handle

No doubt this kind of behavioural observation has its place and has a commercial value. Marketers love things to be measurable - it keeps the suits happy for one.

But we are all thinking, sentient beings. A website is not a door handle - we don't 'use' it without a thought passing through our heads. Even if we can’t articulate it, websites affect us in ways that usability just can't capture. The effect we want is for people to trust our brand, our organisation and our messages. So why aren't we measuring that? Because it's too subjective? Or because it's not as easy to measure as click-paths through a site?


Legislation doesn't solve the ethical issues

Whenever the issue of trust comes up, it's generally in the context of privacy, security and intrusiveness. These are all areas in which legislation imposes boundaries. Despite individual industries issuing their own guidelines for best practice, the message to marketers seeking competitive advantage is clearly 'keep within the law, but other than that be as creative as possible.' Are we so reliant on the law to set boundaries that we’ve forgotten how to make decisions on what’s wrong and what's right?

In an article over a year ago in Clickz, Pamela Parker argued that passing more laws could encourage even more ethically questionable behaviour. She claims that overcoming people's natural fear online is the marketer's chief challenge: be it fear of the unknown (how do I know if this is a real company? Who sent me this email? ) or fear of abuse (can I really trust that they won't share my details? If I click on this link will something happen that I'm not expecting?)

For example, website owners who are reluctant to include a full postal address, or the names of real people on their sites or within emails, may or may not be flouting the law. But this is almost incidental to the real problem, which is that a lack of transparency is a barrier to trust. You may not think you are hiding anything, but you might as well be. Online, the conceptual leap from 'these people have something to hide' to 'these people are after my money at any price' is a very short one indeed. So what is the legitimate marketer to do?


Building trust makes commercial sense

Looking at it another way, let's suppose that ethical practice is not a problem to be negotiated, but rather an opportunity to be embraced. By tackling ethical issues head-on, rather than paying lip-service, marketers are subscribing to a long-term model of success.

This has been argued by marketing academics Ashok Ranchhod and Claire Gauzente in an article in the Academy of Marketing Science Review. In this paper, Professor Ranchhod and Dr Gauzente draw direct links between ethical marketing practice and competitive advantage.

Their seven criteria - notice, choice, contact, security, access, horizon and intrusiveness - paint a complete picture of what is actually going in people's minds when they encounter your internet presence. Even more importantly, they show how these factors can help marketers to tailor their activities according to what they call people's 'ethical flexibility' - what is or isn't significant in a given context - for the best results.

When you're next involved in usability testing or addressing accessibility compliance issues, give a thought to 'trust testing'. Transparency, accessibility, reassurance and staying within the law - yes, but shouldn't we be looking further ahead than that? Never mind 'users', what about people?

Businesses prepared to invest in online trust-building (and the measuring of attitudes, not just actions) are not only walking the talk - they stand to profit long-term from a real commercial advantage.