Designing for Trust
The aim behind is to document my understanding about Reputation systems. These are my rough notes. I’ll continue to edit and add more information to them. Thank You, if anyone is reading this 🙂
A 30 second trust experiment, This is taken from the Ted Talk by Airbnb Co-Founder Joe Gebbia
I want to give you a sense of the flavor of trust that we were aiming to achieve. I've got a 30-second experiment that will push you past your comfort zone. If you're up for it, give me a thumbs-up.
OK, I need you to take out your phones. Now that you have your phone out, I'd like you to unlock your phone. Now hand your unlocked phone to the person on your left.
That tiny sense of panic you're feeling right now is exactly how hosts feel the first time they open their home. Because the only thing more personal than your phone is your home.
People don't just see your messages, they see your bedroom, your kitchen, your toilet. Now, how does it feel holding someone's unlocked phone? Most of us feel really responsible. That's how most guests feel when they stay in a home. And it's because of this that our company can even exist.
What if we changed one small thing about the design of that experiment? What if your neighbor had introduced themselves first, with their name, where they're from, the name of their kids or their dog? Imagine that they had 150 reviews of people saying, "They're great at holding unlocked phones!"
Now how would you feel about handing your phone over? It turns out, A well-designed reputation system is key for building trust.
Some questions that come to my mind
What is reputation?
What is a reputation system?
What are the features of a well-designed reputation system?
And how one can design it?
Answers
Reputation is information used to make a value judgment about an object or a person. (Link).
This defination has two things, if we break it down. One is the information and the other is the action based on that information.
And according to Wikipedia, a reputation system is program or an algorithm that allow users to rate each other in online communities in order to build trust through reputation.
But I believe the above defination doesn’t capture everything. It’s not just the ratings that contribute in building trust. Things like using one's real name, rather than a pseudonym, having a well designed website (about us page, T&C, careers, team, etc), online text reviews, having a profile pic, bio, etc also play an equally important role in building trust on the internet.
And since most of these information is user given, the right amount of trust requires right amount of disclosure of information. Sharing too much at best might keep the trust level neutral and at worst may lead to fall.
A reputation systems require three properties minimum:
Entities are long-lived, so that there is an expectation of future interaction.
Feedback about current interactions is captured and distributed. Such information must be visible in the future.
Past feedback guides buyer decisions. People must pay attention to these reputation systems
A joint study by Airbnb and Stanford
In the joint study, they looked at people's willingness to trust someone based on how similar they are in age, location and geography. The research showed, we all prefer people who are like us. The more different somebody is, the less we trust them. Now, that's a natural social bias.
But when they added reputation system which in Airbnb’s case was online reviews these biases tend to go away. Guests became comfortable. They found if a host has 1-3 reviews nothing changes for him/her. But if a host has got more than 10 reviews.
High reputation beats high similarity.
So how do we design for just the right amount of disclosure?
Airbnb used ways like size of the box to suggest the right length, and also guiding users with prompts to encourage sharing.
Joe Gebbia
Design can overcome our most deeply rooted stranger-danger bias. And that's amazing to me. It blows my mind.
Companion resources
https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/building-for-trust-503e9872bbbb#.trjndtmx3
https://airbnb.design/designing-for-trust/
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/2010-11/PsychologyOfTrust/rep2.html
https://lighthouse.mq.edu.au/article/february/dont-judge-me!-airbnb-and-the-reputation-economy
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/280224
http://people.bu.edu/zg/publications/airbnbreviews.pdf