Designing Trustworthy User Interfaces

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of factors influencing user trust in interfaces, offers actionable design measures, and demonstrates their effectiveness through a proof of concept and preliminary evaluation.

Contribution

It systematically reviews trust theory, develops a taxonomy of trust factors, and derives concrete design measures to enhance interface trustworthiness.

Findings

Design measures can effectively foster user trust.

A trust-enhancing interface variant outperforms a trust-reducing one.

Preliminary evaluation shows positive impact of proposed measures.

Abstract

Interface design can directly influence trustworthiness of a software. Thereby, it affects users' intention to use a tool. Previous research on user trust has not comprehensively addressed user interface design, though. We lack an understanding of what makes interfaces trustworthy (1), as well as actionable measures to improve trustworthiness (2). We contribute to this by addressing both gaps. Based on a systematic literature review, we give a thorough overview over the theory on user trust and provide a taxonomy of factors influencing user interface trustworthiness. Then, we derive concrete measures to address these factors in interface design. We use the results to create a proof of concept interface. In a preliminary evaluation, we compare a variant designed to elicit trust with one designed to reduce it. Our results show that the measures we apply can be effective in fostering trust in users.