Some years ago I was hired by France Telecom to investigate the factors influencing trust between trading parties in online marketplaces. The caveat was that in those distant days there was no established marketplace to be studied. I therefore began my research by conducting qualitative interviews with France Telecom targeted audience, small business owners, providers of advertising services including radio stations, print shops and local newspapers. This was 2002 after all.

What came out of that work is a very simple diagram that I found myself drawing and presenting frequently over the years to explain how most of us operate to decide whether to trust perfect strangers within the context of a transaction. This theory informed the Design and Information architecture of product cards and detailed records particularly in the e-commerce space. Here is that diagram:

The less you know about what you are acquiring the more you tend to rely on subjective criteria.

Here is an example I frequently use to illustrate this point:

“Pretend that you have just moved to a new city and are looking for an auto mechanic to fix a problem with your car. Assume that you know nothing about car repair. You are now standing in front of a mechanician at his shop and are trying to determine whether you are going to entrust him with fixing your beloved car. What are you going to base your decision on?”

When presented with this scenario, a majority of folks will evoke the mechanic’s “friendliness” and “demeanor”, his “trustability”, the overall aspect of the garage, its “cleanliness” and maybe how the matter of the cost of the repairs is presented. All elements that are immediately available, mostly subjective, and at best, remotely representative of the mechanic’s expertise and skills. To use concepts recently popularized by Daniel Kahneman, we fall victim to the Substitution bias. When unable to answer a question for which we have little to no information, we instead elect to answer an adjacent question for which we have a ready answer. In the above example we substitute “Is this a skilled mechanic?” with “Is this a friendly and tidy person?”.

Conversely, the greater your expertise with the service or product you are assessing, the more likely you are to focus on objective criteria.

Several fictitious examples easily come to mind to illustrate this behavior but you can also reminisce of a situation where you assessed something you are expert at, maybe in a professional setting, and how you focused on clear data points. I personally like to borrow a scene from a favorite movie of mine, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly by Sergio Leone, called “Tuco at the gun shop”. As the title suggests, the scene shows Tuco acquiring a new gun by going through a rigorous evaluation of the weapon’s key components. He verifies the straightness of the barrel, tests the cylinder’s ratchet, inspects the cylinder flutes and concludes with target practice. The shopkeeper is not consulted at any moment, shinier weapons are unceremoniously dismissed, Tuco gives all the appearances of a gun expert who relies on objective data points to drive his purchase decision.

Misplaced Trust

As you begin playing with this theory and applying it to different scenarios you might realize that it is more accurate to consider Trust in association with its object, in other words: “What are you placing your trust in?”. Here again there a simple diagram I found helpful.

Applied to the auto mechanic example You trusted yourself to assess the Purveyor of the service. What were the other options? You could have placed the burden of making a decision on the shoulders of a car enthusiast friend. Effectively swapping your friend for yourself in the above diagram. Naturally our first theory still applies to your friend. Instead of your friend you could have also relied on online reviews, thus crowdsourcing the trust decision.

Regardless of who performs the assessment, another possibility would have been to shift your focus from the Purveyor (the mechanic) to the Object (the service) by asking to inspect repairs in progress and ask questions about them (the equivalent of a portfolio review in the design world). One will note that in this example Object and Purveyor are one and the same for the mechanic is both the salesperson and the service you wish to purchase.

In the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Tuco trusted himself to directly assess the gun he sought to acquire (the Object of the transaction). The Purveyor was ignored. It is worth mentioning that Brands also act as Purveyors, in effect they play the same role as a salesperson by telling you: “Trust me, my brand is a seal of quality and vouches for the product”.

But how is this relevant to Product Design?

I have found that combined, these two theories are especially handy when working on sites that feature products or services whether from a transactional or informational perspective. A Designer working on how products and services are presented to the buyer in a marketplace might want to consider whether a persona’s purchase decision is most likely to be driven by subjective or objective criteria and how that may vary from product to product. An objective shopper will be more receptive to data sheets, technical specs and feature lists, while a subjective one might be more easily swayed by lifestyle attributes, staging or brand.

On January 2013 I left my job at Groupon to embark with my wife on a year long motorcycle journey from San Francisco to Ushuaia, the southernmost city of Argentina. We crossed 14 borders, covered 32000 kilometers and made many friends along the way.

A couple of months ago we decided it was finally time to get back to work. We began by updating our resumes and online portfolios before calling our friends in search of solid job leads.

With such a long employment gap we figured it was only a matter of time before a wise recruiter started asking questions. Very much to our surprise my wife landed a job without raising any eyebrows. Just when I thought I might also dodge that bullet, the hiring manager I was interviewing with that one day asked:

“Say, that is quite a wonderful adventure you had, what would you say are the top 3 things you learned on your journey that might change the way you work?“

I took a deep breath, raked my brain for a few nuggets of wisdom and against all odds came up with the following.

Believe in humankind

When we told our friends we were going to ride our motorcycles South through Mexico and Guatemala they immediately warned us about the many lethal perils we would be facing. “If the narcos don’t kill you then the corrupted cops will get you!” we were told. “Stay away from Guatemala, one person gets shot every minute, they have like the world record!”

Despite these words of caution we left the comfort of our Silicon Valley apartment and crossed not only Guatemala but also El Salvador, Colombia and Bolivia, all places of somber reputation. There, we found folks bruised by decades of civil war, people wary of foreigners whom, some said, are known to kidnap children, men trying to make ends meet despite dire circumstances, but foremost we found fellow human beings, ready to go out of their way to help a stranger. A few kind words, a nice gesture and a hand held out was all it took to break walls of a prioris and find a connection.

We learned a powerful lesson there, one we try to live up to both in our everyday lives and at work. In situations where differences in opinions or views on a particular line of action can easily create cleavages and lead us to antagonize the other party, the first step towards a solution often lies in reaching out, finding a common ground and connecting through what we have in common.

If best is not an option, settle for good

Dealing with a mechanical failure in San Francisco is a walk in the park, call AAA, let your favorite mechanic do the work, or if you are in the mood for greasy fingers order OEM parts overnight from any online shop. Things get trickier in, let’s say, Peru. Local dealers have zero inventory for your bike and need a month lead time for special orders. Parts shipped from the US collect dust on a shelf at the Customs office and most local motorcycle workshops tend to operate at worryingly low standards. Yet cars from the 70’s can still be seen smoking down highways and cheap chinese motorcycles zoom through traffic despite known reliability shortcomings.

The locals must know something we don’t. We saw gaskets cut from manilla folders, arc welders bring shattered frames back to life and rebars used as perfectly acceptable tire irons. Thinking outside the box is the only way to repair anything and motorcycle maintenance always turns into a highly creative exercise.

Similarly, the ideal solution to a design problem might not be a practical one. Instead of struggling against resource, time or financial constraints be flexible, optimize the use of what’s available and make judicious compromises.

Plan to improvise

Like many projects, our adventure began with a simple goal and a few constraints. Our goal was to reach Ushuaia and enjoy the ride there as much as possible. Our constraints boiled down to staying away from the main roads, taking the time to stop and meeting the people, no crash and no divorce.

We also had a deadline of sorts, in order to not freeze to death we had to get to Ushuaia in the Summer, the southern hemisphere one that is, spanning from December to February. Rapid calculations told us that we would have to cover an average of 105km everyday for 300 days to make it in time. Add to that the one hundred landmarks we wanted to visit and you get a solid roadmap.

Confident in our planning we left the Bay Area on February 28. Two months later we had not left Mexico and had covered 3000kms, 1500kms short of our objective. A stricter plan was needed and armed with a map and a calendar we defined for ourselves not only new waypoints but more importantly target dates to reach them. Over coffee we would then regularly assess our progress: “We still have two weeks to make it to Panama, we can chill for a few days on the beaches of Costa Rica but we’ll have to ride 350 kms per day for 3 days after that”.

This approach allowed us to stay on schedule and explore the spots we had picked ahead of time but significantly stifled improvisation.

Some unknown villages proved themselves surprisingly charming, teasing us to stay longer than planned. Locals were eager to recommend unique landmarks we were unaware of, and naturally, random trailheads conspired to make us take lengthy detours.

When we heard ourselves say: “we don’t have time to stop here, we need to make it there by tomorrow” we knew It was time to concoct yet a new strategy, one that will prove successful in the long term and applies directly to the corporate world.

1. Define goals while scheduling checkpoints to reassess their validity
2. Keep track of your progress but reserve time to wander off
3. One eye stays focused on the goal while the other scans for opportunities

We also learned that sometimes we needed to follow our hearts while keeping sight of the consequences. That is how we ended up camping in random places, riding at night, having exhausting days or breaking some parts. The spice that turns a journey into an adventure and a dull narrative into wonderful stories.

more about our journey @ wolfandzebra.com