Long before anyone decides whether they trust a product, it has made them dozens of small promises. Most of them are made by design.
A button promises what will happen when you press it. A label promises what you will find behind it. A progress bar promises how long you will wait. None of these feel like promises when we design them, but that is how people experience them.
Promises, kept
Trust is what builds up when those small promises are kept, again and again, on good days and bad ones. It is why a plain product that always does what it says can feel better than a beautiful one that sometimes surprises you.
People rarely remember how a product looked. They remember whether it let them down.
What that means for how we design
It means we study where promises are made: in words, defaults, timing and the moments between screens. It means we test products on slow connections and tired evenings, not only in the best conditions. And it means the work isn’t finished at launch. A product is judged every time someone opens it.