How to "Design" Trust Between Strangers?

These are my takeaways from Joe Gebbia’s TED Talk—How to Design Between Strangers and the implications to the business I was helping?

It was two years after graduation, Joe lived in San Francisco unemployed at the time. There was a design conference happening in town. Hotels were sold out so he and his roommate thought of a way to make some money by turning their place into a bed and breakfast. He and his roommate Brian Chesky built a basic website and Air Bed and Breakfast was born. They pitched the business to investors and waited for the rocket ship to take off. But, it didn’t. Time was 2007, and the idea of inviting strangers over the internet to stay at your own home was just not going to fly. Why? Because we’ve all been taught as kids—Stranger equals Danger

So they started to wonder if it is possible to design trust between strangers.

Similarity vs. Reputation

A joint study with Stanford shows that we trust people who are like us. The more different somebody is, the less we trust them. That unfortunately is a bias we all have to some degree, but what’s interesting is when you add reputation into the mix. In this case, it’s the reviews. If there are fewer than 3 reviews, it doesn’t make a difference in people’s bias, but if you have over 10 reviews, things start to change. Reputation at this point beats similarity

Share the Right Amount

Building the right amount of trust also takes the right amount of disclosure. If you share too little or too much, the acceptance rate goes down. So, They use the size of the box to prompt users to share the right amount of text. They also wait for both the host and the guest to write their reviews before posting them so they can be more transparent about their reviews.

Sharing Economy

When Joe Gebbia first heard the term, sharing economy. He thought: How do sharing and transactions go together? And why don’t we just call it the rental economy? Because that would be incomplete. The sharing economy is commerce with the promise of human connections. People share a part of themselves, and the connection beyond the transaction is what sharing economy is aiming for.

The future will be more and more likely to embrace a culture of sharing that brings us community and connection instead of isolation and separation. And trust will play a huge role in that.

There were many other websites like Airbnb at the time it was launched, but why did theirs take off, not others? Luck and timing aside, they were especially thoughtful at taking the component of trust and design for that. And what they found was people are ready to put their biases aside, and when trust works out right, it can be magical.

In the HBR article, Trust Crisis, a study shows trust has a very real impact on a company’s revenue. In a study of Holiday Inns, 6,500 employees rated their trust in their managers on a scale of 1 to 5. The researchers found that a one-eighth point improvement in scores could be expected to increase an inn’s annual profits by 2.5% of revenues, or $250,000 more per hotel. No other aspect of managers’ behavior had such a large impact on profits.

Since Gaylord Archival launched its Amazon store in 2015, buyers in our consumer segments have been leaving our website and flocking to Amazon. There are many implications in that, one of them being the reputation system in Amazon’s user experience. This is especially critical in our industry because selling an archival supply is essentially selling customers a promise that their treasured items will be safeguarded for generations to come. It is as intangible as it can be. Most customers will not reap the benefit of our quality products until many years have passed. That’s why customer reviews can greatly enhance our reputation and serve as a referral in that aspect. Our marketing goal is to increase trust in the user experience whether it’s through customer reviews or resources and continue to establish our reputation among customers.