Are your customers abandoning their shopping carts or not returning after their first purchase? Is your call center receiving repeated inquiries about information already available on your website? Is it taking too long for customers to check out? This may indicate that your customers lack the information and reassurance they need, and therefore don’t feel confident to move forward. 

The UX field has long emphasized ease and effectiveness, but good UX is also shaped by whether customers feel valued, understood, and confident. User confidence is a user’s belief that a product, service, or system works as expected and is dependable.  According to the US and Canada CX Index Rankings, confidence is the top positive emotion that impacts customer loyalty. Yet we often observe that brands fail to inspire confidence in digital experiences and reassure customers that they’ve taken the rights steps or gotten to the right place.  

Design For Confidence To Build Trust 

Think about a customer looking for a product that they need you to deliver in two days – but they don’t know which products qualify for this option. Compare that experience to a customer who can filter products by delivery times upfront. Ultimately, both customers likely find what they need, but the second has a more positive emotional experience. When the design builds confidence, users not only complete tasks successfully but also have emotionally positive experiences that drive loyalty and build trust. 

How To Increase Your Customers’ Confidence 

This holiday season, take action to increase your customers’ confidence in your digital experiences. High customer engagement during the holidays is an opportunity to determine where your customers need confidence most in their journeys.  

Here are four best practices you can start with: 

  1. Inform users on their progress and the result of their actions. Users hesitate to proceed on apps or websites without clear information on what happens next and they may need extra reassurance for certain tasks, such as orders and returns. What’s going to happen after clicking “continue” in the checkout flow? What’s the next step after they initiate a return? Will the user be notified about the status of their return or will they have to contact customer service for updates? Provide descriptive button language to clarify the next steps and proactively update them on their progress.
  2. Avoid coercive and deceptive design patterns. Coercive and deceptive design patterns, commonly known as “dark patterns,” manipulate customers into acting against their own interest and hurt customer trust in the long term. Fake countdown timers that create a false sense of urgency, forcing users to add an item to cart to reveal the price, and difficult cancellations are just a few examples of manipulative design patterns. Growing awareness of these practices is leading to calls for stricter regulatory guidelines and enforcement to protect customers. In July 2023, the FTC filed a complaint against Amazon for using coercive and deceptive design that trapped consumers into signing up for Prime and made it difficult to cancel the subscription. Most recently, the agency announced a final “click-to-cancel” rule that requires sellers to make the cancellation process for subscriptions and memberships easy for customers.

These manipulative design patterns frustrate customers and damage loyalty — and put companies at risk of legal fines and reputation damage. Even if you’re not intentionally using these design patterns, your digital experiences may still come across as manipulative. To avoid this, evaluate your experiences by asking whether you are genuinely aiding customers in making informed decisions without obscuring or misrepresenting content. 

  1. Reduce bad friction in the UX. Friction does not always mean poor usability. In fact, designing the appropriate level of friction into customer journeys earns customer trust. For example, excessive friction – such as intrusive pop-ups, lengthy forms, or convoluted return policies – confuses users and leads to frustration and abandonment. By contrast, good friction – like requiring multiple steps in a payment process to ensure careful review – builds confidence.  

Review your user flows to eliminate bad friction and increase good friction. The US government is taking action on this issue as well: The White House launched its “Time Is Money” initiative to combat corporate practices that make consumer interactions unnecessarily burdensome. That includes excessive paperwork, subscriptions that are difficult to cancel, and use of dysfunctional chatbots that provide incorrect information and make it difficult to get help from a human agent.  

  1. Provide clear guidance in forms and error messages. Clear input guidelines and error messages are essential to help users understand what information is required and why. This enhances confidence, but brands often miss it. I shared the story of how vague guidelines and error messaging impacted my choice of insurance provider in a previous blog post. Recently, while shopping with a new retailer, I was frustrated to be asked to create an account — especially since I couldn’t check out as a guest. Additionally, when prompted for my birthday without any explanation, I was left wondering if it was a legal requirement, for marketing purposes, or something else entirely. 

Are you clearly communicating what information you need and why in forms? Do error messages clearly explain what’s missing and how to fix the issue? Review your digital experience with these questions in mind and make sure that usability flaws like unclear information don’t negatively impact your customers’ experience.  

Let’s connect 

The holiday season is a time for new beginnings — so start by enhancing user confidence in your digital experiences. If you’re a Forrester client and would like to discuss this topic further, set up a conversation with me here. You can also follow or connect with me on LinkedIn.