Section 29.6. Conclusion

29.6. Conclusion

Throughout this chapter, I have focused on design solutions for the user behavior that I have observed with multiple participants in usability studies of many products. I have shown examples of those design concepts being turned into practical dialogs within Internet Explorer. The following recommendations canand shouldbe applied to any trust interaction on computers:

Let users make trust decisions in context

Decisions made at the time the issue arises contain the scope users need, which would be missing in a disjointed experience such as a setup dialog. Users who are forced to make isolated decisions are often overly cautious, which can later hurt their experience with the application and lead to suboptimal user experiences.

Make the most trusted option the default selection

Users are not well placed to make trust decisions. They seldom have all the details. As long as they trust your application, they will frequently select the defaults.

Present users with choices, not dilemmas

Ensure that the user is able to understand the consequences of choosing a certain option, and that wherever possible there is a trusted way for him to complete his task.

Always respect the user's decision

Once you have alerted the user to the consequences, the rest is up to him. Your application cannot know the emotional context of a trust decision, only the potential worst-case logical outcome. Users often place more weight on the emotional context.

This last point deserves further emphasis, as it is the cornerstone of a successful trust user experience design. Usable and useful trusted software has to accommodate the emotional and social aspects of users' experience. It must allow them instant gratification, help them to fill in the rest of the picture, and gracefully submit when a user chooses a different path for reasons the computer will never understand.