Designing for Trust — the need for a ‘trust metric’

The Indian social media space was up in arms this week. The video of a Zomato delivery guy eating some of the food he is supposed to deliver did the rounds and went viral. Seeing this video, you might have had a bunch of thoughts. Some of them being the righteous — ‘bah, how atrocious this is!’, ‘will my lunch or dinner will also be (/was) compromised like this?’ and the more empathetic ‘poor guy, should have been very hungry, still this is unacceptable’. To be more objective, the authenticity of the video is still unclear but it does spark a serious and valid concern. Amid these concerns, were the social media jokes and meme makers who quickly latched onto this trending video.

Jokes apart, personally for me this reminded me of something that I have been thinking for a while now — brands and trust.

Though ’trust’ as a factor has been and is surely being discussed among the teams in these brands, when the pedal comes to the metal, do brands do enough to build trust and design systems to make sure that customer trust on their brand is grown with every brand touch point? And in a scenario like in India, where many brands act irresponsibly when it comes to user’s trust, how do users like you and me take control of this and ensure that the brands do deliver on their brand promises and held them accountable when they break their trust?