How can you tell if your site isperceived as credible or trustworthy?Wouldn't it be great if we could justask users and say, "Hey! How credible doyou think this site is?" or "Do youtrust this website?"Unfortunately, we can't quite trust usersanswers if we ask them those kinds ofdirect questions. Primarily because as soon aswe've used those terms about credibleand trustworthy, then users tend to shifttheir mindset away from their task andthey shift it towards something wherethey start now thinking about what's theresponsible answer. What would the bestway to evaluate the credibility of thesite be. So we have influenced theiranswer just by asking that question.The other reason we can't trust their answeris because people don't necessarily knowwhat influences them or not. They don'tknow what's causing them to chooseoption A over option B. They might thinkthat it's one thing, but there might beother psychological principles happening,cognitive biases happening that theycan't describe.So what can we do instead? We can observeusers. Ultimately we measure credibilityby whether or not a user accomplishestheir task or whether or not theyconvert. So we watch users completingtasks and we look for signs where maybethey start to question the informationon the site or they start to becomewary of the request that the site is makingIs the site giving misleadinginformation or is ithaving mistakes or something that ismaybe different from what they read on aprevious page on the site. Are theyasking for an email address and the userstarts to wonder why do they want myemail address. Are they going to send me spam?Those types of of questions that theuser has or hesitations are really wherewe can observe possible issues withcredibility on our site. At the end of ausability testing session you can alsofollow up with the user and ask how easyor difficult was this site and ask themto talk about that and in describingthose difficulties you might be able tofind out what was causing some of thattrust issue. You can also ask a userhow confident are they in whateveranswer they had to come up with and ifyou hear a user say well you know I thinkthis was the answer, but I'm not quitesure because X, Y & Z those are thekinds of opportunities that really wecan take advantage of to improve oursites and make them more credible.
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