Designing Trustworthy Situated Services: An Implicit and Explicit Assessment of Locative Images’ Effect on Trust (CHI-2009 Round 2 – Assigned one)

Designing Trustworthy Situated Services: An Implicit and Explicit Assessment of Locative Images’ Effect on Trust (CHI-2009 Round 2 – Assigned one)

By: Vassilis Kostakos, Ian Oakley

Summary:
This paper studies a visual design element called locativeness which is the extent to which media showing a service relates the physical environment it is in. Because of mobile devices that can wirelessly access many services the design of these services and what invokes trust in them has been highly speculative. These researchers wanted to discover which areas of design either add to trust, or take away from a services trust. This study was conducted completely online and consisted of 3 stages of experimentation. The first stage was the Demographics capture. This was where the researchers got a list of data from the subjects through a questionnaire. They gathered information such as age, gender and occupation. The second stage was the gathering of data through an implicit assessment and distinguish which things related good and bad to each subject. The last part was to show them pairs of websites and ask the users which one they would be more comfortable giving their credit card information to. Researchers discovered that the following were trust enhancing words: safe, unshakeable, credible, honest, protected and loyal. Words that tore down trust consisted of: Hazard, suspect, deceitful, unsafe, disbelieving and cautious. They discovered that some people are completely brand-oriented but that most people are influenced by quality and locativeness. For some people locativeness was even the strongest influence.

Discussion:
This paper seemed to touch on a good subject area, but I don’t know about the whole locativeness part. It just seemed like introducing some new word that didn’t really mean a lot to me. I think that research into what makes websites form credibility with clients is a interesting part of research and something that we should look into as our society moves further towards a technological stage.