The development of technology has made everyone’s life more convenient and easier through the worldwide web. The web has made it all too easy for consumers to look up anything and everything they’re interested in or have questions about. And it’s with this easy access to data that consumers have grown pickier about who they do business with. Because if they can get answers to all the other questions in their lives, why can’t they find out everything there is to know about a company they intend to buy from?
As such, more companies lean more towards honest and straightforward approaches than they have in previous years. And that means web designers need to be ready to help clients communicate that transparency through their websites. Below are ways on how web designers can help build brand image through transparency in web design.
Trust Building
Transparency and trust go hand-in-hand in the minds of consumers. When brands are honest with consumers about things like their internal workings, pricing, values, and so on, their customers become more loyal. And, not only that, they become active advocates for the brand. As for what your visitors and prospects consider as “transparency”, here are the most common things they look for:
Solution Clarity – Fifty-three percent of consumers define brand transparency as clarity. And what better way to be clear than to address their pain and provide your solution right away? While you might not be able to get away with that exact design choice on your website, you could tuck your navigation under a hamburger menu to make sure the main thing in view is the call-to-action.
By removing other options from view, and painting a very strong argument for why your solution works (e.g. “Each year, our agents help hundreds of thousands of families buy or sell a home”), there’s no reason for visitors to get right to it. You’ve created the shortest, easiest, and clearest pathway to their pain relief.
Openly Display Customer and Client Reviews – One of the problems with displaying testimonials on a website is that the clients’ words are filtered through the company before they reach prospective clients’ eyes. In addition, brands obviously only want to share the most flattering of reviews, which can lead to some deception (whether intentional or not).
More than anything, consumers want brands to be open (59% of those surveyed defined transparency as openness). So, we need to do away with these overly flattering portraits of brands and start being more honest with prospects. For service-based businesses, the solution is simple: Encourage clients to leave reviews on the company’s Google or Facebook business page. You can put a link to those pages on the website so visitors see that honest reviews are welcome. Use a reviews widget to display your online reviews — the good and the bad — on your website.
Customer Reviews – For eCommerce businesses, this is a little easier to implement as product reviews are commonplace. So long as there’s no manipulation of the data and visitors are able to see true reviews, there’s not much else to do than to configure a product reviews and ratings system. When you include reviews on your website, make sure a ratings sorting feature is included. That way, if customers want to see what all the bad reviews are saying, they can quickly get to them.
Integrity in Data Collection
Privacy has been a major concern for consumers for years. But companies (and their web developers) found a solution amidst the release of GDPR: the cookie consent bar. The only problem is that the cookies consent request was everywhere. And as tends to happen with consumers, banner blindness has led to more and more visitors ignoring those requests and clicking “OK” or “Allow” simply to get them out of the way.
