The Design of Sites: Pattern Group E — Building Trust and Credibility
Pattern Group E of The Design of Sites — nine patterns (E1-E9) covering how a site earns and keeps customer trust: brand consistency, email communication, privacy law and policy, background/contact transparency, connection security, customer control over shared data, and phishing defense. Documents all nine in full six-part format, per Web Design Patterns.
License: © 2006 Pearson Education / New Riders — all rights reserved, no open license; one of the book’s co-authors is a FuguUX founder, which is the basis for citing it here.
Key points
- E1 Site Branding: brand as what customers remember, not just a logo; a five-criteria assessment lens (content, ease of use, performance, satisfaction, brand value); and four graphic-design levers (consistency, size, position, reuse of graphics). See Trust and Credibility.
- E2 Email Subscriptions: periodic, opt-in newsletters, ads, and reminders; where to offer sign-up; writing craft. See Email Communications.
- E3 Fair Information Practices (Fair Information Practices): the U.S. Privacy Act of 1974’s legacy, the EU Directive 95/46/EC, the seven safe-harbor principles, and the FTC’s four recommended domestic practices.
- E4 Privacy Policy (Privacy Policy): footer placement and key-page prominence, the multilayered (short/condensed/complete) policy structure, COPPA‘s special provisions for children, and federal-site legal requirements.
- E5 About Us (About Us Pages): the three questions visitors implicitly ask, and ten content categories (organizational profile, contact info, legal disclaimers, customers/partners, employment, PR, investor relations, community relations, site credits, FAQ link).
- E6 Secure Connections: SSL/HTTPS and the minimal, easily-missed nature of default browser security feedback, reinforced with labeled action buttons. See Trust and Credibility.
- E7 E-Mail Notifications: immediate, transactional messages (order confirmations, account changes); the high/low-priority opt-out distinction. See Email Communications.
- E8 Privacy Preferences (Privacy Preferences): Westin’s three-way privacy-attitude segmentation, the privacy mirror concept, and company- vs. community-facing sharing controls.
- E9 Preventing Phishing Scams (Preventing Phishing Scams): scam taxonomy (419, account-suspension, disaster-relief, spear-phishing), attacker techniques, and defensive design countermeasures (exposure limits, layered verification, referer-log monitoring).
Yahoo!, Amazon, and eBay each appear as worked examples across multiple patterns in this chapter. Other companies used as single worked examples include MSN, Procter & Gamble, Kodak, Netflix, LEGO, LexisNexis, PayPal, LinkedIn, craigslist, and Friendster.