Designing for Credibility: Otto

There is often a debate between form and function. While many would argue that form follows function, I’ve found that credibility follows form; in such case, form should not be merely overlooked as just “aesthetics”.

Case Study: Otto

This past year, I took a course called New Venture Design (NVD), where business and engineering students come together to create a startup.

Our startup was called Otto, a car repair service that automatically diagnoses your car’s problems and connects you with a mobile mechanic to fix your vehicle wherever you are.

While it was a clever way to solve multiple problems, we found a number of issues that would prevent us from continuing. Ultimately, we decided not to pursue this project any further. While it’s no surprise that 9 out of 10 startups eventually flop, the journey along the way piqued my interest.

During our time at NVD, our team made an effort to focus on details that would usually be considered cosmetic in nature. This included not choosing a name until 6 months into the course, redoing entire presentations from scratch, designing a startup landing page and developing a flushed out, user-tested prototype. Needless to say, we spent a lot of time trying to make everything we did “look professional” — and it kind of worked.

Suit jackets and synchronized hand crossing: Team Otto doing our best to look professional

Over the year, we were able to:

1. garner interest from local investors,
2. build up a team of external advisers, and
3. compete in two competitions (placing 1st in one and 2nd in the other).

In fact, during the first meeting with our mentor Robert, he was surprised that his company hadn’t developed slide decks to the quality that we had. Needless to say, we achieved the level of professionalism that we wanted. While we hadn’t built a fully-functional prototype at the time, what we built instead was credibility.

Why is credibility important?

In funding we trust: Otto was one of seven teams to receive funding from the first RBC Get Seeded event.

I’ve often thought about what it is that makes someone or something credible. Perhaps it’s the person’s voice, their style, the phone they use or even the experience they’ve acquired over the years. I’ve come to learn that it comes down to one thing: trust.

In the case of Otto, the consistency between design and business created a sense of trust that led us to partake in a number of amazing opportunities. These opportunities in return cycled back into building up our credibility, which in turn boosted our trust.

What’s important to note is that the subject at hand is not your own trustworthiness, but rather your trustworthiness as perceived by others. In the same way that form follows function, credibility follows trust.

So how do you build credibility into your designs?

1. Iterate & Improve:

While there are many different, and often more detailed ways of building credible design, one of the easiest ways to do so is through iterating. Improving your designs over and over proves that you are serious about what you’re developing and believe in the quality that comes with redesigning what you currently have. This can be done internally, but is preferably done through user interviews and third-party feedback.

Fourth-times a charm: We lost count of how many times we changed the title slide. No templates found here.

2. Build Empathy

As an engineering student in particular, I’ve been exposed to the “as long as it works” mentality that is more or less uniform throughout the faculty in terms of post-functionality execution. Empathy is one of the easiest ways to build trust, and that comes with understanding your users in as much detail as possible.

For example, when we looked back at our customer interviews, we decided to focus on female car owners and found that they had encountered more pain points than male car owners. This alone gave us a direction to pursue. Being able to create for your users as a business is an important step in making a lasting impression.

3. Put in the Effort

This may seem like a no-brainer until you’ve spent a week tweaking your 19-slide presentation. Though this doesn’t mean meticulously adjusting the spacing between your bullet points, it does mean being concise about your word choices. While this doesn’t mean finding the perfect accent color right down to the hex code, it does mean choosing a color that doesn’t overwhelm or disconnect your audience from your content.

In some ways, putting in effort means being aware of everything that you choose to put forward. As long as you’re smart about it, effort goes a long way to helping you build credibility.

Moving forward

If my experience with Otto had taught me anything, it’s that people want to feel a sense of trust, and one way that trust can be built up is through design. While others may not share the same sentiment, we cannot deny that trust is an important factor in establishing successful bonds between users and the product at hand.

At Made by Motif, we incorporate a sense of credibility into every client we work with and teach them about the process of building trust into their products and services. This is just one of our values that we hold on to everyday.

Made by Motif is an international multidisciplinary design studio. To learn more, check out our website at www.madebymotif.com or email us at hello@madebymotif.com