Designing for trust

A founder reached out a few months ago about a new wealth management product. He wanted a founding designer, I was booked through the summer, so it stayed a conversation rather than a project. But I wrote him a long reply that I’ve been coming back to in my mind.

I kept coming back to Summer Health, and it wasn’t the healthcare angle, it was the structural similarity. In pediatric telehealth, you’re asking a parent to trust you with their child’s health at eleven at night, when they’re scared and exhausted. In wealth management, you’re asking someone to trust you with the money they’ve spent a whole career building. Two products that share nothing on the surface. The job underneath them is the same.

In both cases the product can be technically flawless and still fail. If anything in the experience creates a flicker of doubt, a confusing screen, copy that hedges too much, a moment where the user has to stop and wonder what’s happening, the trust collapses. And once it’s gone you rarely get it back in the same session.

That comfort has to live somewhere. It can’t be a line in the terms of service. It shows up in how information is framed, the confidence of the language, the small moments where the product tells you it’s got this before you’ve had to ask. That’s design work. It almost never gets treated as design work.

For a long time, designers signaled their value through industry. There was always someone known for automotive sites, someone who only did D2C, someone whose entire portfolio was big corporate websites. Vertical expertise was the calling card. Hire the person who already knows your world. I understand the appeal, it feels like the safer bet. But the last couple of years have made me think industry is the wrong unit of measurement.

Look at what I’ve actually worked on. Summer Health, where a parent hands you their child. The wealth management conversation, where someone hands you their savings. Sway now, where you’re helping people prepare their ballot and follow through to vote. Three domains with no shared vocabulary, no shared users, no shared regulation. The one thread running through all of them is trust. With Sway, trust was front and center from the start.

Which brings me to the word everyone reaches for.

The story right now is that anyone can build anything, and the products that fall out of it lack taste. Taste is what we still need designers for. I believe that, and I’ve written about it more than once. But I don’t think taste covers all of it. There’s a second thing tangled up in there, and it’s trust.

The two aren’t synonyms, and one doesn’t replace the other. Taste has more nuance than the screenshot crowd allows, and trust has its own nuance on top of that. They sit side by side. A product can be tasteful and still make you hesitate before you hand over your savings. It can be plain and forgettable and still earn the benefit of the doubt because nothing in it makes you doubt. The work needs both, and we name the second one far less often.

You can vibe-code a product that works. It’ll be fine. Decently built, reasonable to look at, nothing obviously broken. And somewhere in it, you’ll hesitate, in a way you can’t quite point to. I’ve written before about how AI output never leaves the middle, competent but never great. Trust lives at the top of that scale, and a model can’t get there. Ask it to make something feel trustworthy and it’ll add a lock icon to the header and call it done. It reaches for the symbol because it can’t produce the substance. It has no read on what makes a stranger feel safe enough to hand over their child’s health or their life’s savings. That read is the part of the job that doesn’t transfer.

As more products get built without a designer anywhere near them, we’re going to see a lot of this. Things that function and still feel slightly off. Some of that is taste, the way everyone says. A lot of it is trust, which almost nobody says.

I’m not retiring the word taste, only adding trust next to it. We need designers for both, and the work in the end is making someone feel safe enough to stop hesitating and act. That’s harder than making it look good, and it’s the part that doesn’t transfer to a tool.