Trust cues fostering initial consumers' trust : usability inspection of nutrition and healthcare websites

Abstract

The number of nutrition and healthcare websites increasing dramatically has prompted concerns over the quality of information found in these websites. How do nutrition and healthcare sites fare in fostering trust in consumers? Through reviews of trust and design literatures, we created a checklist incorporating a 5-dimension framework of design factors (graphic, structure, content, social, system) affecting trust cues. Next, we conducted a usability inspection on implementation of trust cues on 86 (30 healthcare, 31 nutrition and 25 healthcare & nutrition) websites. Our findings suggest that Graphics-Driven trust cues were implemented most to foster consumers' trust, with the Socially-Driven trust cues being the least implemented. This is on-going work. The paper concluded with implementations for improvement in the design of trust cues to foster initial consumers' trust in nutrition and healthcare websites.