In the past few years, it seems that large-scale data breaches have been occurring with depressing regularly. While it’s incredibly important to establish trustworthiness in any product, re-establishing trust after it has been violated is much harder to do. There is far less room for error when dealing with a customer base that already has reason for concern about an organization’s digital security.
When breaches do occur, the best plan to regain trust is use webpages with plain language that contain plenty of specifics and constructive suggestions for issue resolution. In this article for UXPA Magazine, a professional journal for the user experience community, Danielle Cooley and I use the example of four recent breaches (Cici’s Pizza, Home Depot, Wendy’s Restaurants, and Omni Hotels) to see how each firm tried to regain its customers’ trust.