Public Self Service Technology (SST): Designing for Trust : Factors enhancing user’s trust towards a public SST

Abstract: Public Self Service Technology (SST) has become an important part of our daily life. Advancement in technology and reduced hardware costs have motivated service providers to deploy public a SST for various important and complex tasks. Examples of such tasks include editing and printing confidential documents, performing monetary transactions, etc. These tasks requires a user to reveal his/her personal information to a public SST. The major problem while performing these tasks using a public SST is that the user has to deal with many surrounding factors like social density, privacy and security, which might affect his/her trust towards the SST and in turn the user might refrain from using it. This study aims to find different factors that can enhance user’s trust towards a public SST, encourage to use it and complete the task even if it requires user’s personal information.The in-depth interview method was adopted for the study to learn twelve interviewees’ experience with varied public SSTs that specifically handles personal information, in an urge to understand interviewees’ behaviour, underlying motivations and desires to use those public SSTs. Analysing the data collected from interviews, ten trust factors were found that emerge at various stages of interaction with a public SST. They were categorized into pre-interaction, on-interaction and post-interaction factors based on their time of interaction. Beyond the trust factors, three additional important factors have emerged from interview data, which motivates users to adopt public SSTs. They are usefulness, convenience and personality-based trust. The results may be valuable for researchers who are focusing on different aspects of trust and any public artefact as well as for service providers and designers to design a trustworthy public SST. Based on the results, some practical implications for designing public SSTs are also presented.