Monday, 2 March 2015

Be careful about who you trust

Hello people!
This time we are going to discuss trustworthiness among different websites. We have chosen two examples to look at the differences between a trustworthy and an untrustworthy website.

Thinking about trustworthiness, we chose the worldwide-famous website TripAdvisor:


First of all, its good fame makes users feel confident about reviews and opinions and very often they also enjoy to share their own impressions because of this good atmosphere that exists in the community. Secondly, TripAdvisor makes the communication possible between consumers and companies, in way that it is almost impossible for both sides to lie. Another reason to trust the website is its good looking design because it is clearly made by professionals and very easy to use.
Also, TripAdvisor takes into consideration users' feedback and dedicates an whole section of the website to the "Help Center", where everyone can post opinions and tips to improve the using experience. Last but not least, the language used is grammatically correct, which means a lot for trustworthiness, but it is also possible to have informal conversations between users on the dedicated forums.

On the other side, we found a good example in one of those "miracle-weight loss" websites: extremesupplements.net.


The first thing we noticed is the uncomfortable interface, very difficult to read and giving a bad feeling to the readers. Looking closer, the text seems impossible to believe because everybody knows that chemical pills cannot substitute exercises and diet. More, there is no space dedicated to users' feedback, which makes everything look even more suspicious, exactly the opposite of the full transparency we found on TripAdvisor. We tried to click on the "testimonial" link to see what would appear and that's what we found:



Some words have to be spent also on the advertising on the left of the page, showing one kind of "discount" on this product:


The bodybuilding package is now for only 149.90$! (instead of 149.95$)

The website tries to convince people using an easy communication, made of short sentences and with a lot of capital words sentences, with scientific claims and descriptions about the pills, insisting on their efficiency. Finally, on the page they deny the cheap and low-quality products other websites are selling, which makes us wonder how we can be sure of their quality, if every other place sells the same low-quality product.


Which one would you trust? If you have already bought something like the extremesupplements.net is selling, please let us hear about your experiences!

Until next time!

A.J, L.M, E.L, M.M, J.J, M.H, D.C, S.L 

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