The influence of trust on user interactions in e-transaction platforms: The context of a developing country

Abstract

This paper reports recent findings which aims at informing design ideas and identifying characteristics that could help to develop e-transaction applications and systems that promotes perceived trust. To accomplish our goals, we employed the socio-technical model of trust by Sousa et al. [26], to on one hand determine if users’ trust such e-payment system hosted by a third party company outside well known financial institutions (banks); then we further investigate how to incorporate trust into the platform. And on the other hand, as a design critique to establish bespoke visual clues that promotes perceived trust in the system and inform the system of potential pitfalls in their service design. A questionnaire was deployed to 500 current users of the platform and 106 valid responses were received. Our findings indicated that the trust features of concern to users are willingness, competency, predictability and benevolence with exception to honesty, reciprocity and motivation. Results presented are part of an ongoing research on trust related characteristics that should be tackled when designing and deploying e-transaction platforms in developing countries.