Fostering Initial Trust in Applications – Developing and Evaluating Requirement Patterns for Application Websites

When users first encounter an application, or decide which application from a number of options to use, their initial trust in this application is a determinant for their willingness to adopt it. At this time, users have not yet had a chance to interact with the application, and hence their perceptions are based on the application presentation on the website rather than on the application’s actual performance. To help providers select supporting measures for the website to improve the perceived trustworthiness of their application, we propose a set of requirement patterns. Patterns are used in requirements engineering to recognize important and recurring issues, thus reducing the effort during requirements specification. We developed them from trust theory, following the design-science based evaluation framework for patterns. To evaluate the feasibility of our approach, 17 teams used the patterns to specify a website for a mobile application. The results indicate that the teams frequently used ten of our proposed patterns. A subsequent survey regarding pattern quality shows an overall acceptance and that the team members rated the patterns as comprehensible, understandable and helpful. We hence conclude that our approach to incorporating trust-based requirements to foster initial trust in application website specifications is feasible.