Designing Trustworthy User Interfaces for the Voluntary Carbon Market: A Randomized Online Experiment

Abstract

The voluntary carbon market is an important building block in the fght against climate change. However, it is not trivial for consumers to verify whether carbon ofset projects deliver what they promise. While technical solutions for measuring their impact are emerging, there is a lack of understanding of how to translate carbon ofset data into trustworthy interface designs. With interaction between users and ofset projects mainly happening online, it is critical to meet this design challenge. To this end, we designed and evaluated interfaces with varying trust cues for carbon ofset projects in a randomized online experiment (n=244). Our results show that content design, particularly fnancial and forest-related quantitative data presented at the right detail level, increases the perceived trustworthiness, while images have no signifcant efect. We contribute the frst specifc guidance for interface designers for carbon ofsets and discuss implications for interaction design. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI; • General and reference → Experimentation.