Selene De La Cruz: Building Trust with Content Design – Episode 155

Selene De La Cruz Before you let a business manage your hard-earned money, you need to trust them. Selene De La Cruz and her colleagues at Robinhood have developed principles-backed practices that earn the trust of customers who use Robinhood's brokerages services. We talked about: her work on brokerage products at Robinhood how they tailor in-product recommendations based on customer profiles her ABCs of building trust with content design: accuracy, brevity, and three Cs - clarity, consistency, and care the workflow implications of the legal and compliance obligations that come with financial products, and the way content designers collaborate with their legal colleagues how they decide to chunk the delivery of information in their user flows the three pillars of trust set out in Frances Frei's "trust triangle" TED talk: authenticity, logic, and empathy how their focus on reliability, accessibility, and care align with Frei's trust pillars how her shift into a management role has expanded her interest in trust Selene's bio Selene De La Cruz is a content designer and community builder based in Brooklyn, NY. A veteran of the NYC advertising world, she pioneered content strategy and UX writing practices for her clients’ brands and helped establish the content design practice at Mastercard. In her current role at Robinhood, she leads a team of content designers in creating intuitive, informative, and sometimes even fun experiences that help democratize finance. She’s also a co-founder of UX Content Design – NYC’s only meetup for UX product content professionals. Connect with Selene online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/iMCK71KxmMs Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 155. When you're designing user experiences for sensitive financial product areas like investing and retirement, it's crucial to build and maintain trust with your customers. At Robinhood, the online financial services company, Selene De La Cruz and her colleagues follow deeply informed principles to craft content-design practices that have been proven to help customers feel safe and secure as the company helps them manage their investments. Interview transcript Larry: Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 155 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Selene de la Cruz. Selene is the Senior Manager of Content Design at Robinhood. Welcome, Selene. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're doing these days. Selene: Hi. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast. Happy to be here. Like you said, yeah, I'm Senior Manager of Content Design at Robinhood. I've been there for about a year and a half right now, and I'm heading up our brokerage team. So that's pretty much all the products dedicated to investing, also including retirement and some of our recommendations products. So I like to think of it as the bread and butter of the app. Larry: At least when I as a civilian think about financial stuff, that's all the big ones right there that you just mentioned. Selene: Yeah. Larry: And especially that last one. You're making recommendations about financial stuff. And you probably have all kinds of fiduciary stuff you have to worry about. Tell me, and that's why I wanted to have you on the show, is to talk about how do you do that? Do you have principles that guide you in how you design experiences for this kind of ... ? Selene: Totally. We have principles and we also have regulations, and they come together in a beautiful marriage at Robinhood. Before we kind of jump into the conversation, I'll just clarify that nothing I'm talking about is related to Robinhood stock or company performance indicators. So if you think I'm giving you any signals about new products coming down the pipeline, I'm not. We're just talking about straight up what's goi...