Trust plays a critical role in determining user experience and behaviour when interacting with an application. Consequently, designing applications to gain users’ trust is a necessary step not only to promote application content, but also to bolster safe and secure user behaviour. This thesis aims to explore the area of application design from the perspective of gaining and strengthening users’ trust, and propose a set of recommendations to guide the design. Specifically, the student will examine and summarize existing guidelines fostering users’ trust, discuss their security implications, and compare them with respect to suitable criteria. Afterwards, a set of guidelines will be proposed and validated.