Mayor Vince Gray congratulated DC’s growing tech community and was spreading contagious enthusiasm about where this community is going.
Genevieve Bell, Director of Interaction and Experience Research at Intel Labs, delivered a powerful message on how we can learn about technology by observing and understanding the emotional, psychological, and social associations people have with different products or items in their lives, and how these reflect true needs that our products should be designed to meet. The insights drawn from how people use cars as mobile devices were not only brilliant, but also very human-centered. Success is after all contingent upon understanding deeply-felt human needs that drive behavior and use of technology.
Krish Phrabhu, President and CEO of AT&T labs shared some interesting insights about the direction the social web is going, including the move to cloud computing as a norm, which will dramatically increase the potential for more efficient internet applications and uses.
Scott Kelly, Digital Marketing Manager at Ford, brought it back to the human-centered message. It’s all about putting a quality product in front of people and then letting the people talk about it. The product must be designed to resonate with the customers and get them excited, beyond rational choice to an emotional level. This worked for various reinventions and rebranding of Ford models and for the introduction of entirely new models as well. The message was clear: in order to succeed in the current paradigm, bring quality to the people, and create a virtual community for people to share their experiences openly. Success follows naturally.
Mike Jones, former CEO of MySpace, brought it back to “people” again, when he talked about how the team is the most important element to a startup. A good team can take a mediocre business and help it succeed, but a mediocre team given a good business makes for a risky situation. In entrepreneurial planning, again it’s all about the people, the people on the inside, as well as those on the outside.
Brian Solis, Principle at Altimeter, researcher, adviser and writer, really challenged the audience to think about why we’re trying to build something in the first place. Ultimately, we shouldn’t waste our time unless we’re trying to build and market something that truly matters, rather than just trying to copy the success of others. Every word we say gets broadcast across the social graph, and so we must think carefully about what message we send. We must also think carefully about what we’re building for people, and whether what we’re building reaches beyond being openly received to being enthusiastically shared. It must compel sharing. It’s all about substance, and this is because people are only going to be engaged with substance, that is if we want them to be truly engaged, at least enough for them to want to share our offerings with others in their lives. This is echoed in practice by the experience at Ford, shared a bit earlier by Scott Kelly.
Frank Warren, creator of PostSecret, and author of PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God, really drove the message home when he discussed the need people have to be heard. PostSecret, Hopeline (a crisis hotline), and IMAlive, an online crisis intervention network, which Frank founded are all focused on listening directly to a person, and allowing the person to share things that are important to him or her, and this simply because people matter. I thought this message was especially appropriate for DCWEEK because it is quite easy to forget what we’re developing technology for anyway. Is it for the sake of technology itself, or is it rather for people to use? This is why I believe that a human-centered approach to design is needed in every aspect of business, and in the public sector as well.
