RTCRM

While attending SXSW-Interactive this year, I was amazed at how philosophical many of the panels, discussions, and presentations were. New technologies and revolutionary designs (which have historically been a large part of this conference) were hard to come by this year.[^1]

Instead, everybody seemed to be talking abstractly about people.

What do people do?

What makes them happy?

How should you talk to them?

The answers were sometimes surprising, but mostly they were deceptively simple. So much so that it seems the only way to sum them up is by saying: “Peoples is Peoples.” Allow this clip from Jim Henson’s The Muppets Take Manhattan to explain:

Got it? Good.

I’ll admit it’s funny to hear statements like “Talk to people like human beings”[^2] elicit enthusiastic applause from an auditorium full of people, but at the same time, I understand why that’s an important thing to say. Many other great revelations, like the one from Robert Hoekman, “People don’t like to feel like idiots,” received similar, well-deserved responses.

Why are these such powerful statements?

1. When dealing with any burgeoning technology, many companies become so focused on catching-up that they forget to consider how approachable their interactive product or service will be for real people. They get so wrapped up in the battle of Company vs. Technology that they loose sight of the all-important relationship between Customer & Service.
2. The procedural structures of most companies have never before had to confront the complexities of how different people will engage with an interactive system, so they treat “creating a website” as an additional, expensive chore, rather than a revolutionary, cheaper, and easier way to make customers happy and secure their loyalty.

So what happens?

Without a solid philosophical framework or methodology to keep interactive projects in perspective, they’re built so that tasks are made possible, not easy. The products do just what they have to do, and neglect what people expect them to do. Users are thought of as a captive audience of determined robots, rather than a finicky group of complex human beings. And then designers and developers travel thousands of miles to conferences so they can share insights like: “We are not transactions.”

So although these statements may seem too obvious to be worth saying, they’re really pointing to the fact that many times in fast-paced business situations, even the most intuitive of truths can be forgotten, and we really have to keep them in mind if we want to be successful, and shift the collective mindset from “I need to have a website,” to “How should I utilize a web presence to craft countless positive relationships with all kinds of people?” Because people are not just hits, registrations, or even transactions — is peoples.

Brent Canfield utilizes his advanced mobile device to avoid the complexities of peoples.

[^1]: SXSW ‘09 Peoples. Photo by armiller.
[^2]: Quote from Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic.