My financial literacy was admittedly poor before I began exploring the world of cryptocurrency and smart contracts in 2014. I grew up in Salisbury, South Australia, where ideas about getting rich were commonplace, but wealth-building was not a part of our vocabulary.

If we wanted to buy a stock on the ASX — pretending such a thought had even crossed our minds — barriers were high and participation was prohibitive, with minimum purchase amounts that outstripped most savings balances, let alone non-trivial brokerage fees. Such factors made it impossible for many young people to get into the stock market, especially in places where pay cheque to pay cheque living was more common for families than not. To us, the stock market seemed like a game for people who were already rich. We have since seen a democratisation of access to shares, with the advent of micro investing and even no-fee investing apps which enable anyone and everyone to build wealth beyond renting out their time.

Flashing forward to the early twenty tens, like many of my peers, through the rise of cryptocurrency I not only deep-dived on distributed systems and cryptography, but how markets operate and how our macroeconomic systems work in ways that were previously opaque or unexplained. It took crypto, not our schools, to educate so many of us on so many important financial concepts. It’s thanks to this process that I also began to truly understand the power of property as a financial tool that can be leveraged to accelerate the building of wealth, at a time when my opinion was that I might continue to rent, perhaps in perpetuity, investing only in other assets instead. Unfortunately, what we do see today is many young people giving up on home ownership aspirations, putting any disposable income they have into shares alone.

Buying and trading shares is better understood and more accessible than ever before, even for the youngest of generations, yet home ownership still isn’t. As house prices rise, increasing deposit amounts needed to purchase a first home are among the largest barriers to unlock the elusive wealth-building benefits of an investment in property. The importance of diversification of investments is widely understood, and no one should be forced into ruling out property as an asset class because of an ill-founded perception that it’s now out of reach.

That’s why we’re building OSQO

Like modern stock trading apps democratising access to investments in companies, it’s time to lower the barriers to property investment in similar ways. Our team is working hard to solve the problems associated with the increasing divide in homeownership between generations, whereby vast property portfolios are held by Boomers, yet Gen Z struggle to even get their foot in the door… any door. This is dangerous territory, exacerbating themes of a rent seeking society — metaphorically, and literally.

So, how do we get more people into the property market and into a better financial position? By addressing the key issue of property attainability, not to be confused with “affordability.” Even with property prices at record highs, being able to afford mortgage repayments isn’t the insurmountable part of the equation for many Australians, but coming up with the deposit for a mortgage to begin with often is. A 20% deposit for an average property in many of our cities is now multiples of a median annual salary, whereas for Boomers it was fractions of an annual salary. Ditching the smashed avocado on toast simply doesn’t make up the difference.

Except for limited government schemes, first home buyers without a 20% deposit have needed lender’s mortgage insurance (LMI) to avoid many years of continuing to save for that deposit and missing out on the capital growth of a property in the meantime. However, insuring the bank using LMI can cost many tens of thousands of dollars when capitalised into a home loan.

Enter OSQO’s first financial product, which we are making available to Australians this year. We’re investing in deposit shortfalls through our newly devised “Deposit Gap Loan” (DGL) model. Like LMI, it helps home buyers get in early to benefit from capital growth sooner, however DGL can also save home buyers genuinely significant amounts of money in comparison to a scenario where LMI is payable. Money that can instead be spent on renovations, education, or other improvements to wellbeing beyond the house itself.

By way of example, buying an $800,000 home with a loan of $690,000 and $110,000 in savings, LMI could cost a home buyer as much as $55,458 over the term of the loan. Alternatively, by choosing a DGL to fund their deposit gap, a home buyer could save $29,375 of that cost. That’s 62% less than LMI. Of course, the actual savings may vary depending on a range of factors such as the loan purpose and a borrower’s personal circumstances.

Despite periodic dips, values continue to rise across the housing and share markets. These markets are where much of my net worth currently reside — not in a bank account earning ~2% in interest when the inflation rate is ~3% or more; not “saving” it when doing so is merely eroding the value of my money over time. Getting into the property market sooner rather than later is important not only to avoid erosion of savings value due to inflation, but in order to benefit from capital growth in property value for future leverage. Helping more people do just that is what drives us.

Investing in the home ownership of others

Beyond our mission to get more people into the property market and into better wealth-building positions, over the coming months I look forward to sharing more about our plans to enable the broader market to invest in the home ownership of fellow Australians, for the benefit of all. We’ll also be revealing how the technology we’ve been developing over the last four years will be applied to other financial products through impressive partnerships, locally and abroad. Shrinking the intergenerational home ownership divide is, in fact, just the beginning…

In the meantime, you can learn more about the OSQO Deposit Gap Loan at osqo.com.au.

Crypto: a gateway drug to… building a property startup? was originally published in Financing the Future on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What is UX?

Despite what some might believe, good design isn’t merely visual design, usability testing, or common sense. In reality, accessibility best practices, behavioural psychology, language and tone, interaction patterns, information architecture, colour theory, and more, are all critical parts of what makes up a great user experience. This isn’t just the responsibility of experts in these fields, however. User experience is everyone’s job, from development to support, and their ability to empathetically put themselves in the shoes of users, and take on the responsiblity of shouldering the burden of complexity — instead of passing it on — is of paramount importance. Read more on this subject in my article “What UX isn’t”.

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs

The UX process

Design is cyclical. Design never ends; design is never done. User satisfaction can only be maintained with a company culture that sees change as opportunity, not as risk. Expectations of every digital product will continue to change, generally for worse, when the product doesn’t also change. Market, technology, culture, and competition are all factors for the evolving opinion of your product.

The real MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

If a product is merely functional, it’s unlikely that it’s truly viable. A real minium viable product understands that for a product to be adopted and embraced, it requires much more than to simply work. In respect to continual improvement, a real MVP creates feedback loops early, which redefines what your next steps should be as not all features or ideas turn out to be good ones. It doesn’t matter how good you are at building software if you’re building in the wrong direction.

The value of good UX

What is the sum of being easier to use, more delightful and improving time to task completion? What happens when design is embedded amongst business leadership and utilised as an innovation resource?

Design-driven businesses have outperformed the S&P by 228% over a decade, while on the London Stock Exchange they outperformed FTSE by more than 200%. Learn more about these figures and others in my article “The Bottom Line Value of Design”.

What these companies practice, is ultimately informed design. To practice informed design, you need to intimately understand who you’re designing for…

Research and testing

Prior to bottom line impacts, what does user testing achieve within the business?

• An ongoing feedback loop for stakeholder consideration
• The fostering of a culture that makes informed decisions
• Real user guidance on what’s useful and what’s usable
• The revealing of issues overlooked internally
• Data-driven reasoning that squashes in-house politics and disagreements
• Baseline data and documentation for change comparison
• Understanding what users really do, not just what they say
• Decrease support costs and reduce design/dev rework

Practices to live by:

1. Informed design is the critical practice of making conscious decisions, backed by real information rather than assumption.
2. Even the minimum amount of usability testing can deliver extraordinary results. Test everything you’re working on, with a specific problem or objective in mind.
3. Everyone should be observing people using our products an hour every month. It’s all too easy get too close and lose objectivity.

With the above in mind, it’s also important to maintain a culture of being data-informed, but not necessesarily data-dictated. Sometimes a giant leap away from the ‘local maxima’ requires not merely iterating upon designed solutions, not merely incremental improvements. There’s no harm in appraising problems with a clean slate and imagining brand new solutions all over again, as long as all assumptions are qualified, tested, and measured.

If you A/B test the two worst options, your best possible outcome is only the second worst one. Data gathered is only done so based on current strategies and product realities — not possibilities — and can be interpreted with bias. Data alone does not create great products.

6 principles for more human design

#1 Pursue simplicity

Visually complex interfaces are rated less beautiful than simpler ones, which add additional work for the brain to decode, store and make sense of.

“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

#2 Always consider visual hierarchies

It’s not enough to merely have great content — you need eyes to be drawn to what’s important, and create consistency in these treatments. Humans are pattern recognition machines, so pay attention to everything from weighting which enables quick scanning, to commonality in the placement of navigation elements.

“Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.” — Edward Tuft

#3 Carefully craft affordances

Follow what works for your users, not trends. While skeuomorphic design continues to take an increasingly distant backseat to flatter design languages, to ignore the usability benefits of certain treatments for certain user demographics is never a good idea. Sometimes what looks better doesn’t work better.

#4 Use appropriate typography

Using a font perceived as something comical probably isn’t the right fit when documenting one of the greatest discoveries in modern science. Typeface characteristics not only affect aesthetic appeal, comprehension, but credibility as well. In fact, given the same statement in Comic Sans versus Baskerville, the one in Baskerville is more likely to be believed.

#5 Talk like a real person

“PC LOAD LETTER”. HP’s infamously thoughtless language frustrated users around the world, and cost the company tens of millions in unnecessary support time. “What am I supposed to load into my PC, exactly?” Of course, in America, A4 paper is called letter, and the eventual realisation is that you need to re-fill the paper tray. Design is in the details, and every detail matters — overlook them at the peril of user satisfaction and profitability.

#6 Don’t make people think

Don’t insist on requesting information (such as personal details) before demonstrating value. Don’t expect recall (such as where content is) when you can design for recognition. Don’t ask questions (such as location) when you can make intelligent initial assumptions. Don’t make the user trawl through options (such as to hide or show a pane), when you can remember their decisions contextually from the place where it exists.

Most importantly, acknowledge that being “intuitive” isn’t always possible. Intuition can only exist if a user has had prior experinces that resemble yours. The first mouse to be manufactured en masse for consumers was not intuitive, but learning how to use it was fast. Sometimes the greatest ideas cannot relate to prior experiences, so strive to be quickly learnable, not “intuitive”.

UX design is not voodoo

A note worth closing on is that good design is largely pragmatic, not magic. Above all else, good design is achieved as a result of conscious, collective decisions to avoid personal bias, avoid anecdotes, and together employ a genuine care for how people will react to the choices we make for them.

Designing better experiences for Blockchain (and everything else) was originally published in Horizon State on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We live in a world with more computing power inside the smartphones in our pockets than NASA used to get us to the moon, yet the way we govern our societies and companies remains a comparative pocket calculator. Our models for collaborative decision making are a relic, centuries old. Processes are slow and expensive, outcomes are increasingly distrusted, and our geographically centralised methods of participation are a catalyst for voter apathy. Society is hurtling into the future, but our democratic processes are stuck in the past, falling behind the rest of the world.

Today we are formally announcing Horizon State, a team which exists to answer a single question: “If democracy was designed with today’s technology, what would it look like?”

If past founders of nations and capitalist institutions had access to modern technologies, our governments and company structures would look very different than they do now. If blockchain existed then, would it have been decided that the best way to organise ourselves would be to elect unaffected representatives to make decisions on behalf of those affected? Democracy is much more than our electorates, our representative models, our boards and our management teams. Democracy is the opportunity to share in the decision making processes that relates to the shared matters which affect us. Democracy is about reaching consensus on how to best use our shared resources to achieve the best outcomes for our partners, children, colleagues, staff, and fellow citizens. Where there are shared resources in any cooperative environment, there remains no question: we need better shared decision making tools and processes. Thanks to distributed ledger technology, this is now possible, and a historic change in our democratic processes awaits.

Horizon State has devised a platform for the gathering of opinions, the casting of votes, and the making of collective decisions. We’re able to inform constituencies, engage them with immediacy, and do so with unprecedented confidence. This record of participation is decentralised — not owned by any government, institution, or individual — it is owned by the people. It delivers post-unforgeable integrity; it is a digital ballot box that cannot be hacked, within which results can never be changed. Votes can be counted transparently in real time by anyone in the world, in perpetuity, while maintaining anonymity. Commercially, our platform achieves this at a fraction of the price-per-transaction compared to traditional methods of facilitation.

More than devise it, Horizon State has built it.

An MVP (minimum viable product) is already in use, becoming the world’s first blockchain-enabled voting system used by the public. Developed for MiVote — an Australian political movement featured in the Financial Review, The Guardian, and on national radio — our early stage platform has been facilitating the casting of thousands of votes to the blockchain since February, 2017.

What has been built so far is just the beginning, soon to be improved and used by political independents, publicly listed companies, and communities within developing nations. We are looking toward brighter horizons, to a place where our countries and companies conduct themselves with this same accountability and efficiency, a place where voices can be heard securely and simply. We are taking our technology global and we expect it to underpin the process of opinion and vote solicitation everywhere, from the smallest councils amidst your national public service, to multinational enterprises.

Our vision is a future where humanity’s methods of democratic process meet the expectations set by almost every other part of our modern lives.

To help us get there, we’ve begun assembling a board of advisers which includes university professors, executives at businesses worth a collective $45 billion, and renowned strategists. We’ll announce new additions to our team and our board over the coming weeks, as well as our roadmap and white paper prior to our token sale.

We welcome you to join us in redesigning our democratic tools and processes. The manner in which our societies organise themselves and make decisions finally has the opportunity to catch up to the 21st century… that opportunity begins now.

If you’re interested in joining the team, joining our advisory board, or want to participate in our token pre-sale, please register your interest or drop us a line at horizonstate.com

Introducing Horizon State was originally published in Horizon State on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I recently spoke about the future of technology and experience on a panel hosted by David Di Sipio, accompanied by the brilliant Ben Gilmore and Will Egan. Here are highlights from my conversation with the host, the panelists, and the audience…

Mobile was the last big paradigm shift in consumer computing behaviour. We’re now on the cusp of new shifts including augmented reality, virtual reality, and BCI (brain-computer interfaces). Before things like AR and VR take hold, we also have the world of VUI (voice user interfaces) to think about as professionals and as consumers.

“What are some suggestions you have for preparing for those future technologies?”

Wherever you fit in along the spectrum of being a technologist, an entrepreneur, or a designer, it’s more important than ever to consider “what is the world going to look like in 5 years?” It’s looking as though the 2D interfaces we use now will begin to become less relevant, and I see a time in the not too distant future is there will be far less reliance on any interface that has visual queues, such as buttons. When we begin to think about a time in the near future where you could ask Alexa, “I need a new BBQ that’s going to fit into my courtyard and can cater for 6 people. Buy the highest rated one you can find that I can still get delivered by this Saturday for less than $800,” you begin to appreciate profound longer term changes in the way we use technology, and how we design for it.

That sort of improvement in the contextual understanding of your environment, your preferences, your personal history — then making important decisions for you based on those — reveals a world where we’ll have to use Google less. We will no longer need to type into search boxes and look at lists of results.

If we no longer use visual interfaces as we know them today to perform tasks such as search, that is a dramatic shift for those who work on these interfaces, let alone the companies who profit from them. As UX designers and developers, it’s in your best interests to divorce yourself from 2D interface exclusivity. We’re about accelerate into 3D space and zero space. Make sure you’re thinking beyond just 2D panes.

“What role does the study of neuroscience play in the future of creating experiences?”

I wouldn’t really know where to start, I’m certainly not a neuroscientist — but I’m happy to talk about what little I do know in this general area. For people wanting to understand interfaces beyond today’s most common ones, grab yourself an Emotiv headset. From memory, it’s a few hundred bucks, and it will let you train computer software to do things such as push and pull on-screen objects using your thoughts alone.

The problem with BCI right now is that there’s little commonality in how that push is achieved from person to person. Every individual has to train this pushing and pulling for themselves, instead of it just working out of the box. Elon Musk is now working on something called Neuralink, a next generation interface that intends to take this to the next level. Musk wisely wants to create a world where we can augment our intelligence to match that of increasingly sophisticated AI (artificial intelligence). You’ve also got Facebook working on brain-to-computer interfaces which let you ‘write’ at over 100 words to minute just by thinking the words, rather than saying them or typing them.

These BCI technologies could converge quite nicely in terms of timing and maturity with VR and AR, changing how we participate in simulated environments, and how we control augmented reality overlays — without using flaky gestures or typing. Anyone who has used Microsoft’s HoloLens will understand just how frustrating user input can be as things are today.

Somewhat of a tangent, it’s fascinating to consider that our brain itself doesn’t expreince anything directly — it’s trapped in darkness and silence within the walls of our skull. It’s only using the signals our body creates that it expereinces the world. Thinking about the ways we interface with our brain right now, we’re kind of already cyborgs. We strap into a car and we’ve augmented ourselves with the superpower of speed and an armoured shell. You can think about our phone and the internet as effectively unlimited memory, allowing us to access all of the world’s information in close to an instant.

“Is AR really just about advertising, and VR the patform that could be far more meaningful?”

That might be where it is percevived to be right now, but I don’t think it’s where we’ll end up with these technologies. Where we’re headed with AR is something much more profound than current examples. I’m aligned with Apple on the belief that AR is going to be the next personal computing paradigm. In a sense, it will probably be the successor to the smartphone.

If you stop thinking about AR as holding up your phone in front of a magazine to reveal extra content, or holding it up on the street to see a Pokemon you need to catch, and instead start thinking about what kind of information could be dynamically displayed in your environment via a pair of spectacles, a contact lens, or indeed a neural interface, then the opportunities for personal benefit and efficiency are immense. Everything from real time directions, to ratings about a product you’re looking at, and even the capacity of arriving buses — plus so much more. It will likely become our next ‘default device’ for general access to information. Whatever we need know at any moment, it can be presented within our field of vision.

On the topic of VR, I believe it’s the ultimate empathy machine. The ability to educate people about other times, other places, and indeed other people, will begin to reduce conflicts caused by the pathological boundaries we create, such as those of religion and politics… VR will ultimately be an aid in reducing racism, sexism, and much prejudice. To be able to expreince someone’s life through their eyes, to understand what it means to be poverty stricken, or fleeing war, as if you were there… Yes, right now it’s low resolution, but soon enough it’ll be high resolution and we’ll be plugging in more of our senses. Imagine a student being able to experience the Roman Empire, to have it rebuilt and rendered, and then experienced as if they were there, instead of just reading about it in text.

VR and AR will serve generally different purposes. One will be about utility and efficiency, the other will be about experience and escapism. Beyond that, it’s awe-inspiring to think about VR as the final platform. By that, I mean we could actually simulate anything inside of VR, including AR. Indeed: we could put on AR spectacles inside of our VR experience.

“What is the social impact of this kind of experience?”

There’s a natural tendancy to resist and reject progress based on your own nostalgia, experiences, and behaviours. In reality, millennials aren’t victims of screens — they’re the most social generation ever. Technology is enabling them to scocialise more than anyone ever has before, but they’re socialising in ways very different than what older generations are accustom to. This is increasingly true for many, many aspects of how we live our lives.

The important thing to remember is that we are continually designing our future. These changes are not happening to us against our will — it’s us who decides what we do and how we do it. We create these technologies, and collectively we accept them or reject them. If the value that a technology presents us is meaningful enough, then we make tradeoffs for it. We give up some privacy to be on Facebook because of the benefit, as an example. This will continue: tradeoffs for benefit versus potential deteriment. As long as we are net-gaining on our benefit and leaving comparative detriment in the dust, then we are always going to be in an overall better place.

For a look even further into the future, discussing work, automation, and VR simulations, I’ve written “The future of work, and our ultimate end”.

If you’re involved in technology and are reading this article on Medium, it’s likely that you sit in a generally liberal, progressive, moderate, diverse, optimistic, affluent metropolis — the likes of Melbourne, Silicon Valley, London, and Berlin — wondering what the effect of Trump’s administration will be on technological progress.

Instead of looking at that impact and how to mitigate against any possible future wrongdoings of a Trump administration, we need to more importantly begin reflecting on the conditions leading to this election outcome, which we have helped cultivate.

It’s not a popular opinion amongst my fellow left, but sexism and racism didn’t win this election for Trump, even if the unfortunate truth is that this kind of bigotry is entrenched in the psyche of many. Claiming so is counterproductive to solutions thinking. In reality, this latest election was won by suburban outliers, country towns, and a broader American middle class who were targeted with campaign messages designed to inflate economic anxieties and related resentments.

This result should be a wake up call to us all that there is an incredible disconnect between places like Silicon Valley, and many capital cities — all up in arms about the result—who had forgotten to pay attention to the rest of America. Robotics, automation, offshoring, globalisation and other factors are eroding American jobs, and the value of those jobs… this was an inevitable result, which until now has not been apparent.

That’s not to say robotics, automation, offshoring and globalisation should halt. Quite the contrary. There’s a future ahead of almost unimaginable prosperity for all humans, where we resign our role as economic agents and live peacefully on this planet — and others — finding dignity in creativity and philosophy, instead of “work” as we know it today. But between now and then, it has become abundantly clear that we need to think harder and longer about how to combat the ill effects of our ever-fastening run toward that finish line, or the race might be called off early.

The above chart is a reflection of just how incredible globalisation has been as an equalising force for the planet. With an explosion of Asian economic growth, fewer people now live in poverty than ever before in history, despite our population being at a record high. Child mortality — being deaths under the age of 5 — is the lowest it has ever been, as is homicide and death by preventable illness.

No matter what our parents tell us, no, it was not better in their time. We live in the best time that there has ever been. Yet, even with longer lives globally and higher comparative incomes in developing nations, the developed world’s middle class isn’t seeing the same rise of opportunity. We’ve reached a tipping point, and they’re seeing opportunity diminish. The realities of our new economy mean almost nothing to those once employed by the automotive industry, to coal miners, or soon truck drivers as they’re replaced by autonomous vehicles.

It’s easy to say “you need to continually upskill and reskill, to pursue self learning.” But not everyone is an entrepreneur or academic in spirit or mindset, and they shouldn’t have to be. Many people are busy trying to raise their children and keep up with their mortgage — often far away from our dense city centres. Our pursuit of innovation is relentless, it’s human nature after all, but with every incredible transformation delivered to the world around them, the people that elected Trump only become more fearful; their concerns become exacerbated. They are not a part of that transformation, they are increasingly the remnants of what existed before it.

Shortly after the election result, a snide comment appears out of California: “Silicon Valley lives in a bubble, unlike the rural farmers who take time out of each day to consult a broad cross-section of Americans.” Amusing, somewhat, but completely missing the point. The rural farmers aren’t deciding the future of urban lives at all, let alone without careful consideration. They are not the catalyst for change — we are, the burden is on us.

As a technologist, an optimist, a progressive moderate-left, this is a hard pill to swallow. It’s hard to admit there’s something wrong here, that in fact it’s us who have been ignorant. I’m here to say that we have a problem. If we don’t start to have deeper and more meaningful conversations about what happens as rural jobs disappear and the world of yesteryear is dismantled — partly our own doing — that there may be more Trumps around the world rising to power to represent those alienated by inward looking political and media establishments.

Politically, the left is also missing the point. In doing so, they’re enacting the same kind of ignorance and insular thinking that they so decry in the right, and in white middle America. We need to admit this result is partly our fault, but that we can be a part of the solution. A friend, Andy Aldahn, wrote it best: “When the left caricatures the uneducated, underpaid $30,000/yr man as a privileged deplorable racist if he fears his job sent offshore or if he fears Islamic terrorism coming to his city, then they played some part in pushing that voter away. If they call him a privileged irredeemable sexist if he doesn’t think exactly in their brand of university gender politics then they pushed that voter away.”

To reiterate, this was, in the end, an inevitable result. If not Trump in this election, someone like him in another. Over 60% of Trump voters believe, based on exist polls, that the next generation will be worse than the current. Undoubtedly, Trump’s fear campaign will have attributed to this, but for many of these people it might actually be true. Their vote was their opportunity to exercise a choice between more of the same, or to roll the dice on risk. As Nobel laureate Daniel Khaneman explains in his prospect theory; people are risk seeking when choosing between potential unfavourable outcomes. In Fitzroy, Victoria, just like Silicon Valley, California, it’s easy to get lost in your near-Utopian bubble and forget the fears of so many others.

“Design the future, don’t just let it unfold”... “Disrupt your business before someone else does”… “You can’t stop progress”… “Be biased toward possibility”. These mantras have defined my career.

Indeed, progress cannot be stopped, but it’s time we had a look around us with the same amount of empathy we claim to apply to the outputs of our craft. While it can’t be stopped, progress can be directed. If, instead, we proceed by neglecting large portions of our populations without any real care to educate or support them through change, those people will start to look for someone like Trump — who in desperation are forced to ignore what he will ratify in terms of discrimination of minorities and the disrespect of women, as they clutch at nostalgic ideas akin to making America great again.

If we don’t start asking the question more often “progress, for whom?” — then applying careful consideration in respect to how we move forward in the most inclusive and considerate ways — when general AI and fully autonomous systems arrive, we’re going to be in a world of pain as this sentiment effects an ever larger portion of our population. No one will be excluded from this next leap forward, and it’s not hard to imagine a situation in which many of us are faced with the same challenges as those in shrinking American industries now.

We need to start thinking about how we as technologists are going to make the world better for everyone, how we’re going to appropriately inform and educate people, how we’re going to support them during the process. We’re going to need to find ways to help more people transition to the new world with us… otherwise the world might look very different to the one we’re working toward.

With a dwindling interest in desktops, laptops and tablets, some people might ask how anyone is getting anything of value done. The people asking that question might be surprised to learn that 13% of Americans are now smartphone-only, up from 8% in 2013. These are residents who don’t even have a fixed broadband service at home. As reflected upon by Pew, “the reason they do not have broadband at home is because their smartphone lets them do all they need to do online.”

Looking at the trajectory of device sales data, we know that in 2016, the 5 billionth PC will be sold, but the 20 billionth mobile. By 2020, mobile will be at 10x the unit sales and 5x the install base of “PC”.

Evolve or die

The resulting equation for Mac and Windows developer is simple: ignore iOS and Android at your own peril. Those unwilling to build their software for the world’s biggest computing ecosystem are sealing their own fate. They’re asking to be disrupted in as little as 5 years. The computers that everyone has are the ones that should be targeted, not the ones in decline of ownership and usage.

If you question the viability of productivity on mobile operating systems, on mobile devices, you’d be right to do so . However, you’d only be right to do so for a small and shrinking segment of our workforce. I still need my Mac to design on, which will remain the case until a Sketch equivalent reaches iOS. I’ll also need my mobile to be able to drive a larger screen, which is a likely eventuation. Early indicators of this eventuation include Microsoft’s Continuum, Remix OS and Andromium.

Looking at the top 25 occupations in the USA should quickly help everyone understand how most people wouldn’t have the same computing requirements as I would, nor many people interested in this article would. For many people, their smartphone is the only computer they need.

For those relying on a PC for work, it’s important to reflect on the history of computing technology. If it has taught us anything, it’s that old work adapts to new tools. Critics of the PC format said it would be useful if it could run mainframe code. Critics of tablets said they would be useful if they ran x86 applications. Neither of these perspectives are anything but entirely flawed. How you work, in the context of computing, will always evolve to take advantage of the largest scale technology. That’s where the obvious opportunity lies for increased revenue and innovation. In modern terms, that scale was Windows, but it has just become Android and iOS.

Reframing what “real work” is

IT professionals, another workforce minority, can’t feasibly do their work outside of traditional hardware norms — yet. But real work comes in many shapes and forms. Some 3 million people are employed as authors and editors in the USA, which excludes those who blog, students writing essays, and more.

Writing in length on a smartphone may sound like someone’s worst nightmare, yet amongst millennials and those in developing nations it is becoming commonplace. It’s becoming common not just because of economic factors, but technological and cultural ones, too.

Anything that can be done on PC will also be done on mobile, provided it’s intuitive and efficient enough. The truth is that something being intuitive is only perceived as so based on prior experience. The mouse didn’t originate as intuitive, but has become so. For Gen X designers, the idea of younger generations using a trackpad seems impractical, yet it too is happening. Our incredibly impressive 19 year old UI designer at Contact Light does just that.

Abroad, Viranch Damani from Chennai in India, an engineering student and technology journalist, recently Tweeted: “Paid 25k (USD $410) for laptop and use it like once in a week. Paid 6k (USD $100) for a smartphone and use 7 hours a day.” He writes using his Xiaomi Redmi 1S.

Today you can do everything from file tax, to produce vlogs and conduct video conferences on mobile. You can often do so with more pros than cons than on desktop. New ways of getting things done ends up happening just as effectively as the old, especially for natives of new tools.

The PC is dead. Long live the PC.

All this said, there’s still room for the PC and tablet. They’re not dead, but neither is the mainframe. Some people say Elvis is dead, but he made $55 million dollars in 2015 — it’s just that his relevance continues to diminish.

Engaged in conversation with colleagues about the future of transport today, I got talking about the impact that autonomous vehicles will have on the advertising industry. If that seems like a strange leap to make, bear with me. In fact, if you think that fleets of driverless cars only endanger the jobs of taxi drivers, you’ll be surprised to realise that your bottom lines might be in danger as well, whatever your business.

To explain who is in the firing line, I want to start by explaining three key benefits of autonomous fleets— all being profoundly important improvements for human safety and productivity — before describing how each of those benefits is going to completely reshape our economy.

Road fatalities will be all but stamped out

Right now deaths on roads are high. Staggeringly high. In the US, the number of fatalities that occur on roads is in the vicinity of 40,000 every year. It’s right up there with influenza.

Seat belts, traction control, brake assist and many other automotive innovations have seen our roads get progressively safer. Yet, fundamentally, road fatalities are caused by humans. A report from the Eno Center for Transportation says that up to 90% of crashes are the result of human errors, rather than equipment or infrastructure failures.

Relinquishing control to computers that don’t speed, don’t get distracted and can see in 360 degrees at all times has already been demonstrated to be safer than driving yourself. Google driverless cars have been involved in over a dozen incidents in their 6 years and 1.5 million kilometres of operation, all of which were the fault of a human driver.

That same report from Eno expects that road incidents will be cut to 1% of current levels, while Volvo has even boldly claimed that after 2020 no one will die in one of their ever again, partly thanks to their plans for autonomous operation.

This outcome is obviously a very good thing, but what will this heightened level of road safety mean for the economy?

• Car insurance: worth $198 billion in the US, the industry will need to brace itself for a massive downscale as a consequence of less car ownership and less incidents in them.
• Medical practices: just in the US, a reduction of road incidents of this scale will see emergency rooms attending to millions fewer patients every year and hospitals would see many hundreds of thousands fewer people staying overnight. Then there’s the matter of reduced GPs visits and few scripts for prescription drugs.
• Health insurance: as car-related injuries plummet, so will health insurer revenue, with the cost of cover shifting significantly downward.
• Crash repairers: panel beaters won’t have much to do when incidents on the roads have been close to eliminated, becoming one of many small business types resigned to obsolescence.
• Law practices: personal-injury lawyers will see car-related cases evaporate, as incidents and subsequent injuries on the road patter out.
• Government: road offences will dramatically plummet, resulting in reduced revenue generation from fines. Autonomous cars don’t speed, don’t drink-drive, and don’t park illegally.

Road transport will be incredibly cheap and accessible

Owning a car is really expensive. The American Automobile Association estimates that all-inclusive, it costs an average of $10,000 annually to run a car on the road. Taxis are a far-too-expensive alternative. UberX is cheaper, but still couldn’t be used as a cost-effective total replacement today. Looking ahead, what if that UberX didn’t need to pay a driver, insurance costs became insignificant, and cars were always close by? Suddenly not owning a vehicle presents a far better financial position for most people, without 2015’s inconveniences of not having your own.

• Car manufacturers: as autonomous fleets rise, car ownership will fall. With fewer consumer customers, car manufacturers will live and die based on their agreements with fleet operators. Dr. Alexander Hars, MD of Inventivio GmbH, has forecast that only 20% of the US population still own a car in 2030 and PricewaterhouseCooper has made an arguably outlandish prediction that the number of cars on US roads will have dipped by an astounding 99% — from 245 million to just 2.4 million — when automobile autonomy has been fully realised.
• Public transport: why walk to the tram stop when a car will pick you up and drop you off for a comparable expense, with just a minute’s notice? A new report from the International Transport Forum bluntly states that “for small and medium-sized cities, it is conceivable that a shared fleet of self-driving vehicles could completely obviate the need for traditional public transport.”
• Hire cars: technically you’ll still be hiring a car amongst autonomous fleets, but traditional hire car companies will cease to exist, at least in their current form.

Traffic congestion will become a thing of the past

When the autonomous car you’re in knows exactly where all of the others are and what their status is, routes can quickly be optimised automatically. Pair that with the ability to accelerate and brake together — like carriages on a train — and you have an extremely efficient network of vehicles that don’t suffer from the “rubber banding” we see when groups of cars take off and slow down now.

Additionally, ride-sharing will finally become efficient and practical. Car pooling has always been a highly economical and environmentally friendly way of commuting, but soon autonomous cars will be able to respond to pick-up requests along dynamic routes, generated by rider demand, with extreme effectiveness.

• Oil: putting the drastic reduction in car numbers aside, even the autonomous cars remaining will consume less fuel by way of efficient routing and operation, including lowering wind resistance with perfect following distances. In reality they’ll use no fuel by 2030, as most cars will be electric, although in a similar fashion they’ll use less of their battery than a human counterpart would.
• Aftermarket parts and service: there will be fewer individuals needing to maintain cars in the future. For those that do, autonomous cars will apply less mechanical and tire wear than humans with every maneuver, prolonging periods between services.
• Highway stop establishments: autonomous trucks don’t need to rest, while humans inside driverless cars can recline back and get some shuteye as they continue on their automated journey.
• Construction: autonomous cars will be using existing roads far more effectively than human operated ones, ending the need for most future widening, expansion and new road projects.
• Parking: somewhere to store your car at the end of a drive into town is big business, a $100 billion industry in the US alone. With far fewer cars and far fewer of those needing to remain parked in dense metropolitan settings, the car park as we know it today becomes obsolete.

Beyond those knock-on effects are sure to be many more, including my initial remark about an industry seemingly far removed: advertising. Yet, as fewer people gather in transport hubs such as train stations and less people pay attention to roadside out-of-home adverts, even advertising will need to re-position itself to cater for this change in behaviour.

Amidst these changes are vast opportunities for money to be made, not just lost, which you will have probably have begun to imagine while reading this article. However, who makes money and who loses money in the future that has been described, will begin with the decisions that business leaders make today.

1. A reduced visibility of traditional mobile ad placements
2. Less consumer reliance on web search, websites and apps for information
3. The rise of voice user interfaces paired with improved artificial intelligence

That third point may sound somewhat far fetched, but it’s already here and will become a pillar of personal computing within 10 years.

Let’s explore these forward thoughts in a little more detail…

We’re approaching peak-ads on mobile

There’s an enormous number of mobile banner ads interrupting our journeys and taking up valuable pieces of screen real estate right now. By 2017 there’ll be less getting in the way, even if nothing else changed in technology except for the following ones.

• Apple will allow third party developers to create mobile Safari extensions and let users block banner ads in Safari on iOS 9
• Numerous EU mobile carriers are talking about blocking ads on their entire mobile networks
• For the fourth time, courts have ruled AdBlock Plus to be legal
• Adblock Plus is working with businesses and universities to block ads on their networks to save bandwidth
• Apple will no longer allow the use of “canopenURL” API to deploy targeted ads within apps
• Adblock usage grew by nearly 70% between June 2013 and June 2014, which includes over a quarter of all US internet users polled.
• A Firefox-based Adblock browser for Android has just entered beta

To be clear however, a lot else is changing in technology. If that list of mobile-ad-averse initiatives didn’t exist, far fewer people will still be exposed to far less banner advertising on mobile screens very soon…

Deep-linking and predictive computing threaten search as we know it

Spotlight in iOS 9 (and OS X El Capitan) will begin to steer users away from apps and websites for information discovery, effectively declaring war on traditional search, inclusive of the paid results and banner ads within it.

That same Spotlight screen you currently use to search your phone for apps and messages will soon search much, much more. Spotlight will retrieve results for sports scores, stock prices and YouTube videos. It will show you nearby places to eat and drink, present news headlines related to your keywords, and even display information from the depths of other apps without opening them.

Avoiding traditional search engines, websites and even other apps isn’t an approach exclusive to Apple. Google Now is getting smarter, increasingly able to surface more of what you need directly through Android, without having to find that information elsewhere. This include’s the company’s predictive computing innovation, “Now on Tap”, which allows you to directly retrieve information about anything already on your screen, without any external discovery process. An example of this might be cinema times for a specific movie, if someone had asked if you want to see it.

Technologies like these, ones that learn to anticipate what you want and what you might do next, is in fact just the beginning of far more meaningful and frictionless AI…

Voice user interfaces and AI will mean less looking, literally

Picture cleaning up a spill to notice you’re low on paper towel. Without grabbing a device or moving to one, you simply say “Alexa, reorder paper towel,” and it’s then magically delivered to you.

That’s precisely what Amazon’s Echo enables, the company’s voice-based home computing solution that launches this month in the USA. Forming an important part of our IoT (Internet of Things) future, often sporting interfaces beyond sight and touch, Apple is likely not far behind with their next version of Apple TV.

Environmental computing aside, voice user interfaces with this same level of clever understanding are about to become commonplace on your smartphones and wearables, with improved versions of Siri and Cortana. I’ll happily admit that the only real utility and convenience I get out of my Apple Watch is the ability to ask questions, get directions and set geo-based reminders without needing to look at my smartphone — this use case is about to get more practical and more powerful.

Requests like “purchase a Bose SoundLink Mini at the best price but that can be delivered by 4pm” aren’t far off, thanks to the progress being made in contextual computing and natural language processing. This will critically shift eyeballs away from search, from web, from apps and more generally from personal computing screens. It will do so in a far more profound way than any other threat to mobile and web advertising.

Where does advertising go from here?

These thoughts aren’t unaccompanied. Jack Matthews, director at APN Outdoor Media, thinks publishers have a right to be worried. Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, Matthews said that “most advertising, as a revenue model, is under threat for a variety of reasons,” when quizzed on the effect of these changes.

The creators of Viv, a new AI from the team behind Siri, are more than aware of their threat to the industry as it exists. If you’re asking for something and the best possible answer or most suited product is delivered, there’s no space for a sponsored message. Esquire recently interviewed Viv co-founder, Dag Kittlaus, and touched on the same subject, who stated boldly that “business models will change”. As succinctly suggested in response to Kittlaus, that may just turn out to be the biggest understatement of the Internet age.

All of this technological change won’t have to detrimentally impact the enormous forecasts for mobile advertising revenues over coming years. However, if mobile ad spend really is to far surpass a majority share of all digital ad expenditure, we’ll have to renew interest and effort in bolstering DOOH (digital out-of-home) advertising capabilities. In particular, intelligent communication between DOOH placements and devices of passersby. Finding ways to reach individuals directly, with truly personal, timely and geographical relevancy, is of higher priority than ever before.

With the acceptance that consumers will be exposed to far fewer display ads in their personal computing lives soon, comes the realisation of that required trajectory. Ultimately, the future of advertising lies with those capable of imagining new, sophisticated ways of engaging audiences that extend well beyond the ones imagined today.

Delivered via a US forwarding address, my Samsung Gear VR arrived in Melbourne yesterday. With great anticipation, I flashed my Telstra Note 4 with Virgin’s firmware and proceeded to get lost in unfamiliar worlds for the afternoon.

So, was it the virtual reality experience I envisioned would be one day possible, after first trying an Oculus Rift? Could it begin to profoundly shift philosophy, the economy and our society in ways we can’t even begin to dream of? No, not even close. But, I knew that already.

Much like the Oculus developer kits, the Gear VR is merely a glimpse into a technology that WIRED say will “change gaming, movies, TV, music, design, medicine, sex, sports, art, travel, social networking, education, and reality.” It’s a grandiose statement that I agree with, but for now I won’t use it for much more than a personal 400 inch travelling movie screen. At times I might even send friends on a jaw-dropping tour of the solar system without needing to sit them down next to my computer.

So, why my heightened anticipation for the Gear VR? Virtual reality hasn’t progressed far with this iteration, but finally, it’s being made available for the general public’s consumption. Despite the label of “Innovators Edition”, you don’t have to be an innovator to try it in retail stores or see it plastered across Melbourne billboards and bus stops.

That promotion of presence is a big deal for virtual reality, so as a designer and strategist I wanted to dive in and see what the Gear VR would mean for today’s market.

It’s expensive and undercooked

The Gear VR isn’t actually any more affordable than previous Oculus offerings. It requires an investment of about $1300, once you’ve included the Samsung Note 4 smartphone. With the money spent on Gear VR, enthusiasts could build a gaming PC and buy a DK2 for far higher fidelity immersion. Pairing it with a racing wheel and leaning into apexes as you speed around a nearly photo realistic Silverstone circuit just isn’t possible with the power of the Samsung Note 4, nor lack of positional tracking with the Gear VR.

However, a key point of difference using the Gear VR is that you can put yourself inside of a virtual world as far away from a traditional computer as you like. Sitting on a virtual beach with a real breeze at your back and real sun on your face is infinitely more believable than if you’re seated in a computer room.

For anyone expecting that the Gear VR’s 1440p screen would yeild vast improvements, bettering the DK2's 1080p, the resolution benefit is unfortunately undermined by other factors. A slightly reduced field-of-vision, 15Hz lower refresh rate and a difference in optics is where it falls down. The result is more peripheral vision blurriness than I’d had hoped for and slightly more flicker.

There’s not much to do with it

Beyond the barrier of price, if you don’t care for playing games or using it to consume media on your lonesome, there’s the question of what you would even do in virtual reality. Let alone if it you could step in from anywhere.

You should be excited to know that in the near future NextVR plans to offer virtual seats at live music and sporting events. Here in Australia, Realestate.com.au is building a way to let home buyers walk through houses of interest with it as well. Unfortunately there is nothing as compelling as any of that for the Gear VR right this minute.

Be excited anyway

Samsung’s Gear VR won’t be the device that lands virtual reality in the homes of average consumers in high volumes, or a catalyst for reinventing industries. It is however a landmark device for virtual reality. Not because of how good or bad it actually is, but because for many people it’s the first virtual reality experience that is real.

This newfound exposure and availability is of unprecedented importance for virtual reality, along with those who hope to change the world with it. The future is up for grabs, by those who can imagine it.

Now more than ever before there’s an electric bustle amidst the startup scene where design is considered critical, often playing an instrumental role in driving success. But it’s not just startups that are reaping the rewards. Small and large, new and old, companies around the globe are attaching themselves to the importance of user experience, becoming agile, moving design as styling to design as strategy, and cultivating user-centred ways of operating. China’s wildly successful Alibaba is about to go public in the US and is expected to raise more than the Facebook share sale, by putting the shareholders last in their customer-first value system.

The very best businesses are wielding the potential of design thinking to disrupt and differentiate with great success. They’re raising expectations for beauty and utility, empowering people and creating efficiencies in ways that were just recently science fiction.

You only have to look as far as the uptake that Xero’s accounting software is seeing, or the global impact Uber’s ride-sharing service is having, to garner some appreciation for the power of design both in form and function. Their efforts are a stark reminder that the need for design isn’t just to make things look pretty, or even improve usability. Design is delivering value through competitive advantage, increased productivity and ultimately profitability. An evangelist for that business reality, co-founder and Head of Design at Xero, Philip Fierlinger, says, “we’re not a software company. We’re a user experience company.”

The effect of design on company performance and the stock market

As mentioned in my recent article “What UX isn’t”, a 2013 study revealed that design-led companies have outperformed the S&P 500 by an immense 228% over the past 10 years. That number was arrived at by tracking the value of the only 15 companies amidst the S&P that met a strict criteria, including the embedding of design leadership at senior levels and utilising design as an innovation resource. The names of those 15 companies are largely unsurprising, being Apple, Coca Cola, Ford, Herman-Miller, IBM, Intuit, Newell-Rubbermaid, Nike, Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Starwood, Steelcase, Target, Walt Disney and Whirlpool.

In another S&P comparative analysis, Watermark Consulting created two stock portfolios based on Forrester Research’s Customer Experience Index, comprised of the Top 10 and Bottom 10 publicly traded companies ranked on it. From 2007 to 2012, a six-year period that spans recession and recovery periods, the Top 10 customer experience leaders outperformed the S&P with close to triple the returns, at a cumulative total of +43%. The Bottom 10 generated a negative cumulative total return of -33.9%.

Over in Britain, the UK Design Council told us in 2013 that design is linked to profit, and that for every £1 spent on design, businesses see a £4 increase in net operating profit. Back in 2004, the UK Design Council published another report, which found that design-aware companies analysed on the London Stock Exchange from 1994-2003 outperformed FTSE 10 and FTSE All Shares indexes by more than 200%.

Inspired by that 2004 report, the founders of experience design agency Teehan + Lax created the UX Fund in 2006. In that fund were 10 chosen companies who possessed a history of innovation and demonstrated care in the design of their products, such as Google and Netflix. They invested $50,000 of their own money and saw a maturation of +39.3% in the first year alone. By 2011 it had matured a huge +101.8% before the holdings were sold.

I asked agency co-founder Geoff Teehan what the fund might look like now, in 2014. He told me it would be up approximately 205%, but even that would be a conservative estimation as it doesn’t deal with multiple splits.

The effect of user research on design outcomes

Braden Kowitz, a design partner at Google Ventures, recently published an article on The Wall Street Journal on the subject of becoming great at design by listening to your customer. In it he cited one of the Internet’s most popularly misappropriated Henry Ford quotes, being “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” He insinuates that those questions must be asked, and if the answer really was “faster horses,” the interpretation of that insight should be that people feel that getting around is too slow.

Understanding real problems and then designing the right solutions, instead of speculated ones, should make obvious sense to everyone. Yet, common pitfalls continue to be solutions designed by the people who build them without consideration of real users, solutions designed based on the anecdotal ideas of management, solutions designed to match competitors, or solutions designed for new technology with no other reason than “it’s now possible”. Echoing this sentiment was the late Steve Jobs, “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology — not the other way around.”

O2 learned that the hard way, as version 3 of the “My O2” app was designed from a technical rather than a user perspective, consequently being received poorly by the British telco’s customers. When later turning to a new “Customer-Centred Design” process that began with user needs research, future versions went on to save O2 millions of pounds in through reduced support call volumes. Rogers, one of Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, started an intranet redevelopment project by first observing usage and quantifying how long it took staff of to complete tasks. After addressing learned inefficiencies with a new design, employees were saving on average 22 minutes per week, enabling productivity gains worth in excess of $10 million per year. Then there’s Microsoft, who by testing Bing link colours decided on a very specific shade of blue that created an additional $80 million in annual revenue.

While it may seem like all of the required research for informed planning would slow delivery time and increase cost, in fact being user-centred from the very beginning of every design process greatly reduces substantial rework, reveals revenue opportunities and lowers customer support volumes. Tom Gilb famously stated in his timeless reference text, titled “Principles of Software Engineering Management”, that the rule of thumb in many usability-aware organisations is a that a $1 investment in usability returns $10 to $100. He writes that once a system has been released it costs 100 times as much to fix relative to prior.

There’s no longer any doubt about it, the evidence has well and truly mounted. The value of design has grown so bright that it’s now unavoidably blinding. For those who recognise its importance and act upon it, there’s the potential for transformative outcomes that amass advocacy, improve performance metrics of all kinds and propel bottom lines upward. For everyone else, this poignant remark of Ralph Speth, Jaguar CEO, is worth contemplation, “if you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.”