I cannot stress this enough! So I thought I would take some time and write something to try and express the importance that it holds for a new Mega Industry that is mostly still up for grabs if anyone hasn't noticed yet.
REMEMBER: User-Centered Design no longer revolves only around how the user interacts with a User Interface or how to best design the UX to get the best user experience from a particular interaction with your brand or application.
In the world of IoT, it is now more important to think about placing the user in the center of the world! Hence, it is rather about how the user interacts with objects or things that are connected to the internet, but also important to stress is that the user walks around by using their own "intranet" or private network throughout the world using Blockchain enabled networks!
Thinking differently about how the user now uses day to day objects and how we can harvest the data by using a private network to communicate with the things on the Internet of Things, therefore opens up new doors and potentially a whole new industry or organization the size of Google per say.
We need to start thinking about objects and the kind of data that could benefit a user while walking around in the real-world. Also thinking about how best to organize these things onto a duplicated Virtual World that resembles the real world. Thus tracking everything on the internet of things.
I do see Wearables growing in the coming year or two which would have your banking as an enablement layer by default as part of the communication between things. I always saw data to be transparent on the things that a user would interact with throughout the world, but a new organization is needed similar to what Google or other search engines has been doing by harvesting web content and providing an easy way to search for them using search engines. Now only an organization that specializes in the field of establishing a mechanism for a user's wearables to security search and exchange data throughout the world the user finds themselves in.
Another key component would be to do away with passwords and start thinking about a single digital identity with a single Identity and Access Management solution to enable the user's wearables (enablers or interactors) to authenticate and be authorized based authority, finances, education and even criminal records.
A big driver for this to all happen, is having an approach of putting finances as merely an enabler! I like to think that this could all run on a type of blockchain VPN, where you should now be able to use a transactional approach where based on a person's identity and finances (in the case where interacting with some things would be billable), their digital identity would be able to have more access to things around it, therefore purchasing time or in other words, exchanging data that is available to the user where ever he/she might find themselves in the real-world.
Oh man, I would love to see passwords become a thing of the past. I'm actually really curious if we can ever manage to really get rid of them, at least I've been able to make my life about easier by using my Google account to log in to many places lately.
I wonder if block chain will provide a solution to this? I know a couple of blockchain based technologies are already aiming to become decentralised identity providers (blockstack for example), maybe that will make the whole authentication problem yet a little easier?
I do believe that with biometrics we could replace passwords in the near future. My thinking is to make use of biometrics and blockchain, which could give us auditing of access management all together. Tying such a solution then to an IAM (Identity and Access Management) solution, we might even be able to provide a single identity over the internet. Where we could then provide access to many things based on your location, skills and even medical history. Having a single identity could even unlock or do away with passports all tegether?
Looking at IAM, we have been doing this for years in the Banking sector. Would be interesting to see this scaled up into social media. But I guess like you said, with Google we are already doing this. They would probably be the at the best position to scale this. But I would like to see more whistles and bells added such as by those provided by e.g. IBM