Someone is now meddling with a billion-dollar secret, but they are completely unaware of what is going on. According to Peter Thiel, a Stanford University professor, “what people aren’t telling you may very regularly offer you with great insight on where you should be investing your attention.”

People are either unable or unwilling to divulge the secrets of Thiel’s most lucrative investments, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as many other innovative enterprises from the last decade. The kind of ideas Thiel describes the kinds of insights that may propel a firm from obscurity to billion-dollar status in a couple of years are not exclusive to those who have access to large sums of money. However, it is more probable that a determined entrepreneur with a big concept, a sharp mind, and a valuable secret will create the next great software firm.

Where have all of the Web’s new secrets gone?

Observations of human behaviour that provide insights into how people act despite their inability to explain why they do so, I believe, are levers for developing user habits and creating a competitive advantage. Such secrets are also quite cheap to unearth, despite the fact that they have the potential to serve as the basis for big corporations.

Only huge businesses have the resources to unearth secrets that can be turned into profits in the past. While GE, Dupont, Chrysler, and IBM concentrated their efforts on identifying the optimal form of physical objects throughout the twentieth century, the majority of their ideas were buried in the field of industrial design. These organisations had to spend a lot of money on research and development in order to figure out how to manufacture a better, cheaper, or faster product once they discovered the secrets.

In this day and age, as software continues to absorb the world, web-based startups are upending traditional service industries. Interface and systems design secrets are being leveraged by a new generation of entrepreneurs, like Airbnb, DropBox, and Square, to create better user experiences. These firms find new ways to tackle old problems by introducing new user behaviours using web-based interfaces.

Changing the user interface will cause the whole universe to shift.

If people’s relationships with technology change substantially, expect a plethora of secrets to become accessible for harvesting. Changes to the user interface make a wide range of tasks much easier to do all at once. As a consequence, as the amount of effort required to do an activity decreases, the quantity of time spent doing it tends to grow. As a result of a change in the user interface, there is a long history of technology companies and internet enterprises that have made their fortunes by revealing behavioural secrets that have become obvious:

Apple and Microsoft were successful in transforming DOS terminals into graphical user interfaces that were usable by the general public after a long period of development. In contrast to ad-heavy and difficult-to-use competitors such as Yahoo, Google has simplified the search experience for users.

The creation of user interfaces for Facebook and Twitter was aided by new behavioural insights that made online social interactions more convenient. A new interface simplified an activity in each case, while simultaneously providing stunning data about how individuals engage online as a result of the change.

Examples of organisations that have profited from behavioural insights coming from interface adjustments include Instagram and Pinterest, to name a few examples from the recent past. A new understanding of the addictive nature of an online catalogue was provided by Pinterest’s capacity to produce a rich canvas of photographs, which was accomplished via cutting-edge user interface improvements at the time.

The camera integration into smartphones represented a paradigm leap in Instagram’s UI. Instagram found that the quality of photographs taken with cellphones increased when using its low-tech filters to enhance them. Taking beautiful photographs with your phone has become considerably easier, and Instagram has taken use of this newfound expertise to attract a large number of enthusiastic photographers.

Technology is progressing at a faster rate than we as a species are as a species. It is ruining us and making us even more obtuse. When we don’t comprehend anything, we turn to Google for help. For a little while, we are reminded of the truth before it is lost to us. We’ll have to look it up again just to make sure we remember what we’ve learnt. As a consequence of technology improvements, traditional classrooms are becoming outdated as well. Our houses provided us with a comfortable environment in which to study everything we needed. It even has an effect on how we connect with other people on a daily basis.

“According to Microsoft, the average human attention span the amount of time we can devote to a single task without being distracted has plummeted below the level achieved by goldfish.” (Pike and Thirkettle, for example) It is more difficult to realise the whole tale of whatever it is that you are seeking to comprehend when your attention span is less. The rewiring of our brains that has occurred as a result of technological advancements has allowed us to think in new ways.