The Project IRIS team went out to the OCE Discovery conference on Monday and Tuesday to check out some of the innovations taking place right here in Ontario as well as taking away from valuable information from the conference presentations. We met a lot of interesting people at the conference and learned about their organizations’ business goals.

I think the biggest take away from the conference was learning about business applications of our fourth-year design project that we didn’t originally think of. There’s a company here in Waterloo dealing with federal government land settlement claims that heavily requires aerial imaging of rural areas and currently relies on aerial imaging from airplanes and satellites which are both quite expensive.

On Tuesday, Alex Fefer and I got up at 5 in the morning to drive back to Toronto to attend Clayton Christensen (pictured above), one of the most famous professors at Harvard Business School, talk about his famous Disruptive Innovation framework (detailed in his book Innovator’s Dilemma). His engaging presentation was hands-down the best presentation I have ever attended.

As an aside, the principles of disruptive innovation are exactly what good user experience in any product should be: solving a customer’s problem. Too much of the time software companies focus on asking the customer what the customers want instead of asking the customers what they are trying to do in the process of product design. This often leads to the companies setting the wrong design goals for their software and tools.

Taking the UW Schedule of Classes as a local example, it’s nice to let the students know about the enrollment capacities and restrictions of a course, but when and why do students access the tool? The obvious answer here is that the students are looking for courses to take. Consequently, the issue here is that by hiring the tool, the student is still missing other pieces of the puzzle. Students pick courses on a multitude of qualification factors such as covered material, dependencies to other courses, term offerings, textbook costs, and quality of instructor. By identifying the problem, we can then start thinking about the solution that we are trying to provide, the user interfaces, the underlying software architecture, and the software design. This leads to products that strongly meets the desirability of the market and wipes out the existing players. The new product may be cheaper and also simpler to maintain. So here, UWLive.ca’s Courselect is the obvious winner in the market of 22,000 undergraduate students. Yea… bet you didn’t see that plug coming. lol.