Analyze online reviews to discover pain points to inform a design-build-test.

This project is part of a senior level, electrical engineering course called System Design at Ohio Northern University. Teams of 3-4 students work together to discover customer pain points of an online product using customer reviews with the aim to improve the product. The project involves a design-build-test culminating in a working prototype of the electronic improvements of the product.

The project is one aspect of a lab course that meets once per week for 3 hours. The class typically has 12-16 students, but many aspects of this project would scale to a class of any size due to the self-directed nature of the project. The project spans over 5 weeks for a total of 9.5 hours of class time. The deliverables include a written report, design presentation, and 5-minute prototype demonstration.

At ONU, students evaluate the Wondermill Electric Grain Mill, available on Amazon. This specific product could be used by any electrical engineering instructor teaching electronics, systems engineering, or sensors and actuators. The main idea of using online customer feedback to discover customer pain points, which inform a redesign of an existing product, could be adopted by instructors in any discipline involved in the development of consumer products. Be sure the product selected is relevant for your course, has many reviews available, has relatively straightforward, value-add modifications that could be done to it inexpensively, and be sure the modifications could be prototyped in the timescale of the course (if desiring students to follow through with the design-build-test aspect).