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Using Peer-Customers to Scalably Pair Student Teams with Customers for Hands-on Curriculum Final Projects

Edward Jay Wang

TL;DR

The paper proposes Peer-Customers, a scalable mechanism to pair student teams with in-class peers who act as customers without joining the build process. By requiring personal, pitch-based needs, combining class voting with instructor curation, and scheduling structured in-class activities (meetings, presentations, and surveys), the approach emulates external customer feedback while controlling instructor burden. Case studies show that focal customer needs drive prioritization, design probes enable rapid feedback, and the client–agency dynamic emphasizes solution development tailored to a real customer rather than broad product discovery. The findings support peer-customers as an effective, scalable means to provide authentic hands-on learning experiences in undergraduate design courses, with actionable guidance on engagement, evaluation, and ownership. Overall, the method offers a practical blueprint for scalable customer curation in hands-on curricula with measurable incentives and participation structures.

Abstract

Peer-customer is a mechanism to pair student teams with customers in hands-on curriculum courses. Each student pitches a problem they want someone else in the class to solve for them. The use of peer-customers provides practical and scalable access for students to work with a customer on a real-world need for their final project. The peer-customer, despite being a student in the class, do not work on the project with the team. This dissociation forces a student team to practice customer needs assessment, testing, and surveying that can often be lacking in self-ideated final projects that do not have resources to curate external customers like in capstone courses. We prototyped the use of peer-customers in an introductory physical prototyping course focused on basic embedded systems design and python programming. In this paper, we present a practical guide on how best to use peer-customers, supported by key observations made during two separate offerings of the course with a total of N=64 students (N=29 Y1 and N=35 Y2).

Using Peer-Customers to Scalably Pair Student Teams with Customers for Hands-on Curriculum Final Projects

TL;DR

The paper proposes Peer-Customers, a scalable mechanism to pair student teams with in-class peers who act as customers without joining the build process. By requiring personal, pitch-based needs, combining class voting with instructor curation, and scheduling structured in-class activities (meetings, presentations, and surveys), the approach emulates external customer feedback while controlling instructor burden. Case studies show that focal customer needs drive prioritization, design probes enable rapid feedback, and the client–agency dynamic emphasizes solution development tailored to a real customer rather than broad product discovery. The findings support peer-customers as an effective, scalable means to provide authentic hands-on learning experiences in undergraduate design courses, with actionable guidance on engagement, evaluation, and ownership. Overall, the method offers a practical blueprint for scalable customer curation in hands-on curricula with measurable incentives and participation structures.

Abstract

Peer-customer is a mechanism to pair student teams with customers in hands-on curriculum courses. Each student pitches a problem they want someone else in the class to solve for them. The use of peer-customers provides practical and scalable access for students to work with a customer on a real-world need for their final project. The peer-customer, despite being a student in the class, do not work on the project with the team. This dissociation forces a student team to practice customer needs assessment, testing, and surveying that can often be lacking in self-ideated final projects that do not have resources to curate external customers like in capstone courses. We prototyped the use of peer-customers in an introductory physical prototyping course focused on basic embedded systems design and python programming. In this paper, we present a practical guide on how best to use peer-customers, supported by key observations made during two separate offerings of the course with a total of N=64 students (N=29 Y1 and N=35 Y2).
Paper Structure (24 sections, 7 figures)

This paper contains 24 sections, 7 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Peer-Customers
  3. Customer Pitches
  4. Customer Selection
  5. Customer Pairing
  6. Class Activities for Customer Engagement
  7. In-class customer meetings
  8. In-class presentations
  9. Customer Survey
  10. Sample Course Schedule
  11. Case Studies and Key Observations
  12. What The Customer Wants Is What Matters, Not What the Professor Wants
  13. Using Design Probes to Gain Customer Feedback
  14. Solution Development not Product Development
  15. Project Fit
  16. ...and 9 more sections

Figures (7)

  • Figure 1: Examples of suitable and not suitable customer pitches
  • Figure 2: Schema of development team and customer pairing.
  • Figure 3: In class activity allows the development team to meet with their peer-customer. The peer-customer simply rotate by one table and rotate back to their table at the end of the class activity.
  • Figure 4: Left: Customer showing the team what the form factor they need. Right: Customer testing the prototype.
  • Figure 5: Sample Schedule of a 10-week Quarter
  • ...and 2 more figures