Designing DAAD's My GUIDE for Global Education

Connecting students worldwide with German education opportunities

With My GUIDE, we have made it easier for international prospective students to find their way to Germany, and with the DAAD advisor tool, we have strengthened the global advisory network. But one group has long been left out: the universities. Their mailboxes were overflowing with identical inquiries: “When does the semester start?”, “How does enrollment work?”, “What language skills do I need?” Although the answers were available online, prospective students preferred to seek direct contact.

This led to overload at the universities, long response times, and frustration on both sides. With automated responses, we have now also relieved this third user group and expanded the My GUIDE ecosystem.

A clear focus on the needs of universities and prospective students

To provide universities with lasting relief, we worked with the My GUIDE team to develop a new feature: automated responses. Instead of answering each inquiry individually, prospective students now first select from a range of topics, such as admission requirements, applications, or student financing. This results in two simple options:

• When it comes to general information, users receive an immediate response via email with verified standard information.

• For specific inquiries, there is still the possibility to send an email with the inquiry to the university.


This ensures that universities remain accessible, while the lion's share of inquiries are answered automatically by email.

To make such a complex system user-friendly, we combined several methods:

To make such a complex system user-friendly, we combined several methods:

• Close collaboration with Development to ensure that technical requirements and design mesh seamlessly.

• Clear understanding of user problems, developed from university feedback and student journeys. Particularly important: universities are understandably reluctant to create additional accounts—especially since My GUIDE is not the only source for inquiries. That's why we kept the entire onboarding process as simple as possible: no additional login, but direct verification via the existing university email address.

• Iterative prototyping, which helped to visualize complex processes and get stakeholders on board early on.

• Detailed user flow mapping that revealed unnecessary obstacles—and eliminated them.


Transforming complex educational data into intuitive pathways for students

As the lead UX/UI agency since 2021, we've crafted an experience that works for students regardless of their origin. Our approach included:

• AI-supported content seeding automatically generates a draft text for each topic based on official university websites. This saves universities additional effort and ensures that students receive reliable information quickly.

• Custom Editor enables universities to adapt and supplement this content or add their own notes and events.

• Deliberate activation per topic ensures that only verified content goes live.

• Access without a new login – verification via existing university email addresses is sufficient to use the service securely.

• Marketing as an incentive: Universities can also use their reply emails to draw attention to other university activities.

Early results and outlook

The automated replies have been live since the end of June 2025 and are already being used by the first universities. Initial feedback has been very positive: above all, the ability to review and approve AI-generated drafts with just a few clicks is noticeably reducing the workload in everyday university life.

Specific data on the reduction in inquiries or usage rates is not yet available. This will be included in the case study once the feature has been in use for longer and reliable results are available.