Finding the right course of study - with the digital Bachelor Compass of the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences

Every year, new young people interested in studying come to the university's website to find the ideal course for them. However, a flood of results does not make the search easy, and comparing them with other courses of study takes a lot of time.

The idea

Every year, the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences hosts the Campus Day. This gives prospective students an insight into the various courses of study and provides information and advice to young visitors. It is intended to show them their way into studying. Due to the current situation, however, the Campus Day could not take place as usual and therefore had to be virtualized as much as possible. So the university thought about it and developed a concept for the digital study search with us.

A network of complex calculations

We decided to build a so-called Bachelor's Compass, which is intended to guide visitors to their individual Bachelor's degree course through their own interactivities. With such a tool, every activity that the visitor meets and clicks on has to be calculated and adjusted to the result. This means that every image, every checkbox and every further click has its own value and must also be able to be combined with all others.

Therefore, the compass is based on a four-level rating system, which calculates so-called fitting values or misfit values. The special challenge was the optimized user experience as well as the mobile implementation, since the compass is mainly based on many graphics (optimized SVGs for display in different browsers) and interactivities. A big challenge was also the final graphic of the compass, which should show the way to the study courses with all different directions. Furthermore, the complete project had to be finished by June 20th. A well coordinated project schedule was therefore an important factor for the success of this feature.

Goal

The goal of the Bachelor's Compass is to enable prospective students to have fun in their search and not to build it up too confusing and text overloaded. Therefore we designed a very friendly concept together with the HS Karlsruhe with many graphic elements, pictures and storytelling. This made the university a pioneer for such a tool, as there is no such thing in this form yet. Using the finished implementation is fun and provides the necessary motivation for searching in a very playful way.

The cooperation

In this project it was important to cooperate continuously due to the short time frame and thus to achieve a fast but clean result. Agile cooperation and daily updates made this possible and led us to a successful result.

Foresight

We think: The end result is definitely worth seeing and will continue to be maintained by us. In the future, the compass will be available in more languages and we are also planning to optimize the interactivity. Those who would like to test it can click on the link and find the best course of study for themselves. 

https://www.hs-karlsruhe.de/bachelor-kompass/