Alumni community platform
UNISR is a community platform for Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, connecting current students, alumni and faculty across very different careers, faculties and locations. What started as an alumni directory grew, over months of iteration, into a personalized network with mentorship, job opportunities, news and events. As the agency’s lead Product Designer on the project, I was responsible for turning that growing complexity into a design system disciplined enough to scale without breaking.
The project
From an alumni website to an alumni network. The project evolves the UNISR alumni portal from a primarily informational website into a platform capable of creating relationships between former students and maintaining the connection with the university after graduation, bringing together alumni from medicine, psychology and philosophy.
A potential community of around 13,000 alumni. How do you turn a database into a community?
Not a list of profiles. A network of useful connections.
Research & product definition
Understanding what makes an alumni network useful meant identifying the information needed to turn a simple list into something explorable: academic background, professional experience, location, interests, availability and participation in the alumni ecosystem. These dimensions shaped both the profile structure and how people, content and opportunities could be discovered.
Core solution
The directory became the heart of the experience
Not simply a list of profiles: a tool for searching, filtering and exploring alumni through the information that actually makes a connection useful.
From profiles to relationships
Mentorship
A directory tells you who’s there. Mentorship gives you a reason to connect: finding professionals available for support and exchange based on academic area, expertise and availability.
Building value around the network
Around the directory, the experience expands with services that give alumni new reasons to return.
Job board
Professional opportunities for the alumni community: roles and collaborations through search, filters and detailed opportunities.
Events
From digital content to real participation: webinars and meetings through filters and calendar views.
News
Keeping the relationship with UNISR alive: editorial updates from the university, research and the wider community.
The more it knows, the more relevant it becomes
To avoid offering the same experience to thousands of different alumni, the profile was designed as a progressive source of information: professional background, academic area, location, interests, hobbies, sports and community participation, used to make people, content and opportunities increasingly relevant.
Turning profile completion into participation
Progress indicators, contextual suggestions and badges, such as mentor, 10+ years experience, job contributor, alumni UNISR and speaker, make participation visible and communicate not only who the alumni is, but how they contribute to the network.
Academic area · Professional role · Location · Interests · Sports & hobbies · Community activity
One platform. More relevant experiences.
More relevant people, mentors, jobs, events, news and learning opportunities.
One ecosystem. Multiple reasons to come back.
Discover → Connect → Grow → Participate → Contribute
Directory · Mentorship · Job board & learning · Events & news · Profile & community
From portal to alumni ecosystem
The resulting product concept brings a potential community of around 13,000 alumni into a single experience, where the directory acts as the starting point for networking, mentorship, professional opportunities, events and content, able to evolve through progressive profiling and personalization as alumni interact with the platform.
A community becomes valuable when people can find each other, and have a reason to connect.
Want to go deeper into this project? Write to me.
hello@dariozanna.com