Beyond the Job Title: User Experience Designer

A library tech job interview with Axa Liauw

Posted on February 2, 2026 in Job Profiles

Core to LibTech Insights’s mission is demystifying the broad and dynamic field of tech librarianship in higher ed. In this series, we interview a librarian every month to learn a little more about their position. As library tech jobs proliferate, they sometimes come with unfamiliar, jargony, or intimidating titles. We want to go beyond the title and look at the responsibilities, skills, and joys that make up the job. We hope this series will increase your knowledge of library tech jobs and skills and offer you greater insight into the working lives of your colleagues.

For this installment, we spoke to Axa Liauw to learn more about her job as a User Experience Designer. Check out our archive of job profiles. 💫

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What is your job title and responsibilities?

I’m the Interim Head of Library Access & Discovery Interfaces at UCLA Library, and I also serve as the Library’s Lead User Experience Designer. In short, I help make sure our digital spaces—our main website, research guides, search tools, and other online platforms—are usable, accessible, and genuinely helpful to the people who rely on them.

A lot of my work sits at the intersection of design and strategy. I lead the UX design for major projects, coordinate with developers and content experts, and help shape how our digital ecosystem evolves over time. I also maintain our design system, which keeps everything consistent and easier to build and maintain.

I manage a small team of student UX designers, which has become one of my favorite parts of the job. They bring so much creativity and curiosity, and I love helping them find their footing in real-world design work. And in my Interim Head role, I also lead a team of talented front-end developers and a dedicated visual designer, whose work brings our digital interfaces to life, as we continue improving the library’s digital experience.

Overall, my role is about making sure our digital services feel coherent, intuitive, and responsive to user needs—whether that means redesigning a full website, running usability tests, or making small improvements that smooth out someone’s research process.

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What attracted you to UX, and how did you shape your career to get into this field?

I was drawn to UX because it brings together creativity, problem-solving, and empathy in a way that just made sense to me. I’ve always been fascinated by how people interact with interfaces—both physical and digital—and why some designs feel effortless while others create friction. UX gave me the language and tools to understand those patterns and actually do something about them.

My path into the field wasn’t linear. I started by teaching myself front-end development as a kid in the ’90s, taking websites apart to figure out how they worked under the hood. Later, I worked at a print shop, which helped me learn design tools and understand visual communication. In library school, I found myself gravitating toward human–computer interaction, which pulled everything together.

From there, I held a mix of roles that shaped my career: I served as a Web and User Interface Librarian at Wayne State University, worked as a web developer at Princeton University Library (where I also became certified in web accessibility through the IAAP CPWA program), and eventually landed at UCLA. In all of those roles, I found myself wanting to collaborate more closely with stakeholders and users and to think about digital experiences more holistically—which naturally led me deeper into UX.

Libraries turned out to be the perfect home for this work. The mission is fundamentally about access, and UX is fundamentally about removing barriers—whether that’s confusing navigation, inaccessible content, or workflows that don’t reflect how people actually search for information. That alignment is what keeps me energized.

What I love most today is that UX lets me make a meaningful difference in someone’s research or learning experience. Sometimes, that’s through a major redesign; other times, it’s a tiny tweak that makes a workflow noticeably smoother. Both matter—and I love the moments when something we’ve built doesn’t just remove friction but adds a bit of delight to someone’s interaction with the library.

Can you give us an example of a project you’ve worked on in this role?

One of the most impactful projects I’ve worked on in this role is the creation and ongoing evolution of UCLA Library’s design system. We developed it to bring greater consistency, accessibility, and efficiency to our digital ecosystem—while still allowing flexibility for different audiences and contexts.

The design system defines shared visual styles, interaction patterns, and accessibility standards that we use across our platforms. It helps our teams move faster and collaborate more effectively, but most importantly, it ensures that users encounter familiar, predictable patterns no matter which part of the library’s digital environment they’re navigating. That consistency builds trust and reduces cognitive load, especially for users who are already juggling the complexity of research.

A great example of the design system in action is the recently launched website for the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The Archive has a distinct identity and audience, so the site needed its own visual presence and personality. At the same time, it was important that it still felt clearly connected to the broader UCLA Library ecosystem.

Using the design system made that balance possible. The site has its own voice and character, but it shares underlying structure, accessibility practices, and interaction patterns with our other library sites. As a result, it feels like part of the same family without being a carbon copy, and it provides users with a cohesive experience when they’re moving between the Archive and other library services.

Projects like this really capture what I enjoy about the work: using systems-level thinking and user-centered design to support both consistency and individuality, while making our digital spaces clearer, more inclusive, and easier to use.

Having a team of student UX designers seems like a really exciting opportunity. Can you say more about the work that you do with these students?

Working with student UX designers is one of the most energizing parts of my job. These students contribute to real library projects—not hypothetical exercises—which gives them meaningful, hands-on experience while also strengthening our design work.

A great example is their involvement in the iterative design and user research for the UCLA Film & Television Archive website. The students helped with early concept development, prototyping, and usability testing, and they played a key role in gathering user feedback early in the process. At one point, they conducted guerrilla usability testing at the Billy Wilder Theater, home to the Archive’s public programming, where they spoke directly with audience members and tested design concepts in a real-world context. That kind of in-the-moment research helped us validate assumptions and identify usability issues before designs were finalized.

More broadly, I mentor the students through the full UX process—user research, wireframing, prototyping, usability testing, and documentation—while helping them understand how individual design decisions connect to larger organizational goals. We spend a lot of time talking about design rationale: not just what we’re building, but why.

What I love most is watching their confidence grow. Many come in unsure of their skills, and over time, they begin advocating for users, presenting design work to stakeholders, and seeing their ideas go live in production. They also bring fresh perspectives and curiosity that constantly challenge my own assumptions, which makes the mentorship feel very reciprocal.

It’s especially rewarding to support students doing UX work in a library setting, where empathy, access, and service are central values—and where their work can have a real, visible impact on how people engage with the library.

What is a resource you’d recommend to a librarian or library school student who is interested in dipping their toes in UX?

I’d recommend starting with Nielsen Norman Group. Their articles are clear, practical, and grounded in research, which makes them especially approachable if you’re new to UX. You don’t need a design background to understand their guidance, and many of their examples translate well to library contexts.

For something more hands-on, I encourage people to start small and local. That might mean conducting an informal usability test with a colleague, sketching out a better version of a library webpage that causes friction, or reviewing a digital service with accessibility in mind. UX is a practice as much as a discipline, and learning by doing is incredibly powerful.

I’d also point out that most library schools already offer coursework that supports UX work, even if it isn’t labeled explicitly as “UX.” Classes in web development, human–computer interaction, and information architecture all provide a strong foundation and help build the skills needed to think critically about digital experiences.

Finally, I’d remind librarians and students that you don’t need a formal “UX” title to do UX work. If you’re asking questions about users, observing how people interact with systems, and advocating for clearer, more inclusive experiences—you’re already doing UX.

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