Libby's Story

​Picture the Bay Area in the mid-1990s — this wonderful collision of art schools, feminist theory, experimental music, and the early digital tide rolling in. Mills College sits right in the middle of that swirl. It’s a place that tends to shape people into hybrids: part artist, part thinker, part builder. That’s the soil Libby grew from.

From Mills, she carried two things forward: a sharpened sense of language and structure — the English major’s superpower — and a habit of approaching problems as puzzles with emotional weight. That combination is surprisingly perfect for UX, even though the term wasn’t widespread yet.

Fast-forward to Microsoft. Think of it as a massively different ecosystem: corporate, technical, scaled to the point of surrealism. But the job itself — designing interactions, sculpting information, smoothing chaos into a path someone can follow — that’s pure Mills DNA. Microsoft’s teams in the 2000s were full of people inventing the early rules of what digital experience should feel like, and Libby’s work threaded right into that.

What makes her story interesting isn’t just the résumé dots, but the way they rhyme with each other. Mills taught her how people make meaning. Microsoft taught her how to build the scaffolding for millions of people to navigate that meaning every day. Then you look at the more recent turn toward library and information science, and it clicks naturally into place. UX, libraries, archives, taxonomies, metadata — it’s all the same instinct: take a tangled world and make it navigable. The librarian is the information architect is the UX designer is the writer who wants ideas to land softly where they’re meant to. The through-line isn’t tech or academia or design. It’s the impulse to bring order to the human experience without flattening its weirdness. That’s the quiet heartbeat under the whole story.