I am pleased to announce that Sumaiya Elahi has joined the UCSF Library as a user experience (UX) designer. She will work with the library’s UX and marketing teams to deliver inclusive and impactful design. Sumaiya is a multidisciplinary designer and UX strategist with a social welfare, education, and interaction design background. Over the past seven years, she has streamlined complex system processes and enhanced user experiences across various digital touchpoints in academia and healthcare. She began her professional journey managing public health programs in epidemiology and biostatistics at UC Berkeley. The global pandemic marked a turning point in her career, and the shift to remote learning led her to rethink student learning spaces through a critical design lens. Thus, her passion for building meaningful, user-friendly digital experiences in higher education was ignited.
Before joining the UCSF Library, Sumaiya worked as a UX content strategist at the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare. She optimized site content and leveraged data-driven insights to enhance digital marketing and communication efforts for the school’s Master’s of Social Welfare (MSW) program.
Sumaiya holds a bachelor’s degree in social welfare with a minor in education from UC Berkeley and a master’s in human-computer interaction design from the California College of the Arts.
More about Sumaiya
Sumaiya is deeply motivated by community building, social justice, and health equity. Her lived experience as a caregiver inspires her commitment to designing complex, interconnected systems. At the healthcare company Savvy Cooperative, she led the development of a business-to-business software as a service (Saas) portal to facilitate patient recruitment for inclusive clinical research. She partnered with UC Berkeley Online Public Health instructional designers to create inclusive learning content for online Master’s of Public Health (MPH) students. Furthermore, she presented her insights from that collaboration at the 2023 UC Tech Conference.
Sumaiya is thrilled to return to a UX role in higher education. As a lifelong learner, she looks forward to collaborating with library staff and other departments, contributing to rich discussions on accessibility best practices, and advancing her design literacy for the rigors of the 21st century.
Outside of her professional pursuits, Sumaiya enjoys bird watching, painting hyper-realistic landscapes, and hiking the Redwoods in the Oakland hills. She also loves designing her own holiday cards every year, each with a unique theme.
Feature image courtesy of Harpal Singh via Unsplash