Wojtek is a content designer and strategist with 25 years of experience building content systems for complex digital products — banking, healthcare, data analytics, and enterprise software. He works at the intersection of UX writing, design systems, and engineering workflows. In 2023, he published UX Writing: The Power of Language in Digital Products. Philologist and IT specialist by training.
[ENG] UX content as a CMS stress test: Two ontologies, one missing layer
UX content (microcopy) – field labels, validation messages, empty states – may look simple. It doesn't. When you try to manage it through a classic CMS, something breaks. Not because the tools are bad, but because they were built on a different model of what content is. Classic CMS architecture treats content as an autonomous object with metadata. Design systems treat content as a context-dependent element: its meaning, constraints, and validity are defined by its position in a component hierarchy. These are two different ontologies that no amount of configuration bridges that gap cleanly. This talk uses UX content as a stress test for CMS architecture. We'll examine: * where the model breaks, * why translation management systems have accidentally become the closest thing to a UX content layer, * what it costs teams to work around a structural mismatch – including encoding design hierarchy into key names just to know what a string is for. The takeaway is a model for the synchronization layer that doesn't yet exist as a product, but whose requirements we can now name precisely.