A UI/UX designer focuses on the appearance of an interface and how users will use said interface. A content-first designer, a.k.a., a content designer or UX writer, will focus on the content users will interact with.

A while back, in the early days of our design system, we had a ticket for a component sitting in our backlog, with the title “Alert.” My initial reaction was “Oh yeah, a colored box with a little icon to the left of it and some text, easy.” Oh dear reader, how naive I was…