It's Not Just the Words: Candi Williams at Camp Digital 2026
Candi Williams on content design as a linguistic system, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and why treating it as 'just the words' completely misses the point. Also: a form field that saved a company £12 million.
Candi Williams opened by reading out what ChatGPT gave her when she asked how to introduce herself at a conference. Seven hundred words of purple prose about harmonising the symphony of words with the canvas of design. She wasn’t going to use it.
She’s Head of Content Design, with a background in psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, the science of how language shapes what people think, feel, and do.
The talk was structured around a model from linguistics. Three layers: syntax, semantics, pragmatics. Not content design jargon. Just a way of explaining what content designers actually do, and why “just the words” completely misses it.
Syntax is the structure and order of words. She showed two news headlines with the same information structured differently. One used passive voice: the actor is buried, you don’t find out who did what until the end. The other was active: the actor is first, the verb is strong, the meaning is immediate. Same facts. Completely different emotional landing.
This plays out in everything. Error messages, button labels, form instructions. She tested two buttons that said technically the same thing. Tested completely differently with users. The structure is a choice, and it carries meaning.
Semantics is about how words land in terms of comprehension. Two factors shape it: the age at which we learn a word, and how often we use it.
She used the Brexit referendum. “Leave or Remain?” Leave is learned early and used constantly. Remain is a formal verb, learned later, rarely used outside particular contexts. The alternative “Leave or Stay?” would have given a far more accessible second option. Same question, different word, very different ease of processing.
The business impact version: a travel company had two form fields that were confusing users into entering the wrong address. People were failing at the final payment step and either abandoning or calling support. Clarifying the content saved them £12 million.
Pragmatics is the hardest layer and the most important. Language as it exists in social and cultural context. Shaped by background, identity, beliefs.
She gave two examples that stuck.
Last name validation requiring at least three characters. The intention is probably just some developer’s assumption about what a name looks like. But it communicates that names with fewer than three characters, common in many East Asian cultures, are not valid. That’s exclusion baked into a form.
The other example: the way English codes light as pure and good, and dark or black as bad and unethical. It’s so embedded in the language that we use it without noticing. For people of colour, that’s not neutral. There are almost always alternatives. They’re usually clearer too.
The principle: intention doesn’t equal impact. A word that means nothing to you may be genuinely harmful to someone else.
She made the case for accessibility as a content problem, not just a code problem.
The UK average reading age is 9 years old and going down. WCAG, the accessibility standard, breaks down into four things: perceivable, operable, understandable, robust. The content dimension runs through all of them. Are we providing alternatives for people who can’t see or hear? Are we giving instructions that work with screen readers and voice control? Are we designing for comprehension, or just for information presence?
25% of the UK population has a disability. Not designing for accessibility means cutting off a quarter of your potential audience. And clear language isn’t just for disabled users. In an attention economy where everyone is overwhelmed, clarity helps everyone. Whether you’re a doctor, a lawyer, or someone trying to renew their passport, clear language wins.
This connects to a lot of the frontend and accessibility work I’ve been doing at NCC. The technical side (semantic HTML, proper heading structure, keyboard navigation) matters enormously. But so does what’s actually written inside those elements. You can build a perfectly accessible component and still make it unusable with the wrong words in it.
On AI, she gave the most grounded assessment I’ve heard from someone in this space.
AI as an editor: useful. It handles the level-one stuff: Oxford commas, capitalisation, style guide enforcement. There are tools that integrate with Figma and let you embed content guidelines and tone of voice. That’s real value. It stops the same argument about capitalisation from happening at every review.
AI as a writer: jury is very much out, and after four years she’s not seen the quality improve the way she’d expect. The pragmatic layer (cultural context, emotional awareness, what the user is actually trying to do in this moment) is something AI doesn’t have. Often the time you spend prompting and reviewing to get something half-decent is longer than writing it yourself. And AI lies. Consistently. In environments where trust is the foundation of the service, that’s not a small thing.
Her biggest concern wasn’t job replacement. It was the erosion of critical thinking. Writing has always been an exercise in meaning-making. When we outsource that, we lose something that isn’t easy to get back.
She noted, almost in passing: a lot of companies that laid off their content designers are now frantically rehiring.
On working with content designers: the failure mode is bringing them in at the end. The design is done, the wireframes are built, and then you hand it over and expect the content to fit into a space that was designed without any of those constraints in mind. She called it seagull swooping, last-minute chaos that benefits no one.
What works: content involved early, shaping the user story rather than responding to a finished design. Regular check-ins. Access to user research. And meeting invites, which sounds trivial but isn’t, because content designers spend huge amounts of time trying to reconstruct decisions they weren’t present for.
The thing she said mattered most: other people advocating for content when the content designer isn’t in the room. More effective than anything she’s done herself.
And if you have no content designer at all: the design system is the opportunity. Wise’s design system includes content guidance per component alongside the visual specs. Not just what the alert looks like, but how to write it, depending on the user’s context. That’s the model worth following.
She closed with a line from the VP of Design at Figma: the best addition to his design team was a UX writer. Everything is better with them.
Content design isn’t a side dish. It’s at the table.
Candi Williams presented at Camp Digital 2026 at the RNCM in Manchester on 7 May 2026.