Content design team at Urban Company is the largest team within Design. This team has deployment engineers, content analysts (who double up as project managers), content designers, writer, and motion graphic designers.

At the core of it, written content is king (or queen); basically, it's important. Be it for paragraphs, lines, or words that'd show up on the App UI, description pages, or scripts for videos, labels for a graphic, or even a thank you letter one would receive in a box of UC products.

I personally wrote, and edited copy for our apps in 2021 for 9 months before hiring our first content writer. Since then, my regards for good writing for apps and in general has only gone up. I have taken help from multiple books, recommendations, videos to help myself and the team to produce great content.

Here are the books that helped me the most:

1. Thing explainer: Randall Munroe explains some of the most complicated things in the world using only the 1,000 most common english words. Challenges your normal way of explaining things. I have gifted this book several times over the years.

2. Terribly tiny tales: Tiny stories written in 140 characters or less. Teaches you how to communicate more with least number of words.

3. 99 ways to tell a story: One simple story. Told in 99 different ways. It's brilliantly done and teaches you to exercise thinking in various ways to say the same thing; each slightly different. Great exercise book.

4. A twitter year: Picked it up at the airport. A collection of the year's key events, emotions, etc. in 140 characters or less. Similar to TTT, lots of powerful examples on explaining more with less words.

5. Three other books that I love & keep around to refer regularly are: Bird by bird, It was the best of sentences it was the worst of sentences, and the elements of style (illustrated version).

Hope you enjoy them!