Articles

What information will help you outline what content and functionality should be in your portal? When should you integrate with 3rd party systems? Why is information architecture a vital base for your DevPortal?

Should use cases and case studies be part of your API documentation? They play two crucial roles on a developer portal: They act as social proof for your API product (sales function) and they can be an introduction to more specific, implementation scenario documentation types. We explored these fringe documentation types, both on business sites and developer portals, of 18 API companies with different profiles.

The author examined 23 blogs to explore how they can serve the portal users’ needs throughout the 6 stages of the developer journey.

The main purpose of Platform Software Development Kits and Helper/Client Libraries is to accelerate and simplify development. A well maintained SDK is a trust signal that indicates the level of support and usage of your API for a language, framework, or development platform. In this post, we’ll look at how the developer portals in our research sample included SDKs.

Self-service support is arguably the most important role of a developer portal. In absence of proper documentation, API teams can spend hours on training, onboarding, and support effort. In this post we analyze the characteristics of a number of support resources and look at how they involve their users to develop information about the problem areas for an API’s use.

The function of the guides and tutorial pages that are linked from an onboarding page is to fulfill the expectation of learning and to design an experience that will be as close as possible to the learning requirements of key audience segments. In this post, we will explore how the sites we reviewed included guides and tutorials in their information architecture, we’ll look at what they covered, and finish with listing what could help to maximize their effectiveness.