Articles

Most organizations never consciously address the experience of the developers that create APIs, the upstream. This is only logical, upstream Developer eXperience doesn’t always need attention: a team that is dedicated to APIs will overcome friction on its own terms. In large enterprise organizations, however, where API development might be a secondary priority of a team, upstream DX can make the difference between a failed and a successful digital transformation initiative.

The goal of our API Documentation Apprenticeship program is dual. It provides technical writer skills for our clients and it is an opportunity for novice API documentarians to gain credentials by working on enterprise projects under the guidance and supervision of experienced mentors.

In the third part of the series we focus on companies that provide APIs in the field of telecommunication. We included examples both from telecommunication carriers such as Orange or Telenor and from API vendors such as Nexmo or Twilio.

Infographic: What Is a Developer Portal? A trust signal for your API. A self-service hub. A dashboard for your API products. A list of endpoints is not enough.

The financing industry offers so many good examples of developer portals that after focusing on traditional banking APIs in the first part of our series, we felt the need to continue with various portals from the FinTech area. As opposed to banks, most companies in this group were born into the digital / API world.

PSD2 and a swarm of Fintech guerilla competitors are shaking up the banking sector. A large number of financial institutions decided to embrace the change, and to execute an Open banking strategy. As a direct result, a lot of new APIs and developer portals for banking services are now available on the public web. From the numerous developer portals we found, we’ve selected some of the best portals that demonstrate the innovations and best practices to enhance developer experience in the banking context.

In this series we will look into some of the best and most innovative practices developer portals from various industries use to anticipate on the possible expectations of developers.

In this post, we explore how developer marketing practices can help to motivate & engage users and improve DX along the downstream developer journey stages in order to generate a viral loop — i.e. the process in which your acquired users become portal advocates and help drive adoption on your developer portal.

Developer portals play not only a technical role, they also play a somewhat obscure commercial role. We don't like to say that this is a commercial site, but actually it is also about promotion. You have to explain what you do – preferably not in a hard-core manipulative way. For that, you need more than reference docs. How to get started? What does that API do? A lot more than just the very technical aspects need to be explained.

A less well circulated purpose of developer portals is their being a trust signal. They engender trust by showing how much investment went into building that portal. They have to show that the API services documented on that portal will keep on existing and will get reliable support long term.

API friction can be seen as the inverse of developer experience, and it is a great conceptual device to help you identify issues in your API products. To create a great developer experience (DX), it is important to remove as much friction as possible from the developer’s journey.

Recording of our presentation at the CIDM IDEAS 2018 Online Conference about API Documentation Best Practices.