Every year, the DevPortal Awards brings the opportunity to recognize excellence in the API landscape and celebrate the teams whose work is essential to evolve the whole industry.
In 2023, 57 developer portals were nominated across 11 categories: Best Served API Business Model, Best International and Localized DevPortal, Best New DX Innovation, Best Community Outreach and Support, Best Use of Analytics in a DevPortal, Best Visual Design, Best Accessible DevPortal, Best API Reference Documentation, Best Findability of Products in a DevPortal, Best Onboarding, and Best Interface Developer Portal.
Table of contents:
- Final results: first gala event
- Final results: second gala event
- Interviews with the jury panel
Final results: first gala event
After thorough consideration, the jury panel announced the awarded portals and runners-up in each category. We are happy to share the results, and hopefully, the jury’s remarks will give a better understanding of the state-of-the-art of developer experience, operational excellence, and business alignment.
First Gala Recording
Best Served API Business Model
Mature developer experience begins before the user writes a code or generates an API key: it is essential to establish a clear relationship between the developer and the vendor.
Awarded devportal: MasterCard Developers
MasterCard Developers has to consider the complexity of their target audiences, from existing partners to established fintechs and early-stage startups: they have to serve many needs on the same portal with a broad scope of products.
As Andrew Cataldo (Manager of Product Development and Innovation, API) highlighted, ‘being a company as big as MasterCard, we are almost playing an internal service provider to the many products that live within MasterCard.’
Finalist: NatWest Bank of APIs
The jury panel highlighted NatWest Bank of APIs’ value proposition and product context, and specifically called out the choice of URL (‘bankofapis.com’). According to the jurors, breaking from ‘developer.[YOUR CORPORATION NAME HERE].com’ worked well. The portal also provides the right content for the right audience.
Best International and Localized DevPortal
The jury panel underlined that ‘our technical world still expects a good grasp of the English language to collaborate with others. So even if your technical skills are excellent, you may feel at a disadvantage if you cannot engage with a developer portal in your country’s language. We were happy to see the entrants in this category and encourage portal owners and portal fans to consider submitting their favorites in this category. That said, it was difficult to choose a winner.‘
Awarded devportal: Bank Negara Indonesia API Portal
The total number of non-Bahasa-speaking visitors to the developer portal is a little less than 20%, so BNI’s decision to localize their developer portal to English is remarkable. The initiative demonstrates BNI’s dedication to better serve the international developer audience and to cater to the needs of developers in a language they’re more familiar with.
This achievement showcases BNI’s commitment to encouraging inclusivity and nurturing user satisfaction.
Best New DX Innovation
The jurors had to ask themselves what innovation means and how to evaluate products that offer very different developer experiences fairly. In 2023, two nominees were awarded. Both presented similarly innovative solutions for interactive code samples, with different audiences and goals, each deserving recognition for the outstanding level of execution and integration with their docs.
Awarded devportals: Miro Developer Platform and React.dev
Miro Developer Platform added interactive code snippets that seamlessly integrate with their documentation and their products, offering unparalleled levels of interactivity and experimentation.
As Mira Balani (Staff Technical Writer) shared with the audience, their developer portal ‘provides both web SDK and REST APIs, which empowers developers to create powerful apps, that in turn, again, empowers their users to collaborate and create the next best thing.’
React.dev does an impressive job at demonstrating the features of the language using the language itself while providing users with a sandbox they can download, fork, and reset at will.
React.dev - as they highlighted on their nomination page - introduced interactive example code at a scale previously unseen in documentation in the frontend library space using CodeSandbox.
All 600+ code examples are manipulable, and in each section’s "code challenges," learners are encouraged to fix broken examples by following clues left by the core team.
The Pronovix UX Research team is specialized in finding out how users in a specific situation think and behave, and what they expect. If you feel that you could benefit from user insights, contact us to find out how we could help!
Best Community Outreach and Support
Developer portals in this category use creative solutions or initiatives to show developers that their work is appreciated. In the downstream developer journey, community and engagement are very important – this is where one helps developers troubleshoot, provide and find solutions, share knowledge and build connections.
Awarded devportal: RingCentral Developers
RingCentral Developers’ community site presents an engaging and easy-to-navigate experience. The “Community” menu option provides developers with several different ways to engage with the community. In addition, RingCentral Developers’ “Game Changers” program rewards top contributors with reputation points and encourages new contributors to participate through challenges that reward accomplishments. They also offer a way to earn prizes.
‘Just building a platform is one thing, but it really depends upon you infusing it with all of that content to keep people engaged’ - Byrne Reese (Product and Platform Specialist).
Special call-out: Miro Developer Platform
The jurors gave Miro’s community site a special mention for linking their product roadmap directly from the developer portal. They appreciated and admired the commitment to transparency that this demonstrates.
Best Use of Analytics in a DevPortal
This category showcases developer portals that provide dashboards or analytics to enhance the developer experience or business value of operating with the documented APIs. Some examples of metrics are a measure of performance, time to first API call, uptime/availability, usability, calls made to the API, issues logged/resolved, number of subscribers/accounts, monetization, and usage statistics.
Awarded devportal: PandaDoc for Developers
PandaDoc boasts a robust feature set for data analysis that sets it apart from its competitors. While it is integrated with the dashboard and not the portal, the analytics use cases are clearly explained in both the support and learning material for PandaDoc with clear annotated screenshots.
Customization helped this Developer Dashboard stand out since it enabled resizing the dashboard and the ability to remove columns to make for a simpler data display. A CSV export function lets you go beyond what is provided by the built-in dashboards and further analyze your data. The chart with Status transition time provides ways to look for efficiencies in the system on both the sender’s processes and the receiver’s time spent signing a document. The data itself aided the jurors’ understanding of the value proposition of the platform.
Best Visual Design
Excellent visual design is more than the platform’s aesthetics: one needs to consider how every aspect of it – design elements, content, navigation – is structured for clarity, usability, and centers support for a great user experience.
Awarded devportal: Viam Documentation Developer Portal
The pages are well organized and consistent in layout and with clear, intuitive navigation. The jurors also noted that the 404 page was very elaborate and actionable in helping guide users back to the catalog.
This award celebrates the intentionality, design effort, vision, and execution in giving developers a smoothly guided journey around the portal. The Viam DevPortal stands out with this. The jurors are sure that it was done with lots of love for Viam’s developers.
Finalist: VTEX Developer Portal
In the case of VTEX, the jurors found the portal's simple, smooth, and clean design to be very elegant and commendable. They also liked the progressive disclosure of the visual journey.
Special call-outs: Spotify for Developers, React.dev, Cloudinary Docs
The jurors enjoyed and found very pleasant the colorful visuals and playfulness of Spotify for Developers.
The jury panel commend the developer portal’s interactivity and community focus. They highlighted that it is perfect for the target audience.
As the jurors underlined, Cloudinary Docs deserves a special call out for its well-structured and detailed guides.
Final results: second gala event
At the second gala, we revealed the finalists and the awarded developer portals in the remaining seven categories, including the two Best Overall awards: SME and Enterprise.
Second Gala Recording
Best Accessible Devportal
An accessible developer portal follows specific, rigorous guidelines and practices in order to cater to all users, with consideration for permanent and situational limitations. The best way to reach this level of inclusivity is to permeate accessibility design principles through every element of the developer portal, instead of treating it as an afterthought.
Awarded devportal: Spotify for Developers
Spotify has a dedicated internal accessibility team, and the DevRel team running the devportal has their integral assistance. When the existing developer portal was revamped, this a11y team helped to improve the user experience. The team behind Spotify for Developers also collaborated with makeitfable.com: the service helps connect to people living with permanent disabilities to engage them to run tests on the developer portal, mimic real-life scenarios, and remark if something needs to be changed.
Spotify for Developers’ accessibility statement is much more than a list of requirements, it is clearly a mindset.
Finalist: Nationwide Partner Portal
As the jurors highlighted, the Nationwide Partner Portal team clearly has an ambition to be accessible, and this is particularly seen in the extra effort on visual feedback for keyboard users.
Special call-out: Chase Developer Portal
In the case of Chase Developer Portal, the demo pages are excellent examples of multimodality - they use a combination of illustrations, instructions and code to communicate efficiently with users with a wide variety of abilities.
Best API Reference Documentation
Success in this category means that a user is experiencing no obstacles when integrating, finding extras to speed up their work, learning how to find support if needed, and figuring out how to maintain an API integration.
These developer portals serve their audience well with an engaging design, reference topics, and being creative in making the API reference documentation journey easy and discoverable. Evaluation includes navigation, appearance, utility, how easy to use, and completeness.
Awarded devportal: React.dev
Combining clarity, strong examples, and a confident leading of the reader along most likely paths, this is both a great site to use, and impressively slick. It teaches well, and doesn’t fall down by getting in the way: snags have been rounded off all along the user journey.
Individual mentions could be made of the “Get Started” section - with its nicely-paced intro, interactive tutorial, and well-considered “Thinking in React” sections; of the well laid out reference, covering use cases, troubleshooting, and clear demonstrations of various UI elements; and the quality of the explanations - but it is the completeness of the package that puts React’s portal ahead in a very strong field.
Special call-out: Spotify for Developers
The jurors praised Spotify for Developers for the quick intro tutorial: users click to run the code sample pre-populated with authorized access to their account, and see their top 5 songs.
Best Findability of Products in a Devportal
In assessing the nominees for Best Findability of Products, the jurors were looking for developer portals which found a way to provide technical depth without compromising the ease of navigation to finding the right product, considering technical and business users.
Awarded devportal: FactSet Developer
FactSet’s developer portal provides a comprehensive experience to discover and find the right product. The jurors believe there is no one golden pathway: users should have the option of multiple navigation paths to find the right outcome.
FactSet embodied that really well with great extra features like connecting solution pages to specific APIs and recipes, along with calling out trending APIs, and having a strong product catalog with filtering and searching.
‘We developed the idea of showcasing the APIs and the context of large solutions, and workflows, making it easy for users to navigate and discover the right product’ - Veni Paladagu (Digital Infrastructure & API Product Manager).
Finalist: Mercedes-Benz / developers
The jurors liked Mercedes-Benz for their strong findability of product across their developer portal. The site is very clean and the product catalog does a great job of displaying the product suite. Not only is the filtering easy to understand, it’s very performant and allows for filtering based on payment packages. Inspiration pages also link nicely to specific APIs, alongside tailored content for developers vs business audiences.
Best Onboarding
Good onboarding in a developer portal gets started with transparent steps to registration and granting access that show what the APIs are about, how they work, how developers can start integrating, and where they can find additional resources. It is important to give just the right amount of information as this is the first impression the users experience.
Awarded devportal: Miro Developer Platform
Miro Developer Platform went above and beyond with an onboarding flow that is clear, simple, and fun. The experience matches the Miro brand and sense of collaboration quite aptly.
When first arriving at the developer portal, they offer a clear path to the initial tutorials. These tutorials are bite-size in scope and require no local setup. There’s a sandbox embedded in the tutorial page itself. The pre-written sample code can be executed with a single click but it can also be modified, allowing experimentation with a rapid feedback loop.
The platform tracks the individual progress as one completes each tutorial, including a tasteful celebratory animation. By completing tutorials, users can earn a series of badges, recognizing the progress on the platform.
Special call-out: Viam Documentation Developer Portal
Viam Documentation Developer Portal received a special mention for providing a robot that could be controlled by a new user within minutes. This is a great example of a low barrier to entry and this can be very attractive to customers who want to try before they commit.
Best Interface Developer Portal
This year, we merged the Best Devportal Beyond REST Platforms & Best Devportal for Citizen Developers categories.
Interface portals are external (business) developer portals that broker a cooperative AND competitive value exchange between an organization and the communities they interact with. Where possible they help developers use technology assets that provide shortcuts around custom API integration (e.g. SDK, app, widget, QR code).
Awarded devportal: VTEX Developer Portal
VTEX Developer Portal packed in a lot of information without compromising whitespace. The site has many areas to explore but does not feel cramped or claustrophobic. They effectively use icons on the left overarching menu to categorize site use cases. Search is a delight to use, which is especially important with so much information.
VTEX delighted the jurors with the human touch: names and profile pictures of the contributors are visible to each page (via GitHub). The pencil icon on each page invites editors to contribute.
Best Overall Developer Portal - SME
Awarded portal: Viam Documentation Developer Portal
The jurors particularly like the aesthetics of this site, in the words of one juror, ‘It reminds me of my early days of programming in the 90's, of terminals where everything was all about the information.’ It's not just about being flashy, but more about presentation.
In a world dominated by pure software products, it’s unique and refreshing to encounter a developer portal bridging the gap to robotics.
It’s one thing to change a few pixels on the screen or a value in some database, it’s another thing entirely to use software to interact with the physical world. The ability to remotely control a robot within minutes of signing-up is undeniably cool.
Best Overall Developer Portal - Enterprise
Awarded devportal: React.dev
The jury put additional emphasis on the following aspects: ‘the cleanness and ease of navigation, of finding information. The portal shows the result of good–and hard to make–decisions on what to present to developers and what to leave out.’
The portal has no login, which of course comes with the territory of the React framework being documented, nevertheless the jury panel celebrates how this instant access contributes to the ease of use.
The "Learn" section being part of the top menu, where new users can get to "hello world!" examples and then build upon that. The makers did a tremendous job in tailoring to audiences at different starting points, breaking down the barriers to early success.
The portal has very good substance, and is built in a way that it is also easy for artificial intelligence to consume.
Most importantly, the jurors' decided to award the Best Enterprise Developer Portal Award to React.dev, because beyond all these aspects, the content is technically very well-written. The jury commented on how the level of technical writing craftsmanship carried this portal to the leading edge, and they would like to see more of such excellent writing in the future. Technical writing is a craft that should be taken seriously.
Improve your developer onboarding and technical documentation, and bring your developer portal to the next level with our Technical Writing services.
Special call-out: Miro Developer Platform
The Miro Developer Platform executes on a very high difficulty score with a great design and an outstanding developer experience component. After onboarding, the user immediately gets the in-the-workspace experience–see the SaaS tool in action on one of their own boards. This embedded interactive experience, which the jurors believe was technically very hard to pull off, was done brilliantly.
The tutorials offer excellent gamification, creating a fun, rewarding experience that builds on itself. The Mironeer community is a holistic proposition with changelog, roadmap, testing out features, going way beyond the basics.
We are deeply thankful to the Jurors for their enthusiastic support and contribution to the community! Their remarks can be an indicator of 2023’s state-of-the-art.
In 2023, API The Docs conference hosted 16 teams of the nominated devportals, who showcased their processes and practices. We collected some of the main takeaways in two articles.
Developer Experience Best Practices »
DevPortal Awards seeks to recognize the most outstanding solutions available today and push the boundaries of what we believe to be the key components of a developer portal for tomorrow. Subscribe to the DevPortal Awards Newsletter to get notifications about nomination, voting, gala event details, and DevPortal Awards winners.
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