Industry: Energy
The most recent collaboration between the Company and Pronovix started in 2021 with User Experience and Technical Writer review. The aim was to create a status report of the developer portal’s state at that time. Based on that, and after mapping out the needs and how Pronovix best can serve the Company's goals with the Zero Gravity Developer Portal solutions, a closer collaboration has been started.
The recent developer portal went live in 2022 and offers solutions for enterprises and startups. With explicit onboarding materials and detailed API descriptions, the portal caters to business and technical personas. As of 2023, the two companies work together in close collaboration, in the form of further customization, hosting and support.
A Few Highlights: Services
Information Architecture (IA) workshop: The Information Architecture workshop aimed to provide advice and guidance on best practices that align with the Company’s business goals. Pronovix helped to discover the possible user journeys — all to provide a better devportal engagement and overall user experience, and reviewed and made an inventory of all existing materials (e.g. documentation, mechanisms, etc). We can describe the creation of UX as a set of decisions on five layers or “planes”.
The IA workshop focuses on plane one (strategy) and two (scope) which helps to create a solid base for the long-term goals.
UX and UI services: Many major aspects have been covered in this phase such as
- planning of the API product structure, and the sitemap,
- business overview on the APIs,
- review, feedbacks on APIs,
- help in the creation of use case and case studies listing pages,
- implementation of the company’s brand to create a cohesive user experience,
- etc.
Technical Writing services: Pronovix provided templates to the Company so they can follow a uniformed and transparent structure when they create new content. These templates include use case, case study, API product templates.
In the framework of the technical writing services, Pronovix reviewed the Company’s already existing contents, and provided suggestions to them. This service helps to improve readability, and give a coherent feel and look of the developer portal.
Do you need help to define your user's needs? In the context of developer portals, the IA workshop offered by Pronovix brings your developer portal stakeholders together, explores your audience, outlines your developer portal site architecture/map, and more.
Read More about Pronovix's IA Workshop »
Features and Custom Solutions
SSO
The developer portal has internal and external SSO solutions, and taxonomy-based access control. The access control mechanism enables the content editors and APIs owners to target their customers with a personalized content area, which will be only available to them. This also allows them to reveal the content elements and APIs in a phased journey to gather customer input from the beginning.
Apigee Integration
The developer portal is integrated with two different Apigee Organizations: Sandbox and Production. While the Sandbox integration is entirely self-service for Consumers (they can create and manage all their Apps and Credentials themselves) the Production integration is one-way only: a Go live request has to be sent to the API Provider (the Company) who will make the necessary arrangement in the underlying systems, and will create the App for the Consumer. This is a safety measure to keep the Production environment secure.
The workflow enables the users to try out the APIs in a non-Production environment before making a contractual step to consume the Production APIs in their Application. Currently this is email based communication between the parties, but further improvements are on the way to make this more automated with the Company's ticketing system.
System Functionalities
The API status page displays if an issue occurs with the API and shows previous outages and incidents. The Company can also communicate upcoming maintenance windows to their users. All of these provide transparency regarding the API’s state.
The Company has an API listing page with the ability to filter the search results. In-page navigation is also possible on the API reference, and API status information is available for the visitors. Users need to find the relevant product as soon as possible, and the listing page, the navigation and the API catalog serve these goals.
Pronovix also did custom design for the Company such as app creation workflow, file uploading and downloading.
The Company also keeps accessibility requirements in mind. For example, animations can be turned off any time on the developer portal.
Support
The portal offers many support options for the users. One can rely on the FAQ block, or can ask technical or business-related questions. This way, the developer portal caters more user personas with the necessary information.
Future
As of 2023, the Company relies on Pronovix’ hosting and support, but the collaboration points further. With the customizable Zero Gravity Developer Portal Solutions, Pronovix aims to evolve the developer portal in alignment of the Company’s and the industry's needs.
The Company provides their customers with the necessary information, and the next level is to implement a widespread notifications system, which enables self-service on the developer portal. This way, when someone uploads a new API, SDK, there is an error, and so on, users will get an immediate message via email and/or through notification banners. Currently, this information is only available on the developer portal.
Furthermore, it is possible that all the support submissions, and requests will be channeled directly into the ticketing system. This will make it easier to handle the requests and will create better and more interactive communication between the users and the support team.
Are you building a developer portal? Do you need help? As a devportal company, Pronovix has created developer portals for 70+ customers since 2016. Talk with us to learn how our Zero Gravity developer portal can accelerate and simplify your launch or help on your journey.
Read More about Pronovix's Devportal Solutions »
All Pronovix publications are the fruit of a team effort, enabled by the research and collective knowledge of the entire Pronovix team. Our ideas and experiences are greatly shaped by our clients and the communities we participate in.
