Articles

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.

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.

What information is absolutely essential on a developer portal? What kind of API documentation do you need? Is there a best practice that can be followed when launching a developer portal? We formulated 11 questions and built 3 mock sitemaps that demonstrate how portals can address the different stages of the developer journey.

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.