Articles

Twilio is regarded as one of the API industry’s leaders, so when, after five years, Twilio changes the documentation format on their developer portal, everybody wants to know why. Jarod Reyes and Andrew Baker (both developers of Twilio's developer education team) gave a presentation about the reason for the changes at SIGNAL 2016. Because we found them valuable and wanted to share them with our developer portal mailinglist, we’ll summarize their findings in this blog post.

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.

Once a developer knows how to use your API, they will need detailed instructions on how to build the actual integration. Experienced developers already familiar with an API, including its creators, will have a hard time completing an integration without access to the API reference. In this post we’ll show how the developer portals in our research sample implemented their reference pages, compare their formats and labels, and try to deduct best practices you could apply on your developer portal.

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.

Onboarding pages need to hook the developer. In this article we’ll list the various roles onboarding pages need to fulfill, explore how the developer portals we reviewed expose them and how they are labelled.

The "Overview Page" provides a devportal with an entrance page for developers to start exploring. What are strategies to structure information? What is the function of your developer portal? What to know to build an appealing overview page.