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.

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.

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.