What is the Role of Blogs in the Developer Journey?
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Companies use blogs as an informal, unstructured communication tool that can engage current and future customers and members of their wider community. Blogs are often used to start and maintain relationships, to update an audience, discuss new functionalities, and to inform about company decisions. Because blog posts are published as a sequential series of updates, they create a fleeting feeling of urgency, serendipity and newsworthiness, which makes it much more likely visitors will share blog posts through social networks.
Blogs also function as a content incubator: an unstructured area in the content architecture where you can develop new types of content for your developer portal, a place where new content types “incubate” before they get their own place, like a company’s first “getting started tutorial” or “how to do XYZ” guides.
Most API teams use blog posts on their developer portal or business site as a collection of documentation formats (tutorials, testimonials, interviews, guides etc). Blog posts can:
Educate users:
Demos and mashups help users explore the API and its functionalities.
Blog posts often contain code samples and help with problems in specific areas.
Build trust:
The frequency of blog posts, and the time since the last update are an indicator of the health of an API.
Blog posts can communicate policies and team culture.
Blogs can help fulfill these needs throughout the whole API implementation process. In this post I’ll explore how blogs can serve the portal users’ needs throughout the different stages of the developer journey. I’ll discuss their labels and subcomponents, and extract best practices. To finalize, I’ll list some questions to keep in mind when deciding whether, when and how to plan a blog on your developer portal.
To write this post, I reviewed the blogs of Adyen, Amazon, Apigee, CenturyLink, DigitalOcean, Dropbox, Dwolla, Facebook, GitHub, Google, IBM, Instagram, Keen IO, LinkedIn, Mapbox, Orange, Pinterest, Slack, Spotify, StackOverflow, Stripe, Twilio and Twitter. These companies have active communities and/or provide a wide variety of developer resources. I explored how they organize their blogs and what purposes the blogs serve.
The blogs in our research sample announced events, hooked their users, explained functionalities, communicated company decisions, linked to other documentation resources, provided support in certain areas, explained concepts (domain language), provided code samples, and encouraged users to think out of the box when applying the API. Blogs are generally filled with videos, images, screenshots and explanations in everyday English.
Developers go through 6 stages when implementing an API into an application. These 6 stages are discover, evaluate, get started, troubleshoot, celebrate, and maintain :
Optimize the API for search engines: blog posts are often keyword sensitive, they might help users to find their way to the developer portal and its documentation.
Role: The blog as a marketing tool in the developer’s exploration phase
Enable people to evaluate what’s on site, via mock APIs, test accounts, tutorials, sample apps: blog posts and articles can explain how an API works, and how it can be implemented in plain English.
Role: Blog posts as a collection of (best) practices
Blog posts can include code samples, test cases and user stories that might inspire fellow developers to get started with their implementation.
Role: Blog posts as onboarding tools
Blog posts explain and communicate about problem areas and function therefore as support tools. Blog posts are also an internal evaluation tool: e.g. to explain a product works you will also be to testing it at the same time.
Role: Blog posts as support resources
Show developers that you care about their work: offer them a place on your portal, e.g. via guest posts or in interviews.
Role: Blogs can help grow a community
Companies can use their blog to communicate about the API health.
Role: Blog posts indicate API availability and reliability
In our research sample, we found developer portal blogs (blogs that are directly accessible from the developer portal) and more general blogs that also listed developer topics.
We found several labels:
Subcomponents:
Along my research, I found a few tips and tricks that could help to attract and inspire users:
A blog is a great tool to help you develop new types of content on your developer portal. If you want to iteratively develop your content, and build out your content architecture as your community grows, it is a great place to experiment with delivery formats and documentation types. But before you start you need to ask if your company is ready to maintain one?
We are working on a series of content services for developer portals, want to start a blog but need some help? - Get in touch!
Kathleen is an information architect helping clients find out how to align business goals and user needs with the knowledge we gathered about devportals. She grew her expertise through early research on developer portals to determine components, strategy, and best practices for user experience. She holds master's degrees in history and in archival science & records management.
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