Louis Debatte-Monroy - How to tailor your developer portal to your audience

Understand and Segment your audience

• Your internal stakeholders need to understand your audience
• Need to get away from "the developer" general stereotype
• Serve your buyers and your users -- they are rarely the same person

A persona

• Is a fictional character with back story, professional attributes, likes and dislikes, goals, challenges and frustrations, and with a personality
• Stereotypical, but specific to business and industry
• Tool to get a common understanding on who is your audience
• Qualitative description, do not use for market segmentation
• Changes with your understanding and learning
• Internal tool only, used for everything created/built

At TomTom four distinct personas:

• two technical, user personas (the Hacker and the Engineer), and
• two business-oriented, buyer profiles (the founder and the PM).

Clear idea on how to sell to each and what influences them.

Tailoring the portal to the personas

/products - the Hacker user persona

• Show speed to market, actual implementation
• Interactive examples
• Code snippets to copy and paste
• Direct links to CodePen or GitHub

/products - the PM buyer persona

• Simplified product overview for the PM, easily recognizable service categories. Industry terms, SEO!
• Further product pages to answer: Is this a good company to work with? Is it worth investing? Can they help with my problem? References?
• Simplicity, credibility, high-level descriptions
• Focus on visuals and demos, no exhaustive technical details

/documentation - the Engineer user persona

• Exhaustive, detailed, precise documentation for the engineer persona
• Consistent IA for all the information on the APIs, all the tools and examples
• No distractions

/documentation - the Founder buyer persona

• Quick overview to show function and value
• API Explorer tool: tool to rapidly test APIs with no authentication

Signs of success

• Everyday referencing of personas in the office
• Content clearly written for a specific persona
• Real users match your fictitious personas
• Predicted behavior happens in life