This talk was presented at API The Docs Virtual 2020 event series on 23 September. We are honored to share the video recording, slide deck and talk summary below. Enjoy!!
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Louis Debatte-Monroy
Head of Developer & Product Marketing at TomTom
Louis's presentation (video recording)
Louis's slides
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
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