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This talk was presented at API The Docs Virtual 2020 event series on 4 November. We are honored to share the video recording, slide deck, and talk summary below. Enjoy!
Visit the API The Docs 2020 recaps overview to explore all presentations from 2020. API the Docs Virtual begins May 2021! CFP closes February 28, 2021.
Professor at Merseburg University of Applied Sciences
The work reported in this talk was a part of a project that explored ways to make API docs more useful and effective in collaboration with Stephanie Steinhardt, Andreas Schubert. The talk presents:
Focuses on two main decision that technical writers have to make in their work:
API docs differ greatly regarding the information and the way of how that information is represented:
Applied research: the kind of research we need to address these questions:
The research is called for to find out whether differences like:
Results of two studies
Obstacles are related to: (study 2011)
Mostly selected answer: (study 2018)
Do guidelines lead to better documentation?
Research findings that motivated the guidelines based on the empirical study:
From these findings, various guidelines for optimizing docs have been derived:
Enable efficient access to relevant content:
Facilitate initial entry into the API (help starting with the API):
Support different learning strategies:
See non-optimized and optimized versions of the documentation of an existing API in the presentation.
Testing the guidelines showed:
For full research details check the ACM SIGDOC 20 conference paper. The content becomes available after registration.
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