Developer experience on first contact is arguably the single most important job of a developer portal. In some cases your API might only have a few minutes to hook a developer, if it isn’t immediately clear where developers can start their integration efforts, they might leave and never come back. This is why onboarding pages are so important. In this article we’ll list the various roles onboarding pages need to fulfill. We’ll also explore how the developer portals we reviewed expose them and how they are labeled.

Depending on the objective and the prior experience of a user, an onboarding page needs to fulfill 3 different roles: