Onboarding Pages

by kathleen / 21 October, 2016
The onboarding page, a crucial component for developer portals

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.

Different onboarding for different audiences

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

Evaluate: Help developers and... Read more

Overview Pages

by kathleen / 13 October, 2016
The importance of overview pages

Even though every page is page one in a post-Google world, a large group of developers will end up exploring your documentation starting from one of your portal’s landing pages. That is why it is really important to provide a front page that gives an overview of the available documentation, an entrance page to the portal where developers can start exploring: the “overview page”. Ideally overview pages clearly refer to (all) documentational components (getting started, API reference, guides, tutorials, FAQ and example pages) and provide links to subpages.

To help developers process the information, links to subpages will be chunked according to a classification system. The chosen classification system will also typically influence the... Read more