Eight typical Use Cases for creating or updating API documentation

Here are some of the common reasons why companies contact us about API documentation:

  1. You’ve been providing APIs to your largest customers, together with a lot of onboarding and technical support. You want to have more (smaller-sized) companies use the APIs, but you’re worried about the strain that will place on your Support team.
  2. You’re releasing a new version of your API. The current documentation needs updating, but you just don’t have the time (or the technical communication skills) to do it.
  3. You’ve released your API, but its poor documentation means not enough developers are using it, you’re getting too many Support calls, or it’s seen as worse than your competition’s products.
  4. Your product offerings and APIs are going to get a lot more complex. You know you’ll need great content to explain what the APIs do, how to get started, and how to use them effectively.
  5. You’re launching your first API, and you know you’ll need to provide a great developer onboarding experience for you to succeed.
  6. Your developer portal/developer experience is a mess. There’s a lot of content, but it’s spread over explanations on Jira, readme files, files in a shared folder on Google Drive, PDFs originally developed for a single customer, web pages, wikis, video walkthroughs etc.
  7. Your developers are too close to the APIs and products to explain it fully in a way that a new user would understand.
  8. You’re getting battered by the competition, and one of the main reasons for this is that their developer documentation is so much better than yours.

Are there any other Use Cases?

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