In this page
The Benefits
How It Works
Typical Projects
Case studies
Google’s recommendations for developer documentation
How to contact us
Create documentation developers love
APIs open up business opportunities, revenue streams, improve internal efficiency, and signal a commitment to external developers and transparency.
High quality documentation supports all these strategic goals.
Cherryleaf’s technical writers create complete, easy-to-use, API documentation. This promotes adoption and enables developers to seamlessly integrate your API into their products.
The Benefits
Building trust
High-quality documentation can build trust between your company and your users. Developers often rely on API documentation to understand how to interact with a product safely and efficiently. When you provide documentation that is clear and reliable, it fosters a sense of trust and reliability in your company’s products.
Credibility
In the developer community, the quality of API documentation can serve as proof of your company’s competence and credibility. Companies that invest in comprehensive documentation are often seen as more credible and reliable by the developer community.
Community engagement
When you have well-documented APIs, it can encourage a sense of community among developers. This community engagement can lead to a more collaborative environment where users not only use the API but also contribute to its improvement through feedback, bug reports, and community support forums.
Empowering developers
Providing thorough documentation empowers developers by giving them the tools and knowledge they need to succeed. This empowerment can lead to greater satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment, enhancing the overall user experience with the product.
Faster onboarding
Our getting started guides and tutorials speed up developer onboarding.
Reducing anxiety and frustration
Comprehensive documentation can alleviate the anxiety and frustration that developers might experience when trying to integrate an API without sufficient guidance. This leads to a more positive interaction with the product and can increase the likelihood of continued use.
Increasing adoption
Useful, well-organised documentation drive more developers to use your APIs.
Improving your reputation
High-quality, comprehensive, documentation and support for developers helps build a company’s reputation as being transparent, helpful, and committed to its ecosystem. This gains goodwill and trust.
Reducing the support burden
With comprehensive documentation, developers can self-serve instead of opening tickets. Good documentation can cater to developers with varying levels of expertise, from beginners to experts, thus broadening the API’s appeal and usability across a diverse range of users.
User advocacy
When users have a positive experience due to good documentation, they are more likely to develop loyalty to the brand. This loyalty can turn users into brand advocates who recommend the API to others, and this can help you expand your user base through word-of-mouth.
Three Types of Organisations We Help
Companies launching new APIs or API updates
You’re releasing a new API or a major update, and you need clear, thorough documentation to onboard developers and ensure seamless adoption.
We’ll create complete documentation that covers what the API does, when and why to use it, and detailed integration guides to get developers up and running quickly.
Organisations with outdated or fragmented developer documentation
You have outdated, scattered, or hard-to-navigate developer docs, and it’s having an effect on the number of developers using the API (and its success).
We’ll consolidate and modernise your documentation, creating a centralised, user-friendly resource that makes it easy for developers to find what they need.
Businesses looking to reduce support calls and speed up adoption
Inadequate documentation often leads to increased support inquiries and slows API adoption. Our documentation solutions are designed to answer developers’ questions. This minimises the need for manual support, so you can drive faster, smoother onboarding.
No matter your documentation challenges, our team has the expertise to craft compelling, easy-to-use materials that maximise developer engagement and success with your API.
How It Works
Our documentation experts partner with you to:
- Analyse your APIs and understand integration paths
- Plan and structure documentation for an optimal user experience
- Write clear, complete API reference docs, guides, and tutorials
- Provide a polished developer portal to access everything
Refining your own content
In some situations, we collaborate with your subject-matter experts (SMEs) to transform raw information — whether from interviews, notes, or other sources — into polished, professional content.
We apply our expertise in on organising and structuring the content to ensure a logical flow, making sure the final document serves its intended purpose.
While your SME remains responsible for accuracy, they can stay focused on their core responsibilities, trusting us to deliver a high-quality result. Minimal but essential communication between our team and your SME ensures success and smooth collaboration.
Where it’s required, we carry out more in-depth revisions. That can include re-structuring and rewriting parts to enhance clarity, accuracy, and readability.
Google’s recommendations for developer documentation
Are you ready to elevate your developer experience and make your API stand out?
In a six email series, we share information on Google’s recommendations for developer documentation, plus real-world examples.
To receive the emails, use the form below:
Case studies
Creating a developer documentation portal for a financial organisation
An organisation in the financial sector had developed a collection of APIs and tools for accessing, integrating, and securely sharing data. They had provided some documentation, but it was contained in a number of PDFs and other formats that were hard to read and navigate.
They required a developer documentation web portal that provided overview and guidance, API reference documentation, and onboarding information.
Cherryleaf created an information design model of the revised website, and a complete set of redrafted and consolidated content. The content was organised in a way that follows the journey a developer was likely to take:
- Understand the product and services
- Setup the product and services
- Use the product and services to create apps, call an API, publish APIs, etc
- Look up reference information when developing
- Sustain/Resolve any problems
We reduced the amount of content, compared to what existed before, so the information was delivered in a clear and accessible way.
Creating API documentation for HCC Embedded
“The first, laborious, step was to get all the information organized into documents in a structured and modular way. As we complete the process we will want to improve presentational aspects to give a better customer and marketing experience.
We see an ongoing role for Cherryleaf as consultants who can help to get better documents out of the vast material we have added to the system. Very importantly, Cherryleaf were able to rapidly respond to our issues with the system and help us understand. We have no expertise in this and did not want to be stuck on things that experts could solve instantly – Cherryleaf were very responsive in this. “
See: Helping HCC deal with the size and complexity of embedded systems documentation
Creating API documentation for a well-known, international company
A large, international, multi-billion dollar company, had developed a series of APIs to make it easier for organisations to use its services. It wanted to provide a developer web portal that encouraged customers and partners to use these APIs.
Cherryleaf organised the content in a way that followed the customer journey:
- Discover the APIs
- Explain what the APIs do
- Explain the benefits of using the APIs
- Register to use the APIs
- Get subscription keys
- Use the APIs
- Understand the endpoints and code samples
- Try out the API sandbox
- Start their integration with the live system
- Sustain/Resolve any problems
We wrote a range of marketing, technical, training, and troubleshooting content. The project involved working with their API technical partner, product managers, and technical staff. The portal launch was very successful, with great feedback from the client.
Improving a developer portal for a large European financial organisation
A large European financial organisation had developed a developer portal containing APIs that developers could use in their own applications.
Often, developers needed to use more than one API in order to integrate a service. The organisation needed to improve the developer portal so that developers could understand how to integrate the products. This included:
- Providing a better onboarding experience.
- Communicating the relationships between the APIs (what they do, and how they work).
- Helping developers understand what an implemented solution would look like, before they committed to a production version.
- Stating any prerequisites.
- Providing information that enabled developers to use the products and APIs.
- Having consistency across all of the content.
Cherryleaf reviewed the site using a friction log to identify and record all the usability issues in the developer journey. We then developed an improved logical structure for the content in order to meet the needs of the audience. We also identified where content was missing, and improved the content on the website.
Helping Tisane Labs transform their developer documentation
Tisane Labs is company that provides a natural language understanding application with a focus on abusive content, and the related legal and regulatory requirements. The system, Tisane, detects cyberbullying, personal attacks, hate speech, sexual advances, obfuscated profanities, criminal activity, and more.
So far we’ve done two projects, and the experience is more or less according to my expectations. The first project was to write several small manuals for several web applications. The second one involved overhauling all our API documentation and merging it with assorted bits and pieces everywhere.
Vadim Berman, CEO, Tisane Labs
If you want to learn more about how we helped Tisane Labs refine their developer documentation, you can read the full story here: Refining Tisane’s developer documentation.
Contact us
Schedule a call today to discuss your API documentation needs. Our writers are ready to provide the docs your developers want.
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