Discoverable, accessible, and always up-to-date API documentation is the number one paint point for API consumers, and ensuring that it is present for all APIs is fundamental to allowing team members, stakeholders, and consumers to understand what an API does, and how it can be put to work, making it a growing problem as the number of APIs continues to expand.
To help produce the most useful API documentation possible it helps to pause and think about each of the individual components of what makes API documentation valuable to each consumer. Take a moment to consider the investment needed in metadata, examples, code snippets, and the other aspects of documentation that make them as usable as possible to API consumers. Then making sure the desired components are present for every single API made available internally or externally within an enterprise, being consistent, while also going the extra mile to make sure the most meaningful components of our API documentation are always present, no matter which team is behind the API.
- Documentation Title - A simple, concise, yet information and potentially creative title for API documentation help increase the documentation will be discovered and explored by consumers, helping API stand out in a world where there are not just hundreds, but thousands of APIs, and increase the chance that will be put to use.
- Documentation Description - Providing simple and concise descriptions to overall API documentation and sections of the documentation that is defined by collection folders, ensuring that every API, automation, integration, and other purpose is properly documented, but the documentation descriptions are as useful as they possibly can.
- Documentation Parts - Needs a description for this elements
- Documentation Requests - Providing detailed descriptions and as much detail for each individual API request, channel, or other parts of the surface area of each API, making sure that consumers have everything they need to make a successful request, and understand the scope of requests that they can make while using each API.
- Documentation Versions - Needs a description for this elements
- Documentation Examples - Offering examples of API requests, responses, schema, and the other moving parts of APIs, making sure that every possible use case has an example of the expected outcomes can look like, ensuring that documentation doesn~t explain, but also demonstrates what the value of each API actually is.
- Documentation Snippets - Providing auto-generated client snippets in a variety of programming languages with API documentation, providing a snippet that can be quickly copied and pasted to provide the starting point for playing around with each API in the language of choice for the consumer, moving from documentation to integration as quickly as possible. null
The ways in which consumer engage with API document has evolved over the years. Documentation has become much more decentralized and sharable via URLs, and embedded within portals, documentation, help centers, and woven into the narrative of our operations with embeddable buttons each day. Documentation has become much more interactive and living as part of teams, lines of business, and communities, allowing stakeholders to fork, submit pull requests, and merge changes back into the documentation in real-time. Shifting engagement for documentation beyond just a single portal, and something that needs to occur wherever work or conversations are occurring on a regular basis.
- Documentation Watches -
- Documentation Forks -
- Documentation Comments -
null