PRODUCT DESIGN • RESEARCH
API Documentation is a manual, which contains instructions to how to efficiently use and integrate with an API. Users can white label their company (or team) API docs to get more people onboarded and use their APIs. Currently, 30k documents are published monthly from the Postman app.
We wanted to add new customisation features [theme support, custom logos and SEO tags] for our API Documentation.
Delivering the MVP, design, and research
1 designer, 1 engineering & product manager and 7 developers
Dec 2022 - April 2023
Initially we had planned to release for customisation features. Unfortunately, they weren’t prioritised later.
As soon as the user lands on the publishing form, we bombard them with heavy questions on how they want to release their documentation.
f the user doesn't want to customise the given fields, we auto-fill default information, so it made it question, that shouldn't the action items to Publish the document be on top?
We decided to group the fields under 2 sections. Appearance; for everything related to the looks of the document and General; for fields related to the content of the document.
Cleaning up the interface with fields and description together.
We put Appearance on top to let the users fill out the easier fields first.
We realised we can do a lot more to improve the end-to-end experience of documentation. But taking the MVP first approach, we decided to release the new features with as minimal changes as possible. Based on the quantitative and qualitative data we receive on the released features, we would make changes to the documentation experience iteratively.
As adding meta tags is a fairly advanced setting, not all users might want to add it. So we explored iterations exploring the same.
As soon as the user lands on the publishing form, we bombard them with heavy questions on how they want to release their documentation. We added meta tags by default, but now we let the users customise them if they want. We wanted to communicate the same and also share SEO best practices.
As the user customises the colors and logo of the document, we had a skeleton preview on the side to show them the changes.
If a user added Light theme image, we automatically added the Dark theme logo as well, with a background color to show how their logo would look like.
Based on the data we are receiving, we are currently in the process of revamping our end- to- end documentation experience. Some of the initiatives are shown below!
As we use default values for the fields, the users can just use those values to publish their document. Putting the action items on top allows the user to Publish their document without scrolling through the whole form.
Because of over categorisation, we had a sidebar that was redundant. .
To make the journey more delightful, we are exploring to break down the journey into 2 parts, instead of presenting a long form to fill at once to the users.
We are looking to revamp our published documentation experince, and some of the improvment we are looking at are-
• Seach within docuemnattion
• Collapsible sidebae
• Navbar improvmenets
• Better code blocks
• More entry points to the Postman app
