It’s Documentation December, so we’re showcasing some of our favorite documentation use cases from customers all over the globe. Big or small, the creativity and innovation that comes from creating good documentation has endless possibilities.
But what makes great API documentation? This recent blog dives into a few trends that produce excellent documentation that developers love to use. Great API docs are increasingly automated, consistent, and flexible.
Of course, documentation doesn’t have to be complicated to be good. Here are five of our favorite examples of API docs from Stoplight customers that follow these trends and more best practices.
1. Fiserv
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Fiserv’s payments solutions documentation effectively walks users through how to integrate their payment products into a seamless customer experience and enables users to accept their customers’ preferred payment methods.
2. PagerDuty
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PagerDuty utilizes our open-source documentation tool, Elements, for its excellent developer platform documentation. PagerDuty’s clean and comprehensive docs detail how to build real-time workflows into your application and meet the expectations of a world that’s always on. They emphasize developer experience to keep devs coming back to use their API again and again.
PagerDuty began as an automating on-call rotations company and evolved into a platform that helps companies of all sizes proactively manage their digital operations so their teams can spend less time reacting to incidents and more time innovating for the future. Learn more about PagerDuty’s API story here.
3. ZingBrain AI
However, great documents aren’t solely created by large organizations. Smaller organizations can shine just as bright on the documentation front. For example, ZingBrain AI is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine that has been designed specifically for the iGaming industry. It leverages AI technologies and innovative machine learning to make personalized casino and sports recommendations based on player data, behaviors, and preferences.
Their documents are a great example of incorporating helpful graphics and diagrams to help users visualize the potential of their powerful AI functionality. In order to scale up quickly and effectively, you need great and easy-to-use documents that help bring your API to more customers, and ZingBrain AI does exactly that.
4. Avanti
Avanti is a Canadian software company that provides an all-in-one workforce management platform that empowers and engages both employees and employers. Avanti’s API Docs makes the list with an engaging and visually appealing docs home page, showcasing their new and improved Application Programming Interface (API).
They’ve taken the time to beautifully describe their endpoints with at-a-glance images, making it truly easy to get started.
5. wefox Insurance
wefox Insurance is Europe’s number one digital insurer, and one of wefox’s most successful changes has been using Stoplight to centralize and standardize their API documentation. Previously, each domain team had its own API and its own documents, which weren’t always readily available to other teams. Combining API-first with a design-first strategy is what lands their docs on our list to celebrate.
An emphasis on standard, in-depth documentation and quick get-started guides helps wefox ensure that, by the time they get to development and implementation, they are working from a design that already has buy-in. wefox’s engineering organization strives to create accountability through collaboration and collective decisions rather than micromanaging compliance. Learn more about wefox’s use case.
Getting Started with Great API Documentation
So how do you get started with your own API documentation? We’ve put together a handy guide full of best practices and recommendations.
- Download the API Documentation Guide now.
- Try Stoplight for free.
