Designing great developer sites. A study on how to approach creating intuitive and efficient developer resources

Abstract

Developing software has become a wide spread occupation both as employment and for entertainment purposes. There are estimately 18.2 million software developers globally and this number only increases, partly thanks to improved and lowered pricing of technology. We see a trend in developing using others’ existing libraries or platforms and thus also using the pertaining documentation guidelines to access and understand how to go about this approach. The aim of this report was to investigate how developer documentation and guidelines on sites could be improved for the target group of developers. We looked into what characterized developers, current implementations of developer sites and thereby presented a set of recommendations on things to have in mind when designing their interfaces. The report will cover the theoretical approach, the process behind the results and a case study prototype through design driven research. Conclusions in this report will help designers when approaching designing a developer platform site in regards to understanding the users and key points to have in mind. The report will discuss broadly on the dos and don’ts and argue both ways in order to fit a general approach and not merely our case.