Developer experience · Exploratory observational user study: developers were observed while solving programming tasks involving a simple API; the paper reports differences in activities and documentation use and derives design guidelines.
How developers use API documentation: an observation study
Communication Design Quarterly Review · 2019
Summary
Documentation use and developer activities differed across participants; API documentation should accommodate those differences. The study discusses guidelines for optimizing documentation.
For your marketing
Possible founder application
Use as a product-design checklist: instrument onboarding and docs, support different learning behaviors, and test documentation with realistic developer tasks before scaling an API.
Reported result
What the study found
Documentation use and developer activities differed across participants; API documentation should accommodate those differences. The study discusses guidelines for optimizing documentation.
Research question
What the authors investigated
How do developers use documentation when starting to work with a new API, and what documentation design strategies support API learning?
Design
Exploratory observational user study: developers were observed while solving programming tasks involving a simple API; the paper reports differences in activities and documentation use and derives design guidelines.
Sample and setting
Developers solving programming tasks with a simple API; the publisher abstract does not specify the number or recruitment setting.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
Exploratory task-based study with a simple API; the publisher abstract does not establish generalizability to production APIs or report a quantified sample.
Research sources
Publisher ACM page supplies exact title, authors, venue, pages, date, DOI, abstract, and study description: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3358931.3358937 Firecrawl research job 01a14371-854f-71aa-ba3d-455ec397717d returned this citation and metadata.