Technical marketing wasn’t spun out of thin air. You’ll need to take your project’s documentation more seriously to grow your developer base, especially if you’ve built a developer-centric product. You can’t mid-curve this.

Here, you’ll learn the main pain points in your documentation for developers and how you can fix these issues to onboard more developers and grow your developer base.

The Documentation Deficit

Content is king; your documentation is a precious artefact, and I mean that in the most pragmatic way possible. Your documentation should cover all facets of the product and leave no stone unturned in answering any developer's questions about exploring and using the product.

Developers should be able to dive right in when they visit your documentation. It is common to see technical documentation that doesn’t cover all the facets of the project under the guise that developers join forums to ask questions, which is tedious. Personally, if you have competitors, they have better documentation. I’m bought, and this is the consensus for many developers.

Basic Technical Writing Problems

Technical documentation should be direct and concise, hitting the nail and helping developers build from the get-go.

When writing the content, your goal should be structured logical communication that developers of all skill levels associated with your documentation would understand without assuming preexisting knowledge.

Unclear objectives and insufficient examples are another turn-off; implementation should be straightforward.

Poor DX Features

DX (Developer Experience) is the critical factor that expresses how pleased developers are with your documentation, which is the objective of the documentation in the first place.

Features like search with relevant results for key terms or topics, code snippet copying and duplication, and accessibility features like keyboard navigation or screen reader support are non-negotiable for technical documentation.

Trading off any of these would significantly degrade your documentation’s DX and send them to your competitors.

Maintainability Factors

Maintainability refers to how easily documentation can be improved and modified over time. Modularity, versioning, structural consistency, automation, and stakeholder collaboration are crucial for maintaining documentation.

Developers themselves should be able to contribute to your docs if they solve any undocumented issues or choose to improve on the clarity of what you’ve documented.

Fixing These Documentation Issues

The most obvious way to fix these issues would be to hire a great technical writer. These issues are mostly due to development teams trying to underscore documentation by writing it themselves.

• Document every part of your product that the users interact with; do not assume any parts would be prominent.
• Get a documentation audit to see what and where you can improve.
• Add surveys to your documentation to get feedback on how you can improve your documentation.
• Pay attention to your onboarding process; you want to give developers an easy start on your product.
• Use developer personas and add prerequisites to help developers of all skill levels.
• Add UX-improving features like search, code snippet copying, etc. and implement navigation logically.
• Add a troubleshooting section to help fix issues on the fly and a Glossary if you have jargon specific to your app.
• Automate documentation processes with tools like Postman to autogenerate API implementation in any language. Invest in CI/CD integration to ensure code releases match the documentation and lining tools for grammar and style consistency.

Great documentation is progressive. You should also pay attention to maintainability. Add support for different versions and improve your docs-as-code process with CICD support for the technologies you’re using for your documentation.

Conclusion

You’ve learned about some popular reasons developers may hate your documentation and how you can fix them.

Collaborating with your developers primarily through self-service options, like well-written and designed documentation, is a great way to ensure the success of your product. Please don’t sleep on it.