You may have known it already, but Bump.sh was born from a disaster that could have been avoided: an API evolving without any updates to its documentation. The unsuspecting developer, completely unaware, led inevitably to the dramatic fall of our story: an e-commerce site with a million users, freezing at checkout.
You can easily imagine the escalation: users unable to pay contacting a support team, which in turn escalates the incident on every Slack channel within reach, trying to contain the blaze. Developers digging through logs, pull requests reverted.
The hero of our story, now co-founder of a popular, top-quality API documentation tool (Bump.sh), could have averted that pressure point, and missed out on such a great anecdote, if someone had realized that this API’s documentation mattered more than it seemed. Unfortunately, many similar stories exist. You may have faced such a mishap yourself… or worse, you may have been the inadvertent trigger.
If your own API documentation were behind these kinds of incidents, what would the impact be on your APIs and, more importantly, on your users? Above all, how can you tell that your API documentation may deserve some attention and a welcome refresh?
So why consider an overhaul?
Most of us have a very particular relationship with documentation in general. It’s often the part we like writing the least, the one we sometimes postpone most when we’re the author.
Yet it is often essential and decisive when we are the consumer.
Good API documentation means thinking of your users, the ones who trusted you, those who use you every day, and those who sometimes pay you for a service. Providing them with key, ready-to-use elements to ensure they can enjoy their tools without friction is a sign of consideration that can make all the difference.
Conversely, failing to keep your documentation up to date carries a number of risks, potentially driving your users to the competition. Wasting time on incomplete documentation is wasting time on a friction point that should never have existed.
It means spending time contacting a support team, waiting for their reply, only to end up stuck with no way forward.
It means giving up on that great new feature you invested so much in because it’s too complicated to adopt.
Documentation has a direct impact on your brand image. It sets the tone for the attention you pay to your current, and future, users. Who has never glanced at documentation before adopting a new product to make sure it meets their needs?
But what are the symptoms of API documentation that’s slipping?
To know it’s high time to roll up your sleeves, there are two types of signals: some are quite visible, others may require you to look more closely at the existing work.
The first concrete element to rely on is user feedback. For that, you have two privileged channels: your customer support and adoption feedback (for example, if you have a team handling your onboardings). But don’t forget the silent majority, those users who won’t even give you feedback and will quietly abandon your product. Sometimes, all it takes is a single unclear operation or an orphaned endpoint. You probably have examples in mind, but you might be one yourself: how many times have you given up on a service or product due to a lack of information or support, without ever reaching out to the team behind it?
For support, it’s simple: how many tickets are directly related to your API documentation? How many could have been avoided with detailed, complete, and up-to-date documentation? How many times has your team had to clarify or revisit endpoints and operations you thought were already documented?
And regarding onboarding, what difficulties did your new users encounter? Are some features less adopted than others? If so, why?
By now, you probably already have a good idea of what’s going wrong. Let’s not stop here, it’s the perfect time to tackle the situation head-on and start the essential rereading of your own documentation.
A few quick points never lie:
- obsolete endpoints
- examples that are inconsistent or no longer match reality
- painful, lengthy, or dysfunctional API doc update processes (ask those responsible for them, for instance)
- no clear changelog or version tagging (v1, v2, etc.)
- ineffective or incomplete search
- slow navigation or a heavy interface
- documentation page traffic analysis: number of visits, short time spent
The basics of a solid audit
You can also launch a more methodical analysis to get a better idea of the work ahead. A more complete audit will take a bit more time up front but will lay the groundwork for planning upcoming changes. A good approach is to divide the audit into four distinct parts.
The purely technical part of the audit starts with examining your API contract. This includes listing obsolete operations, those that are poorly documented, and those that are missing. Also ensure that your specification files correctly adhere to the standard. Certain linters can quickly help you identify these issues.
Next, quickly assess the UX by running rapid user tests on your API documentation. Among the quick exercises to set up, ask a developer unfamiliar with the API to perform a brief integration you’ve prepared and measure the time taken to deploy it as well as any obstacles encountered. They will inevitably test your documentation, and you can observe their usage behavior in real time.
To continue collecting feedback, don’t rely solely on analyzing tickets received by the support team. Even though they provide a solid basis for identifying the work ahead, keep in mind that many unhappy users never even contact technical support, they simply give up along the way. Feel free to launch quick survey (few but effective questions) or even integrate them directly into your documentation, for example with a dedicated button.
Finally, some metrics don’t lie: TTFC (Time-To-First-Call) measures the time between a user’s first steps and their first successful API call. As mentioned earlier, support ticket volume (but not only that, the number of exchanges before resolution or the recurrence of certain themes) is a good indicator. Also, adoption rates of new features or changes are invaluable.
Results that are well worth the effort
Once you have all these elements in hand, and often even during their collection, you will quickly reach the inevitable conclusion that your API documentation needs an overhaul. And that’s good news, because it’s a project that will pay off handsomely, and examples abound.
At the end of 2024, Stripe announced a new approach to its APIs and their documentation with revamped versioning, prompted by a drop in adoption and user feedback. Versioning is an important topic on its own, and we have some keys to help. BigID recently overhauled their API documentation and continuous integration processes, simplifying doc maintenance and generating very positive user feedback.
And to be honest, it’s an exercise we undertook ourselves for our own API documentation tool (yes, it’s very meta). We documented the experience in a fascinating article you won’t want to miss.
In every case, these changes translated into benefits both internally and for API consumers. Reduced support tickets allow you to focus on real problems, not those that could simply be solved with accessible, complete documentation. That same documentation concretely increases developer engagement with your APIs and enables much faster onboarding. And ultimately, all of this contributes to sharing a stronger brand image.
And to help you get started, it’s perfect timing: Bump.sh has a team of experts ready to guide you through this incredible journey. Contact us!
