Chapter 15: Metrics and measurement
Measuring API documentation quality and tracking its improvement is a frequent management request that’s challenging to fulfill. User surveys and satisfaction scores offer some insight, but they shouldn’t be the only evaluation tools. This chapter provides a comprehensive quality checklist for API documentation and developer portals, spanning more than 70 different aspects that involve accuracy, clarity, completeness, and relevance across your API documentation. This checklist can help highlight areas to focus on and be a springboard for discussion about ways to improve your developer portal. Although scoring methods are possible, your primary focus should be to agree on clear, actionable standards for documentation quality.
About Tom Johnson
I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.
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