Hold the audience's hand to finish a beginning-to-end call
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This part gleaned tips around articulating conceptual topics for an API product out of Tom’s API documentation tutorial.

Getting Started

An equivalance to the Hello World tutorial in developer documentation. Make the output simplest. The goal is merely to get users to get an end-to-end sense of how your product works.

Break down your Getting Started tutorial into several segments, such as:

  • Signing up for an account
  • Getting API keys
  • Making a request
  • Evaluating the response

Put a link to the Getting Started tutorial on your documentation homepage.

Run-in-Postman vs Swagger UI

Product Highs Lows
Run in postman Able to save the calls users make Cannot incorporate parameter and endpoint description
Swagger UI In-browser experience Cannot save the calls user make

Keywords you should know about the getting started tutorial

  • The call being simplistic
  • Hold the developer’s hand
  • Demonstrate a beginning to end, full process

Examples

Paypal

Contains quite a bit of details:

  • Get started
    • Authentication & Authorization
    • API Requests
    • API Responses
    • Make Your First Call

Twitter

Text being concise and easy-to-follow, coupled with different development goals and able to link out to other pages that have more details:

  • Getting started
    • Getting started with Twitter’s developer platform
      • What do you want to build?
    • First steps
      • Twitter’s developer tools and APIs
      • Creating a Twitter app
      • Dig into our documentation
      • Find some example code and libraries
    • Next steps
      • Integrate Tweets into your app or website
      • Post Tweets and Direct Messages from your app or website