New developers or developers in general do not like to read the documentation. I was in the same place three years ago before I became a Developer Relations professional. There could be various reasons for this.
In this blog, let’s discover some key points on why developers don't read docs and what you can do better.
Why do developers avoid documentation?
Your docs are too vague or outdated.
When your onboarding documentation lacks detailed instructions, new hires are left guessing. They’re forced to experiment, cross-reference multiple sources, or abandon the docs altogether.
It doesn't fulfill its objective if the official docs can’t provide the most basic setup guidance. Once developers stop trusting your documentation, it becomes unreliable.
Your docs are hard to use
Some reasons for this are that the documentation is accurate but lacks practicality, the navigation is unclear, and it assumes knowledge that developers or newcomers don’t have. This happens more often than you think.
What excellent documentation looks like
After reading the documentation, developers should feel more empowered to solve their problems. They should be able to follow instructions, run a command, and see results.
The first steps should be simple and help developers understand the architecture. The Supabase and Stripe quickstart guide is a good example of this.
If your documentation hasn’t been updated in months or years, it will create more confusion than clarity. Update and review your documents regularly, and take feedback from new users.
Solution? With documentation tools like Mintlify, teams can fix that: better internal docs to ease new hires' onboarding and better external docs to help new hires and customers understand the product more effectively.
It will help you use Git sync to notify you when changes are made in the repository, whether on GitHub or GitLab. Mintlify also provides structure and flow that provides intuitive navigation.
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