Ask HN: Which startup has the best support documentation?

9 points by prashant10 9 years ago | 6 comments

I am looking to revamp the support site for my startup and looking for some inspiration. We are in user-engagement and analytics domain. We have our Android , iOS , Windows and javascript SDK. All have been up there on our support site. But right now it is more 'developer friendly'. But as 'user-engagement and analytics' is also used my many marketers/sales folks, I would like to make my support site both developer-marketer friendly.

Looking for great support site from which I can find good points and implement it in my own support site. Thanks.

froindt 9 years ago |

I've never implemented anything with either platform, but I've been impressed with Dwolla and Twilio. Both provide a nice interface finding the information you need while also giving an example for each language their API supports. I'm not a super experienced programmer, but I am looking at getting into it more, and will probably use twilio as one of my early attempts to work with other services.

https://developers.dwolla.com/

https://www.twilio.com/docs/

sushid 9 years ago | |

I've used Twilio for casual one-day projects and I don't think their documentation is a good example. They have a lot of resources and examples but it's very disjoint and hard to use. A better example would be Stripe.

For example, let's saying I'm trying to redirect an inbound call, a fairly trivial use case. Their nodejs doc doesn't have a section on inbound calls [0] at all. It's different from using your average RESTful API and you'd expect a trivial use case to be given as an example, as opposed to a section on callbacks vs promises.

Trying to find out the 'from' number from your /voice POST request? Good luck parsing out the req manually to figure out what you need because the doc doesn't tell you anything.

And there are things Twilio's neglected to do for no reason whatsoever. For instance, the methods for a TwimlResponse object is not documented on the node doc because the verbs are from TwiML. I get that <say> = TwiMLObject.say() but documenting this is trivial and makes it easier on the developer using the platform.

Anyway, that's my rant. Check out Stripe instead, OP.

[0] https://twilio.github.io/twilio-node/

prashant10 9 years ago | | |

I agree with the disjoint part of Twilio docs. I had used to integrate SMS in my product. They have awesome Customer-Support which covers their 'not so good but not so bad' documentation. And for rest all points I have exactly been through the same route.

prashant10 9 years ago | |

I have visited these two. Many people find Dwolla documentation good and its surprising. They have documentation which is very very verbose. Which has many advantages but also has it own shares of disadvantages. But yeah your help is very much appreciative. Thanks. Any other documentation? (*'market-developer' friendly)

Jenny2017 9 years ago |

There are alot of great documentations on the web. My favorite is Surfly co-browsing API documentation. https://docs.surfly.com?utm_source=hackernews

lcmatt 9 years ago |

Stripe documentation is very good: https://stripe.com/docs

Detailed, full of examples and easy to understand.