As a company building open banking-powered infrastructure for businesses and developers in Africa, maintaining great developer experiences for our API products is very important to us. This is why we consistently find ways to ensure developers can easily integrate Mono APIs and build innovative financial experiences for their users.
Discovering Developer Experience pain points
We observed that as our products grew, developers found it difficult to navigate our documentation and stay up to date with important changes that could affect their integrations and workflows. We also observed an increase in inquiries regarding different API products. While engaging with these developers to address their queries and assist in integrations, we recognized the potential need for the evolution of our documentation.
To clearly understand the difficulties from their perspective, we sought out developers in our community and developers at businesses that use Mono to speak to them to get some reliable feedback on their experience and possible pointers on how we could improve their documentation experience.
The new Mono Documentation
After working with the valuable feedback we collected and a couple of iterations later, we’re excited to announce that we have completely rebuilt the Mono Developer Documentation from the ground up, to better serve the developers and businesses who use Mono. Let’s look at what’s new in the Mono API documentation.
Features of the new Mono API Documentation
Our previous API Documentation was built on a third-party platform, which did not give us total control over the design, structure, and content. Moreover, it didn’t allow for seamless navigation that would lead developers to the information they sought to build experiences without having to continuously reach out for integration human support.
Rebuilding the Mono API Documentation gave us the flexibility to:
Shape the design and organization of our documentation,
Implement direct feedback received from our developers and
Implement custom integrations with other third-party existing systems.
Here’s what we have improved:
The Homepage experience
The documentation homepage has gotten a complete refresh. We have built a more comprehensive introductory page packed with the basics you need to get started with your integration on Mono. This lets you view our starting guides, quick start pages for our products, quick links, the common use cases you can build with our APIs, and more, all in one place. You can also easily navigate to these pages and get the important information you need as soon as you visit our API documentation.
Navigation speed and search
We have made finding information on our API docs much easier and faster than before! With our updated page hierarchy, we have grouped sub-pages under their relevant categories so you can quickly navigate between pages and find the information you need at a glance. We have also improved the navigation experience, down to making the documentation pages more mobile responsive and optimising the page load speed.
In addition, the search experience on our API documentation is a lot faster. You can now seamlessly look through the documentation with your preferred keywords and get accurate search results each time. This makes content more discoverable for developers and improves their integration experience.
Detailed product integration guides
We’ve reimagined the experience for our product integration guides. You can now easily navigate between the integration guides for our different products directly from the sidebar menu. To also help developers implement Mono APIs into their product as fast as possible and with reduced integration assistance, on each product guide, we have added clearer code snippets, better page callouts, improved quick links, and interactive image and video walkthroughs to help people who prefer to watch than read technical guides. These improvements ensure that developers can find the important things they need to succeed with Mono APIs and meet their integration goals.
Improved changelog & real-time updates
Our Changelog has been redesigned in a way that developers and businesses can get up-to-date information and changes to our API products and services, as they happen. This ensures that they are always kept in the loop as we move fast, so they can innovate faster for their users too.
To help developers easily track these changes, we have grouped these updates according to each of our API products — Financial Data, Lookup, and Payments. Our improved changelog page also comes with a filter functionality that allows you to view new changes over a particular set period, and the ability to subscribe to receive changelog updates and notifications, straight to your email.
Interactive Quickstart sample applications
The new documentation now has quickstart sample applications with editable code samples and templates you can use to build several real-life projects and use cases with Mono APIs. On the Quickstart page, you’ll see a collection of all the sample applications we have created to show how you can power financial solutions with Mono APIs, they include:
An e-commerce shop app
An identity verification app
A Telco account verification app
A custom white-label app.
Developer feedback section
We have also built a new feature that lets developers instantly share any feedback or recommendations they have about the documentation experience with our team. This helps us get helpful suggestions and feature requests in real time, to make your experience better. You will find this feedback section at the bottom of every documentation page, so don’t forget to use it to leave comments on what you’d like us to improve or work on.
What’s next with the Mono API documentation?
As we learn more about how you and other developers use the Mono API documentation and what iterations we can make to improve the overall developer experience, you can expect to see new updates in the future, such as:
Improvements to our integration guides and resources
More use case-relevant sample apps
More official and community-built SDKs and Libraries
Dark mode implementation for the night owls
A developer playground for more interactions with Mono APIs
Common questions you might have and answers to them
How can I access the new Mono documentation?
You can simply visit docs.mono.co to access any of the features on our API documentation.How can I provide feedback on the API documentation?
At the bottom of each page on the new API Documentation, you'll find a “Did this page help you?” section where you can share any feedback you have about the documentation. We will review every message you send and learn how we can improve your documentation experience.
How can I find some frequently asked questions about integrating Mono products?
Our FAQ section provides answers to some common questions about how to integrate our products and API endpoints. Also, if you require integration help from our team, remember that you can always reach out to us via integrations@mono.co.
Can I check updates made to Mono APIs in real-time?
Yes, you can. Our Changelog page shows all the latest changes to our API services in real time. You can also subscribe to our changelog to get notified of any updates via email.
