Year of collaboration
2020 – 2022
Context
One of the fastest-growing fintech companies in Europe
Unzer was founded in 2003 and has since offered groundbreaking innovations in online payment solutions and transaction management. The company supports customers worldwide with scalable solutions for online marketplaces. Unzer helps other companies grow by delivering secure payment methods, such as credit and debit card payments, wallets, direct transfers, and prepayments.
Aim
Design a progressive development portal for Unzer
Unzer needed a brand new solution for keeping their API documentation portal uniform, up-to-date, and in line with best practices for writing technical documentation. Their documentation tool had to be either substantially enhanced or changed in order to suit their needs. In addition, Unzer needed to align their documentation process with the product development cycles, and automatically generate API docs using OpenAPI.
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Challenges
Finding a contemporary technical solution for documenting the Unzer API and migrating live content
Unzer was using ReadMe.io, an out-of-the-box solution for developer documentation, and ReadMe-flavoured Markdown, a proprietary authoring format. Because of this, full customisation of the documentation portal wasn’t possibile.
The documentation in use was often outdated, so numerous updates and improvements were required. At the same time, Unzer was undergoing rebranding, and the branding changes had to be reflected in the portal layout too.
Unzer’s team needed to learn how to document the Unzer API themselves, without external help in the long term.
Solution
3di found a better technical solution for the Unzer API documentation
The 3di team:
- Designed a content plan and defined the structure for the entire documentation set.
- Refined the structure and content of the existing documentation.
- Designed UX wireframes of the new portal features.
- Built the new documentation portal with Hugo, a static site generator, instead of ReadMe.io.
- Migrated the existing ReadMe-flavoured documentation to CommonMark with a number of standard extensions.
- Designed a new documentation process and technical workflow to complement Unzer’s development cycles.
- Set up a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) in GitLab, deploying Unzer’s own infrastructure.
- Set up an authoring environment in Visual Studio Code (VSCode), with extensions and customisations tailored to the CommonMark format.
- Documented both the technical solution and the technical writing process for Unzer developers.
- Customised Unzer’s corporate graphic design layout and applied it to the documentation portal.
See our work
See the API documentation we created for Unzer here
Result
3di helped Unzer regain control of the technical documentation, improved the Unzer API documentation, and simplified the process of updating content
The 3di team:
- Deployed a brand-new documentation portal using cutting-edge technology.
- Made Unzer’s documentation well-structured and concise.
- Made it easy for Unzer developers to create and update documentation, and publish their changes.
- Provided practical guidelines for Unzer’s staff to follow when creating and updating documentation.
- Organized and ran training sessions for Unzer’s technical authors on creating and updating documentation.