A software expert once asked me “Why does Facebook need to hire thousands of people? It’s only a website!” Leaving existential questions aside, it takes a surprising amount of work to keep a website up-to-date and to make accessible the information about products and services.
The Developer Experience team at Envestnet | Yodlee just completed the most significant upgrade yet to our developer portal (where you are reading this blog). The most visible change is in the page styling and “Look and Feel”, as you can see from these “old” and “new” images. But the improvements are much more than eye appeal.
Old home page July 2020 / new home page June 2021
What we changed
Beyond the “look and feel” styling there are many other improvements in the June 2021 release. It all starts with our design team. Senior UX Designer Katy explains, “Envestnet | Yodlee is a design first organization. As UX designers, we spend a great deal of time thinking about the users’ needs and their experience, whether it is the first time or the hundredth time they visit the site. Everything from the typography and visual hierarchy of the documentation pages, to the number of steps it takes to reach the most commonly-sought information, is considered for the new design.”
The draft designs and flows then go before the engineering, tech pubs, and marketing teams who provide merciless feedback until we jointly arrive at web pages that are better than anything previously seen. The release notes have a full list of improvements, so I won’t duplicate them here except to mention my bête noire – search!
The framework that we use to organize our website was notorious for its inadequate search feature. The “search” function didn’t actually look at the words on a page. You had to provide manually, for each page, a list of search terms that would be a “hit” for that page. We quickly addressed that limitation with crowd-sourced search terms for the top 50 pages, offering Envestnet | Yodlee staffers a laser virtual keyboard prize for the best suggestions! (The 6 Best Laser Keyboards Reviews and Buying Guide) That initiative moved our search capability in the previous release from “horrible” to “tolerable”. This latest release has a search facility that Google itself would be proud of. Check it out now by looking for, e.g., “Blog”.
Where to find things now
We have moved some pages, but a great search feature makes it simple to find their new place. The new top menu bar is on almost every page, and will quickly move you to your intended destination.
The top menu bar appears on most pages
“Solutions” has a dropdown menu with 4 product categories and a storyboard about the Envestnet | Yodlee platform. “Documentation” takes you to a landing page from which you can reach basic product summaries as well as detailed technical descriptions (look for the “API Endpoints” link). “Quickstart” takes you to a hands-on walk through the calls to verify a customer account, using the industry-standard Postman tool.
I saved the best news for last. As good as this portal is, we are not stopping here. Our design team is hard at work mapping out additional features for you. I don’t want to pre-announce anything before it’s ready, but our marketing team has a big red folder labeled “analytics”.
This blog post started by saying curating a good website “takes a surprising amount of work”. Now you know what goes into it, have a look at the results. We think you’ll like what you see.