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[Feedback] How can we improve CamKit documentation for you? (Q323)
Hey Camera Kit developers,
As of 07/26/23, we're initiating this thread to gather your feedback, ideas, and suggestions for improving the current state of our documentation: https://docs.snap.com/camera-kit/home
Your voices have been heard loud and clear, especially from the recent survey and office hours. We are committed to improving our documentation, and to do that effectively, we need more details from you to identify and prioritize actionable improvements.
Here are some prompts to guide your feedback (if you need):
- What elements are missing from the documentation?
- Which areas require better explanations?
- Do you feel the need for more examples to illustrate concepts?
- How do you find the overall structure of the docs?
- Are there any specific tutorials you want or need?
And don't hold back! If there are aspects that frustrated you or didn't make sense at all, we want to know about those too. Roast us! Your honest feedback will be immensely valuable to us.
Remember, there are no hard feelings here with us; our ultimate goal is to continually enhance your experience in building with Camera Kit.
Please note that this thread will be open for a month from this writing, until 08/26/23. So, take your time to share your thoughts and insights. We will do another one in Q4.
Thank you all for being part of this journey. We're looking forward to your contributions and making Camera Kit even better together!
Comments
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Hi @stevenxu, thank you for opening this line. I've only used the Web SDK so all my feedback will be about that.
In the getting started documentation one thing I feel is missing is a quick explanation of Lens Groups and adding lenses to a Lens Group. I figured it out eventually, but still feel I spent much more time than I would have liked in that (part of it is that there's two profiles to develop using the SDK, the business and the developer profile and sometimes knowing whether something needs to happen in one or the other makes a big difference)
Same thing for the API Token. I think a solution would be something like live links in the documentation that you can just click to go to your Lens Group profile and where your API token lives? Sometimes I would be following a documentation and then take a 30 minute detour finding the thing they were referencing.
My last thing is that in my frantic search to understand what I was doing I ended up reading three different documentations with three different approaches. I assume part of it is because it is a moving target with a constantly changing platform. But some documentations, started by saying "first familiarize yourself with this" and I think something as simple as that can really simplify the navigation through the documentation the first time.
Of course, once you setup the Web SDK the first time, everything seems obvious and the rest of the documentation makes so much sense, but that first time getting the lenses on the lens group, finding your API token when you are following the documentation, and getting a hold of what is needed, besides the specifics of the SDK, is the hardest part.
On that note, the new camera Kit Web for Beginners, the Lens and Camera Selector and Amazon IVS Integration guide look amazing! I feel that a challenge of documentation is making it specific enough but also general enough, but I feel the flow from Camera Kit Web for Beginners that is very specific to the other documentations that are more general make so much more sense now. I also appreciate the clarification of "this is typescript", "this is javascript", which is another thing I struggled with through my setup.
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@aestarita YOU ARE THE BEST!!! Thank you for your amazing and detailed feedback! Our engineering team is thrilled with your input, and we'll be running a sprint at the end of August to implement the improvements across our documentation. TY again!!
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Closing this round of feedback for the quarter! Shoutout to all devs that shared their feedback on our docs via email, forum, office hours etc.
We are now putting together an action plan to execute on the improvements & requests. Stay tuned for more announcements once we start rolling out these updates
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