We recently conducted a global developer survey. The purpose of the survey was to better understand how we can improve your VR experience as a developer. We received a lot of valuable and actionable feedback. The main themes of which included:
- Improve developer site
- Improve documentation
- Provide more communication and support
In addition to announcing what we’ve done to make massive improvements to the developer site, this post also includes what we’ve done to improve documentation and provide more communication and support.
New Developer Site Infrastructure
Better Navigation
New Header
- Discover — A high-level overview of our PC, Mobile, WebVR and other Oculus-supported solutions.
- Design — An in-depth review on ensuring your concept and design approach result in the best experience for your users.
- Develop — Documentation that guides you through your development process, Downloads that supply all the packages needed to make your ideas a reality, and Tools to help you efficiently upload your builds.
- Distribute — A guide to publishing and distributing your app including distribution options and Oculus Store operations.
- Support — A robust section of blogs, forums, faqs, and contact information to obtain support throughout your app development.
- Manage — A dashboard for submitting and managing your app.
Left-side Navigation
We’ve also introduced a left—side navigation throughout the developer site. You can now navigate between various sections of content, easily find what you're looking for without loading a bunch of pages, and navigate between the developer site and dashboard. If you don’t need the left—side navigation, simply click on the three stacked dashes in the far upper—left corner of the header to collapse the navigation.
Previous and Next:
Within our docs section under Develop, you can easily navigate to the previous or next section of the documentation by clicking on the links at the bottom of each page.
Search
If you can’t find what you’re looking for by using the new navigation, use our new search capabilities. Located in the upper—right side of the header is a magnifying glass icon. Click on it and you can search throughout the site including uncovering conversations from fellow developers in the forum.
Feedback
We can only know how well we’re actually doing with feedback from you. In addition to the survey, we also launched the feedback nub at the bottom of the developer site a few months back. With the launch of the new developer site infrastructure, we added an additional feedback loop. On all documentation pages, you will now find a Feedback button at the bottom of every page asking about usefulness of the content. Please, keep your feedback coming as it does make a difference.
Better Documentation
We have made concerted efforts to refresh our
documentation in many areas including the Platform SDK documentation to ensure easier navigation, discovery, accuracy and better content to help you through the development process.
Better Communication
Blog:
Over the past couple of months, we have been working hard to provide you with more information about the going—ons here at Oculus through our blog posts. Go to our
Developer Blog and you'll find a new series of Tech Notes, Developer Perspectives, Best Practices, and feature announcements. We plan to increase the amount of posts over the course of the next few months with insights from around the VR community.
App Overview Page:
Within your dashboard, click on your app name and you’ll see a new page — an overview page for your app. It includes the status of your submission and other quick links to important content within the developer site.
SDK and Feature Changelogs:
With the new developer site infrastructure comes a few new places where you can keep track of all the great stuff coming out of the team including SDK releases and new features.
- News: You’ll now find a News section in your new app overview page that highlights recently released assets that pertain to your platform — Rift or Gear.
- Notifications: We will begin sending notifications (found on every page in the upper right corner of the header via a lightening bolt icon) 10 days prior to SDK releases with what deltas you can expect in the release notes.
- Blog, Facebook and Twitter: We will post in our blog and social channels all launches on launch date.
More Support
Since January, we have been ramping up a team of people dedicated to helping the developer community throughout your development process. They are dedicated to moderating our
developer forum, responding to
1:1 questions and keeping our
new FAQ page alive with valuable information.
Looking Ahead
As we continue to build for the Oculus developer community (and more developer happiness), keep the
feedback coming and stay tuned for more updates very soon!
— The Oculus Team