a searchable docs website is the most important thing for me. having to "discover" an api by stepping through code and comments is a waste of time--only useful when you already know the basics, which requires documentation
* Easily get an overview of the entire API. I may just be scouting the library, so I want to understand what the API looks like.
* Examples as a starting point. How do I use your API?
* Makes your product more discoverable / approachable to potential users.
Think of your users like a funnel - how are they using the library? What are the common reasons you’re losing potential users? What are the common reasons you’re losing existing users? Users are also different so you have to analyze by cohort.
Now can something better be done? Maybe It takes a lot of work and would have to address the above issues and I don’t know if it would necessarily change the need for something centralized.
Users don't search for documentation for the sake of finding documentation. They search for documentation because they want to know how or if our product can solve a particular problem they have. My hypothesis is that the documentation discoverability problem is really just a symptom of the product discoverability problem, and that centralizing docs in 1 searchable website to make docs "discoverable" is only addressing the symptom, when that effort can be much better spent addressing the root cause by making the product itself more discoverable and deeply integrating useful documentation into it.