Is API Experience affecting the adoption of your API or product? With APIs being the backbone of todays internet, isn’t it time you started to pay attention to your API Experience, and how you can improve it to reduce friction, frustration, and start improving productivity and adoption.
To start to understand what API Experience is, firstly we need to talk about Developer Experience. To get started, let’s explain what developer experience is:
Developer experience examines how people, processes, and tools affect developers’ ability to work efficiently.
- GitHub Blog
Developer Experience is all about making tools and processes for developers easier and more enjoyable to use. It makes sure things are simpler and easier to build, a great DX ensures that developers can create software with less frustration and friction. It is all about smooth workflows, good documentation, and more intuitive tools that will help developers to do their best work.
API Experience is somewhat similar. Shortened to API Ex - it is a term that describes the ease of integration with your API. A positive API Experience will suggest that integrating with your API is relatively straightforward, even a pleasure, reducing the burden to a development team. This usually means that your API is well-documented, user/developer-friendly, and designed with the developer in mind. On the other hand though, a negative API Experience indicates that the API is cumbersome to use, poorly documented if at all, or becomes a burden to a development team to rely on.
The quality of your API is seem in the developer space as an extension of the API Experience, it impacts the speed and efficiency of working with your API, which in turn affects overall project timelines. It is crucial to consider the API experience of your API, and continually improve it with feedback from developers.
Nobody can release an API with the best API Experience, you need to get that valuable feedback and experience the integration pains from many different use cases to find the right balance. There is no magic formula that will tell you how to design your API for the best API Experience, it is trial and error, and more importantly understanding. Understanding the developers that use your API and why is key to improving your API Experience. Is documentation more important than the ability to filter and sort on a collection of resources? Is strong error messaging more important that speed and caching ability? These are the questions you need to ask yourself when trying to create the best API Experience you can for your product.
Much like User Experience for your web applications and mobile application is a vital step in making sure that adoption increases, API Experience and understanding the frustrations and journeys a developer will go on is a vital step in making sure that your API adoption increases. A bad API Experience is the quickest way to lose a potential customer to a competitor.
