User Focused API Design

Talk given on May 10th at Django NYC Meetup

Transcript

1. Renato Oliveira USER FOCUSED API DESIGN
2. Who am I • Recife, Brazil • Co-founder and Software Engineer at Labcodes • PUG-PE & Python Brasil • DSF • Communities <3 • Coffee <3
3. Labcodes • Software studio de Recife para o mundo • Tecnologias que trabalhamos • Labcodes e Comunidade Labcodes
4. DISCLAIMER
6. Your API is a User Interface
7. Your API is a User Interface
8. Your API is a User Interface
9. API Design
10. There are people on the other side
11. There are users on the other side!
12. On what should we focus? • Functionality • Usability
13. USER EXPERIENCE
14. DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE
15. UX Honeycomb usable useful valuable desirable accessible credible findable
16. How to measure your API usability? • Task invocation ratio • Structure • Navigation • Time to first call • Error handling
17. UX without user research is not UX
18. User Research • Participatory design • Persona development
19. Test • Write client code • Metrics
20. Documentation • Getting started guide • Common use cases • Sandbox
21. Error Handling • Different errors requires different exceptions • Descriptive error messages • “Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced”
22. Top-down approach • How the API should behave? • Prototype • Iterate • Feedback
23. Prototype and Iterate
24. Design/Prototype Implementation Customer
25. Design/Prototype Implementation Customer :D
26. API Blueprint • apiblueprint.org • Mock tools • Tests
27. Empathy • Understand • Put yourself on your users’ shoes • All of your users (Personas)
28. Functionalities are eternal • Or at least as long your API version lasts • Please don’t break clients by removing functionalities • Users only use your API once, everything else is automated
29. “APIs are starting to look more like the product and less like the technology.” Jason Harmon, Head of API Design @ PayPal
30. Obrigado! twitter.com/_renatoOliveira github.com/renatoliveira www.labcodes.com.br speakerdeck.com/labcodes