API Consumer Experience
Get StartedThe API Platform Architecture station focuses on ensuring that your API fits seamlessly into your existing platform architecture or establishes clear requirements to guide necessary architectural changes. It balances the core needs of API producers, API consumers, and broader organizational goals, providing a foundation for scalability, security, and performance. By the time you reach this station, you should have already: Defined the API Value Proposition and Business Model in the API Product Strategy station. Understood your API Consumer Needs in the API Consumer Experience station. This station takes the insights from those prior steps and applies them to your platform architecture, ensuring your API is built on a robust, future-proof technical foundation.
API Consumer Experience
Understand your audience. Design APIs that developers want to use and that deliver business value. The API Consumer Experience station builds directly on the work completed in the API Product Strategy station, where you identified the API’s core value proposition, business goals, and consumer segments. Here, the focus shifts to understanding and addressing the specific needs of your API consumers—whether developers, systems, or external partners—to create an intuitive, effective API that aligns with those business objectives.
Build on the API Business Model Canvas
By refining the insights from the API Business Model Canvas, this station helps you:
- Deeply understand the consumer segments identified earlier.
- Translate business-level insights into actionable technical and usability requirements.
- Prioritize features that enhance developer satisfaction and increase API adoption.
A well-designed consumer experience ensures that your API delivers value not only for the business but also for the developers and systems that rely on it.
Understand API Consumer Needs
- Validate the API Value Propostion pains and gains with your actual or potential API consumers
- Ask detailed questions on preferrable data formats, performance requirements, etc. Identify the specific pain points, expectations, and goals of developers or systems using the API.
- Gather and prioritize technical requirements, usability features, and documentation needs.
Next steps
Proceed to the API Platform Architecture station to summarize the needs and design infrastructure that supports these consumer needs at the required scale. Ensure alignment between API consumer requirements and the platform’s capabilities to provide seamless performance and reliability.
What are developers interested in?
Developer experience is linked to both business, product, and technical features but also to marketing and communications
Developer experience is a lot like customer experience. It can have a big impact on the end-customer experience of the API-using application as well. Depending on maturity level there are different aspects to developer experience.
"Finding the API"
" Getting Access to It "
" Compatibility of features to needs, does using the API save time and effort or bring some advantage that you wouldn’t have without using it "
"Knowing what it can be used for "
" Understanding Specifications "
" Sustainability of formats, endpoints and authentications "
" Cost of using it "
" non-functional requirements: latency, reliability, security and error handling of the API to suit the needs of a particular application. "
" Being able to give feedback, knowing about changes, the image, and brand of the company offering the API "
Developer experience design starts when the API is designed with API Canvas. See also API Consumer Interview -template to understand the specific technical needs of your API consumers.
Onboarding Developers
In addition to the API it self, there are many assets that help developers to learn a new API.
Developer portal or documentation site UI design. Usability and graphics are both important.
Use company branding and content creation guidelines. But remember, your audience is much more technical than the average customer.
Can all your API consumers access all APIs?
Depending on developer portal capabilities and API -specific configuration developers can subscribe access to APIs with
- self-service or
- self-service with approval workflow
Content and communication guidelines
All human readable API documentation pages should be created automatically from API productization and OpenAPI documents. Masters should be stored and edited using version control, not just in the developer portal / documentation site.
Content, language, what information is shared, which channels and formats are used, etc. should be planned and optimized for your developer community.
Terms and conditions for using our APIs are important. Remember to create them together with business, legal and technology people. They need to address privacy and re-use, service levels and data ownership. Try to still keep them understandable.
You can create SDKs or provide code snippets. Remember that not all developers undestand cURL and that maintaining SDK will require work. Your Developer Portal may provide you a way to generate code snippets automatically from an Open API definition.
Presentations and demos help developers understand what they can use the API for. They may also need help in using the tools or figuring out the authentication. so make sure you address that, too.
Think how you are going to collect feedback and feature suggestions.
Some additional things that can impact developer experience:
- Marketing communication (ads, swag, press releases…)
- Monetization (API pricing and payments handling) can be used, if your API business model requires it and your own or your API management platform supports it natively or by connecting to payment gateways.
- Customer stories (testimonials, interviews etc.)
- Release notes/change logs
- Plugins and ready-made integrations
Choose your identities carefully
Pay a few moments of attention to how your API Consuming applications and developers need to authenticate to your APIs and your developer portal. Your priority maybe to make it very easy, but remember to make it secure enough.
