The document discusses developer experience (DX) with application programming interfaces (APIs) and platforms. It begins by introducing DX and its relationship to user experience and development practices. It then discusses evaluating DX from the perspectives of both API users and owners. The document outlines features to consider when measuring DX, organized into eight groups, and provides examples to illustrate both good and bad DX. It argues that DX will become increasingly important as more functionality is delivered via external APIs and services.

1. DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE
AND API AS A PRODUCT
ANASTASIA GORYACHEVA
© INTENTO, INC.
SEPTEMBER 2018CSS-MINSK-JS

2. INTENTO
!2© Intento, Inc. / September 2018
INTENTO
A simple API to
third-party AI models
from many vendors
https://inten.to

3. INTENTO
DX = UX + DEV PRACTICES
!3

4. INTENTO
PRODUCT LIFE CYCLE
!4
Product → User

5. INTENTO
CONSIDER ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW
Product → User
Platform → Product → User
!5

6. INTENTO
PLACE FOR DEVS
Product → User
Platform → Product → User
!6

7. INTENTO
DEVELOPERS & ENVIRONMENT
!7

8. INTENTO
Platform owners ❤ Users
⬇
Platform owners ❤ Developers
!8
They should

9. INTENTO
– Heroku Platform, https://www.heroku.com/dx
“We believe that great apps come from
developers using tools they love.”
!9

10. INTENTO
OUR FOCUS TODAY
Platform owners ❤ Developers
Developers ❤ Platform
!10

11. INTENTO
ONE TAKES GOOD STUFF
FOR GRANTED
!11

12. INTENTO
!12
INTENTO

13. INTENTO
PIECES OF GOOD DX
Opensourced code
Debugging tools
Interactive stack trace
…
!13

14. INTENTO
USUALLY, ONE NOTICES
ANNOIYNG STUFF
!14

15. INTENTO
BAD DX
it eats your time ⌛
it drains your battery 😩
it makes you unhappy 😿
it lowers down your productivity 🤯
!15

16. INTENTO
TERRIBLE DX
One need a local bank card to pay for smth
It requires a local phone number to register
One need to sign NDA to read an API spec
!16

17. INTENTO
If it annoys you
⬇
It slows you down
⬇
It slows The Progress
!17

18. INTENTO
HOW TO IMPROVE DX
IN TWO WAYS
!18

19. INTENTO
1. If you are a platform user,
choose the right experience
2. If you are a platform owner,
provide the right experience
!19

20. INTENTO
1. CHOOSE THE RIGHT THINGS
• Compare options (measure, get some numbers)
• Predict what will slow you down in the future
• Pick the most satisfying option
• Start using it, get more insights
• Update your prediction; consider changing the option
!20

21. INTENTO
ENJOY! 🏖
!21

22. INTENTO
2. PROVIDE THE RIGHT EXPERIENCE
• Get into your users’ heads, analyse their problems
• Pick one of the issues, come up with a solution
• Implement, provide
• Listen to the feedback
• See if it eases the pain, analyse again
• Update implementation
!22

23. INTENTO
PROFIT! 💎
!23

24. INTENTO
SAY, YOUR SITE NEEDS A MAP...
!24
product

25. INTENTO
!25

26. INTENTO
MAP FEATURES
•Embed
•Add marks
•Zoom in/out
•Drag’n’drop
!26

27. INTENTO
YOUR SITE GOES VIRAL
!27
⏱ * + 🚀

28. INTENTO
QUOTA LIMITS
•Payment options
•Volume discount
•Billing history
!28
UPTIME / ERRORS
•Outage alerts
•Clear error messages
•Support / Help

29. INTENTO
YOUR AUDIENCE GROWS
!29

30. INTENTO
MORE FEATURES
•Smart watch support
•Chinese language and regions
•Cache layers for offline use
•Integrate with users’ personal profiles
•Legal constraints
!30

31. INTENTO
TUTORIALS
•Getting started
•API explorer
•Interactive docs
•Free trials
!31
MAINTENANCE
•Explorable logs
•Roadmap for
updates
•Status dashboard
•Documented RPS

32. INTENTO
!32
NOT SO MANY OPTIONS
AFTER ALL

33. INTENTO
AI API SERVICES
!33

34. INTENTO
CONSIDER ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW
Product → User
Platform → Product → User
!34

35. INTENTO
PILES OF PLATFORMS
Platform → Product → User
Platform → Platform → Product → User
Platform(s) → Platform → Product → User
Platform(s) → ... → Platform(s) → Product → User
!35

36. INTENTO
!36
INTENTO

37. INTENTO
A QUICK EXAMPLE
• A biomed texts translator (a person)
• CAT* for translating biomed articles (a piece of [desktop] software)
• Some cloud service supporting the CAT tool
• Machine translation APIs as cloud services
• Trained models in the biomed domain trained for NMT**
• Cloud services for hosting all of it (...and even more layers)
!37
* Computer-assisted translation
** Neural Machine Translation

38. INTENTO
BETWEEN EACH LAYER THERE IS
A CRYING STRUGGLING DEVELOPER
!38

39. INTENTO
AI SERVICES FOR TRANSLATION
!39

40. INTENTO
2. PROVIDE THE RIGHT EXPERIENCE
• Get into your users’ heads, analyse their problems
• Pick one of the issues, come up with a solution
• Implement, provide
• Listen to the feedback
• See if it eases the pain, analyse again
• Update implementation
!40

41. INTENTO
!41
INTENTO
From State of the Machine Translation by Intento (July 2018)
https://bit.ly/mt_jul2018 19 Cloud MT engines, 48 language pairs

42. INTENTO
~70 FEATURES → 8 GROUPS
• Product features
• API design
• Documentation
• Onboarding
!42
• Commercial
• Implementation
• Maintenance
• Reliability

43. !43
INTENTO

44. !44
INTENTO
GOOGLE

45. !45
INTENTO
YANDEX

46. !46
INTENTO
PROMT

47. INTENTO
SOME GROUPS IN DETAILS
!47

48. INTENTO
PRODUCT FEATURES
• Supported languages
• Custom engines
• Formatted text support
• Bulk mode
• Language detection
• ... + 5 more
!48

49. INTENTO
COMMERCIAL
• Starter package
• Public pricing
• Volume discounts
• Payment systems
• Billing history
!49

50. INTENTO
RELIABILITY
• Uptime (observed outages)
• Sporadic errors (observed)
• Unexpected bugs or conflicts with the specification
• Performance issues (occasional request timeouts, etc.)
• Status dashboard
• Outage alerts
• SLA
!50

51. INTENTO
MORE IN THE ARTICLE*
!51
* https://blog.inten.to/measuring-api-developer-experience-91b5c19645b0

52. INTENTO
IS IT A FULL LIST?
!52

53. INTENTO
PROBABLY NOT!
!53

54. INTENTO
TEAM ROLES
• Product
• Finance
• Sales
• DevOps
• Analytics
!54
• QA / Testing
• Support
• Security
• Development
• ...

55. INTENTO
IS THERE A MATCH BETWEEN
ROLES AND FEATURE GROUPS?
!55

56. INTENTO
Product
Finance
Sales
DevOps
Analytics
QA Testing
Support
Security
Development
!56
Product features
API design
Documentation
Onboarding
Commercial
Implementation
Maintenance
Reliability
TEAM ROLES FEATURES

57. INTENTO
Product
Finance
Sales
DevOps
Analytics
QA Testing
Support
Security
Development
!57
Product features
API design
Documentation
Onboarding
Commercial
Implementation
Maintenance
Reliability

58. INTENTO
Product
Finance
Sales
DevOps
Analytics
QA Testing
Support
Security
Development
!58
Product features
API design
Documentation
Onboarding
Commercial
Implementation
Maintenance
Reliability

59. INTENTO
Product
Finance
Sales
DevOps
Analytics
QA Testing
Support
Security
Development
!59
Product features
API design
Documentation
Onboarding
Commercial
Implementation
Maintenance
Reliability

60. INTENTO
Product
Finance
Sales
DevOps
Analytics
QA Testing
Support
Security
Development
!60
Product features
API design
Documentation
Onboarding
Commercial
Implementation
Maintenance
Reliability

61. INTENTO
Product
Finance
Sales
DevOps
Analytics
QA Testing
Support
Security
Development
!61
Product features
API design
Documentation
Onboarding
Commercial
Implementation
Maintenance
Reliability

62. INTENTO
Product
Finance
Sales
DevOps
Analytics
QA Testing
Support
Security
Development
!62
Product features
API design
Documentation
Onboarding
Commercial
Implementation
Maintenance
Reliability

63. INTENTO
Product
Finance
Sales
DevOps
Analytics
QA Testing
Support
Security
Development
!63
Product features
API design
Documentation
Onboarding
Commercial
Implementation
Maintenance
Reliability

64. INTENTO
Product
Finance
Sales
DevOps
Analytics
QA Testing
Support
Security
Development
!64
Product features
API design
Documentation
Onboarding
Commercial
Implementation
Maintenance
Reliability

65. INTENTO
Product
Finance
Sales
DevOps
Analytics
QA Testing
Support
Security
Development
!65
Product features
API design
Documentation
Onboarding
Commercial
Implementation
Maintenance
Reliability

66. INTENTO
Product
Finance
Sales
DevOps
Analytics
QA Testing
Support
Security
Development
!66
Product features
API design
Documentation
Onboarding
Commercial
Implementation
Maintenance
Reliability

67. INTENTO
MATCH RESULTS
• Each team role has at least one link with some DX feature
• Each DX feature is connected with some team roles
• So the DX features list is probably good enough
for measuring DX
!67

68. INTENTO
SO WHAT WITH DX?
!68

69. INTENTO
LET’S USE A TEMPLATE
• Some
• Incomplete
• Features
!69
• What
• …is this
• …for me?

70. INTENTO
1/8 MISSING PRODUCT FEATURES
• No batch input
• Missing support for some
popular formats
!70
• Need to add these features
on your own
• Complications with adding
another service to your
stack

71. INTENTO
2/8 QUESTIONABLE API DESIGN
• Non-intuitive URI format
• Ignoring standards like
REST
• Non-encrypted traffic
• No quota info available
through API requests
!71
• Spending lots of time
investigating custom
interfaces
• Potential problems with
sensitive data
• Manual checks will slow
down any automation
process

72. INTENTO
3/8 INCOMPLETE DOCUMENTATION
• Vague error messages
• Hidden features
• No API explorer *
!72
• More time for debugging
• Requires own environment
to run experiments in
* OpenAPI / swagger is super easy to add. Well, almost like that.

73. INTENTO
4/8 ENTRY BARRIER
• Weird Sign up or paywall
• Too easy or too complex
tutorials or code samples
• No official SDKs
• Unavailable direct support
or ticket system
!73

74. INTENTO
5/8 OBSCURE COMMERCIAL CONDITIONS
• No public pricing
• No billing history
• Just too expensive
!74
• Money losses on start
• Extra checks for correct
payments
• High-risk decision making

75. INTENTO
6/8 SUSPICIOUS IMPLEMENTATION
• Non-standard API spec
• Non-standard response/
request format
• Problems with unicode
support or HTTP
compression
!75
• More time to get familiar
with another part of
functionality
• Or even write your own
spec above non-standard
one
• Write own adapters for
response format, etc.

76. INTENTO
7/8 CARELESS MAINTENANCE
• No versioning
• No release notes
• No roadmap
• No news feed with updates
!76
• Hard time for supporting
unexpected changes
• Manually monitor potential
updates
• Stick to an old version due
to unclear changes in the
new one

77. INTENTO
8/8 UNRELIABILITY
• Observed outages
• Observed sporadic errors
• No SLA
!77
• Deal with urgent bugs on
your side
• Manually discover service
limits

78. INTENTO
WHAT DOES IT MEAN
FOR A FRONTEND DEVELOPER?
!78

79. INTENTO
FUTURE IS HERE
• More and more stuff is likely to be delegated
to external API services since in-house development
is expensive in many ways
• AI is fun https://aijs.rocks/
• Tensorflow.js is waiting for you
• Everyone is half-step away from using AI services
as an everyday tool on a daily basis
!79

80. INTENTO
READ IT LATER
• https://blog.inten.to/measuring-api-developer-experience-91b5c19645b0
• https://www.infoq.com/news/2015/10/api-developer-experience
• https://nordicapis.com/why-api-developer-experience-matters-more-than-
ever/
• https://hackernoon.com/the-best-practices-for-a-great-developer-
experience-dx-9036834382b0
• https://www.slideshare.net/jmusser/ten-reasons-developershateyourapi
!80

81. INTENTO
IMAGE CREDITS, UNSPLASH.COM
• Aaron Burden
• Alexander Andrews
• Andrew Itaga
• Arwan Sutanto
• Dawid Zawila
• Fleur Treurniet
!81
•Jeremy Bishop
•Larry Teo
•Mike Kononov
•Samuel Zeller
•Tom Grimbert
•Tyler Nix

82. INTENTO
THANK YOU!
!82
Anastasia Goryacheva
A.e.goryacheva@gmail.com
Github: tyanas
twitter: tyanas_