Designing the developer experience (DX) in a B2B company, by a former developer (part 2)
This second part of the article invites you to delve into the fundamental role of developer-centered design through the prism of Sarah, our App developer persona (understand “App” as a connector between 2 pieces of software) at the heart of the B2B (Business to Business) context.
We’ll explore how the concept of “developer experience” fits into the improvement of Akeneo’s API documentation, impacting the creation of Apps designed to make life easier for our partners’ customers.
Akeneo’s DX team
Before diving into Sarah’s portrait, I’d like to give you a brief introduction to the company and team I work for. Akeneo is a company renowned for its pivotal role in the field of product information management. Its B2B scope lies in the creation of Apps (such as BigCommerce or Shopify) and solutions (PIM, Supplier Portal, Activation for Retail…). These solutions simplify the management and distribution of companies’ product information across their sales channels, to deliver a satisfying customer experience.
I am a part of the company’s DX (Developer eXperience) team.
Before this team existed, the developers and product managers of each team were responsible for enriching and maintaining Akeneo’s API documentation, however, they were not working on only this 100% of the time. Users of this documentation struggled to find what they needed, especially for developing Akeneo Apps.
It was to improve this context that the DX team was born in June 2022. A team dedicated to the developer experience, comprising a product manager, a lead developer, a few full stack developers and myself, in the role of product designer. And so the DX adventure began! Since then, we’ve been working together to improve our persona Sarah’s experience with our API documentation.
Now that you know more about where our mission to help Sarah started, I’ll tell you a little more about her.
Sarah, our App developer persona
Sarah is an App developer employed either by Akeneo (as mentioned above, we develop our own Apps), by an Akeneo partner company, or by an Akeneo client company.
In a B2B context, she lives in a world where performance, functionality and efficiency are imperatives.
➡ She assumes the decisive role of selecting the appropriate technologies for her project, encompassing:
- technical architecture
- hosting
- programming language and frameworks.
➡ In addition, the development process requires Sarah to have several tools at her disposal:
- an Akeneo PIM environment
- a functional PIM API (enabling her to retrieve data from her PIM using “API calls”)
- comprehensive API documentation.
Here’s an example of a task that Sarah might have to perform: She wants to retrieve the “Stoneware vase” product data from her PIM and send it to the App she’s developing. She will install the Akeneo PIM API on her computer and then, in her App, write code capable of requesting the desired information from the PIM (e.g. get product information, here).
On the other hand, Sarah may find herself at any moment having to deal with performance issues in her App or data synchronization. Her ability to solve technical problems quickly remains essential to the success of her projects. However, the problems she may encounter are not specifically related to her App. If the API documentation provided is not clear enough, lacks essential information or is poorly structured, Sarah will lose a lot of time in her development work. Her experience as a user of the documentation is then very poor.
Improving the developer experience
That’s where we, the DX team, come in!
The notion of “developer experience” plays a central role in the design of Apps adapted to developers like Sarah. In the specific context of Akeneo Apps, this aspect takes on particular importance. Documentation, specifically, plays a pivotal role for developers, providing clear guidelines and essential resources for designing high-performance Akeneo Apps.
Our efforts are focused on improving documentation to assist Akeneo partners in designing Apps that simplify their customers’ lives. Through in-depth user research and iterative collaboration, we are working to provide Sarah with precise instructions, concrete examples and tutorials. This approach aims to minimize obstacles in her development process, ensuring more intuitive, fluid and reliable Apps. Sarah improves her efficiency, reduces the time invested in her development process and gains access to a more rewarding user experience.
In this flow, the documentation is poorly organized. Sarah is lost in the midst of all these redirection links. Sometimes, she even finds herself in a “dead end”, as no link allows her to return to a key page.
Here, Sarah can easily navigate through the API documentation thanks to a step-by-step flow. She knows where to go according to her needs. The information she needs to create her App is presented to her in such a way that she never gets lost.
As Apps become the cornerstone of various industries, developer experience-driven design is becoming increasingly important. By putting the spotlight on personas such as Sarah, we realize the profound impact that design choices have on the quality of Apps. An improved developer experience, made possible by optimized documentation, generates significant benefits not only for developers, but also for Akeneo’s partners. As we explore the convergence between development and design, we find that this symbiosis creates better user experiences, more powerful Apps and, ultimately, greater satisfaction. By uniting these two worlds, we are forging a future where collaboration between developers and designers is the key to successful experiences.
In the third and final part of the article, we’ll go behind the scenes of developer experience design, where we’ll explore the singular research methods and dynamic collaborations that make up my daily life. You’ll discover the intriguing advantages they offer, as well as the exciting challenges involved in shaping a development experience that meets users’ needs.
