Aim for top of the world developer portals (survey)
API Economy contains love story — developers in companies are building more tools for other developers. If tools (APIs) are not put out nicely and with developer taste, their work is in vain. No one will use the tools. This is what I want to change and it can be achieved by build better portals for API consumers.
I’m Jarkko Moilanen, a researcher from Finland with passion towards API Economy and developers. I’m doing post-doctoral research about API economy and my interest is in API developer experience. I have also written book “API Economy 101” and it was published couple of months ago. It was originally written in Finnish and discussions about translation have been going on. In the past I’ve done research about low cost 3D printing ecosystem — why it happened and what was the role of grassroot hacking communities (Hackerspaces) in it. I have passion towards hackers.
Developer portals are manifestations of good or bad developer experience. This research aims is to provide all portal builders better chances to succeed and provide easily usable tools for API consumers. Better portals most likely increases API usage and thus grows API economy even bigger.
First 15 seconds determine how developers feel about your precious developer portal. They either hate it, love it or neglect it. Builders of developer portals, business people drawing nice customer journeys tend to have an assumption that people are objective rational thinkers. They start from here, select that and then click here and so on until they make a purchase. In fact, our decision making, judgment, attitude, and behavior is influenced by things we are not even aware of such as feelings, emotions and mood.
Survey open until Nov 20th
Aim is to collect information about developer preferences, what works and what does not work. Results can be used in designing new developer portals, drive more traffic to APIs accessed via more attractive and developer focused API portals. Results also help in understanding what kind of content works in B2D marketing. To gain knowledge of developer needs regarding APIs driven portals, I could have interviewed hundreds of developers. But since that is not doable resource-wise, I have launched a survey for API consumers. It takes about 15 minutes to fill in the questions.
More details about the survey and link to survey can be found from
