Provide adaptive and measured API developer experience
Developer eXperience (DX) should be shaped and improved all the time. It’s not something you build once and expect developers to be happy. We are being told that a good API developer experience is a necessity and contains things such as up-to-date documentation, support, reliability, code examples, SDKs, plans and so on. To me that sounds too mechanistic — it is just a list of features. That is an engineer’s approach to developer experience. In other words, we are offered one size fits all Developer eXperience, which in fact is one size fits none.
Instead you should treat developers as customers explains Data Engineer, API & Chatbot Builder Jani Karhunen:
“API providers should treat developers as close to real customers as possible. Thus, developer experience is customer experience, which should and can be measured, and therefore managed.”
You want developers to be hooked (read the developer statement above again!). After that you want to make their path as easy as possible to finally fall in love with your APIs. It’s the same as with cars. Once a person becomes part of the BMW family, they tend to stick with BMW. They love the quality of BMW even though it’s pricey to maintain. But more importantly they love the brand and image. You want that effect with your APIs as well.
To achieve this you need to get under their skin and provide top quality developer experience. One aspect of excellent DX is ability to adapt to developers’ needs and provide individual learning paths and service, which can be build with learning analytics.
The 2016 Horizon Report describes learning analytics as “an educational application of web analytics aimed at learner profiling, a process of gathering and analyzing details of individual student interactions in online learning activities.”
Support individual learning paths
Learning how to use your API is part of developer onboarding, which contains more steps than just getting familiar with your API. API owners should be demanding solutions which give them real-time feedback about how API consumers (the developers) adopt their APIs and what kind of learning paths they prefer.
Each developer is individual and needs to be treated as such even in learning how to use your API.
Taking API into use is about learning
What else is API adoption than learning? Developer knows nothing about your API and wants to learn effective use of it as easily and fast as possible. Some prefer to read 3rd party developer stories about utilizing your API before reading documentation. Others might want to test API before doing anything else. Providing code examples for the “wrong” language might be enough to push the developer (potential paying customer) away.
Therefore, we need to support individual learning paths which are based on four fundamental elements:
- Each developer takes responsibility for their own learning.
- Mentor only assists in overcoming hard parts
- Developer sets own goals and works towards them
- Learning takes place in own individual pace.
Now let’s apply the above to APIs.
Solution is adaptive & measured API developer experience
Finland has been the top education leader in the world for sometime even though lately some indicators have shown decline (I’m not too worried about this). We have excellent rising companies such as Claned Group and their solution which contains real-time analytics and social learning capabilities. Furthermore, there’s HeadAI and Steamlane. We should hook up with companies like them!
Adaptive API developer experience contains following features.
- Provides each API consumer individual learning path
- Provides social learning and co-operation opportunities with peers.
- Assists newbies to get started more easily (cross the chasm)
- Adapts to what API consumer prefers and has learned already.
- Suggests API consumer what to learn next.
- Provides chatbot based virtual assistant for every step towards API consuming happy developer (and to stay as such).
- Utilizes Artificial Intelligence and learning analytics to make use of the collected data (developer behaviour).
If learning analytics is, in essence, collection of data that is gathered while learners are engaging in the eLearning experience, then API Developer eXperience Analytics is collection of data that is gathered while developers are engaging in the API developer experience.
Benefits of adaptive developer experience in a nutshell
It is expected that the availability of personalised, dynamic and timely feedback supports the developers’ self-regulated API adoption as well as increases their motivation and success. Here’s what we can gain by implementing developer analytics driven adaptive DX:
- Helps to predict developers’ performance
- Provides developers with a personalized API developer experience
- Increases developers’ retention rates (less ‘dropouts’)
- Helps to improve future APIs & related API developer experience
- Boosts cost efficiency
Whether you choose to build adaptive DX around API management or create separate developer center, it makes sense to collect information about the API consumers — what they do, where they go, what kind of interactions they have, what are their coding habits, willingness to get tutoring etc.
Measuring helps in making things better
Based on the information, learning analytics can provide visualizations about how developers learn to use your APIs and more importantly where they most likely fail and abandon your API.
With help of the analysed results, API owner can fine-tune (manually or automatically) developer experience. Adapting to developer’s needs is better DX than assuming that same size fits all — or none. This is what API developer experience should become. The path described above looks intriguing and we’ll explore it in apinf.io. We are open for co-operation with others — as open source.
