How to Talk to Non-Techies About APIs

I joined Best Buy API team last winter with only the most cursory knowledge of what an API is or does. After five months of trying to explain to my friends and family what exactly it is we do at my job, I’ve learned that I wasn’t alone. It seems practically nobody who doesn’t regularly work with APIs has much idea what they are or what they do.

In the interest of cutting through the confusion and saving myself some halting explanations, I’ve come up with a partial answer: APIs do pretty much everything. Or rather, APIs facilitate the doing of pretty much everything. It’s a tough topic to explain to a layperson, as it’s one of those things that’s endlessly exciting to those who understand its intricacies and desperately unsexy to those who don’t. I imagine the conversation going something like this…

“So what is it that you do again?”

“I work with Application Programming Interface technology.”

“Oh, so you build apps?”

“Well, no, not exactly.”

“Oh, so you do programming.”

“Well, not quite. We develop the channels by which apps can communicate with programs.”

“So you’re a technological middleman, basically?”

“I suppose you could say that.”

“Well that’s… cool.”

But it really is cool. Whereas electronics stores and the like often talk about cutting out the middleman and passing the savings along to the customer, in the API world it’s the middleman who creates the savings. If developers had to build a separate interface for every product or functionality that required communication between an application and a program, the costs would be prohibitive enough that many advancements would likely never be made. APIs are a vital conduit between two closely related but quite distinct areas of tech, and without them the marketplace would have far less room for innovation.

That’s especially true of open APIs such as Best Buy’s. While there’s a case to be made for all varieties of API depending on the situation, it’s by and large open APIs that drive advancements in tech. As opposed to a closed API, which serves a specific function for its parent developer and no one else, an open API serves its intended purpose and also allows anyone with the know-how to adapt it and take it in new directions. This allows the same API to be tailored to the specific needs of different users.

For instance, our Stores API allows users to narrow searches to stores within a specific city, a ZIP code or a radius of a specific location. The Stores API also lets mapping apps pull information that helps you find not just the nearest Best Buy store but also whether it carries the specific products you’re looking for. Our Products API powers the sorting capabilities that help you filter purchases by category, price and customer rating. Used in combination with an app like IFTTT, the Best Buy Products API lets shoppers get customized and automatic alerts for new products, price changes, and more. When you ask a smartphone voice assistant like Siri to find the nearest Best Buy? That’s our API at work. When a site like Pinterest lets customers shop directly from BestBuy.com? Our API again.

It’s a bold new tech world out there, and API is a subtle but huge part of it. The more we can teach our non-techie friends about it, the better.