Human-Centered API Design
By: Amancio Bouza
Tags: API, Product Design, Innovation, Human Centered Design, Product Management

Human-Centered API Design

Design APIs Human-Centered to Build Successful API Products

Digital transformation is the next big thing after the industrial revolution. And APIs is one of the pillars of this transformation. That’s why so many organizations are interested in building APIs and expose their assets.

However, building and providing APIs is no guarantee for creating business value, digitalize, or transform. Without the Who, Why, and What, it’s rather a guarantee for failure, especially in the API economy. Thus, the key is to answer the following questions, which should be done prior to discussing how to build an API:

Who is the customer?

Why does the customer need it?

What is the API or rather value proposition interface (VPI)?

Organizations are increasingly investing into innovation to differentiate from or stay ahead from competitors. Innovative organizations focus on users and their needs. And this is what human-centered design is all about: focus on users, their needs, and requirements.

In this article, you’ll learn how to answer the Who, Why, and What with human-centered API design. To this goal, we’ll explain the methodology developed by Tobias Blum, who developed the human-centered API design workshop with us to find good candidates for innovative API products.

In the following, we’ll first describe human-centered API design. Then, we’ll present an API maturity model for organizations that helps you to select the appropriate API design workshop. Subsequently, we’ll present the corresponding workshops that help you discover your organization’s assets, understand customer journeys, and find innovative API products.

What is Human-Centered API Design?

Generally, human-centered design is an approach to interactive systems development that aims to make systems usable and useful. To this goal, this design approach is focusing on the users, their needs, and their requirements.

Highly usable systems and products tend to be more successful both technically and commercially. Especially, systems designed using human-centered methods improve quality, e.g., by:

increasing the productivity of users

being easier to understand and use

improving user experience

Our goal is to make API products useful and usable to make them successful. Hence, human-centered design is an appropriate approach. So, let’s use human-centered design in the context of API products.

Human-centered API design: Human-centered API design is an approach that explores the needs, wants and wishes of users and other stakeholders to create API products that are fitting their needs.

Human-centered design is different to user-centered design. Typically, human-centered design is more focused on methodologies and techniques for interacting with people to detect desires and needs, either by verbal or non-verbal means.

In contrast, user-centered design focuses largely on the API user. But API users or rather developers have different needs than API customers. That means that user-centered design focuses more on the user. On the other side, human-centered design is more holistic, which best fits the API stakeholder landscape.

That’s why we apply human-centered API design and not user-centered or developer-centered API design.

Three Stages of API Program Maturity

Different organizations are at different stages in their API journey. Some have no experience with APIs. Others have already experience with developing APIs and integration. And yet others have experience with API use cases.

Here, you’ll learn about the three stages of an organization in their API journey and to classify your organization accordingly. This will help you to select the right API workshop to create successful API products.

In the following, we’ll present the three stages in more details.

Stage I: Beginner

An organization without knowledge of APIs and how they work is in Stage I.

For organisations in Stage I, we suggest to start with the API Workshop I to discover new API use-cases. In fact, it’s about building up knowledge about API, how they work, and what you need to take into consideration.

Stage II: Advanced

An organization enters the Stage II when they run an API program. Some have already some experience with API design and development. Others are just starting.

When you expose more assets it doesn’t necessarily mean to be more successful in terms of commercial success or business value. Hence, you need to discover new use-cases, and understand what jobs customers want to get done and their pain points. To be successful, you need to know your organization’s that are at you disposal. Otherwise, you’ll find creative ideas that are not feasible within your organization.

For organisations in Stage II, we suggest to start with the API Workshop II to discover new API use-cases that build on existing assets of the organisation.

Go to API Workshop II.

Stage III: Expert

An organization enters the Stage III when they have a running API program. Further, it already has some API products based on available data and service assets.

If you stop innovating, stop extending API products, stop create new API products, then you’ll soon outperformed by your competition. Hence, it is crucial to continue innovating and creating new API products or extending existing API products.

For organizations in Stage III, we suggest to go for the API Workshop III to discover new API use-cases. Repeat this workshop to continue innovating.

Go to API Workshop III.

Summary

Organizations are increasingly investing into innovation to differentiate from competitors. Innovative organizations focus on users and their needs. And this is what human-centered design is all about: focus on users, their needs, and requirements.

Our goal is to make API products useful and usable to make them successful. Hence, human-centered API design is an appropriate approach. We define human-centered API design as follows:

Human-centered API design: Human-centered API design is an approach that explores the needs, wants and wishes of users and other stakeholders to create API products that are fitting their needs.

API Program Maturity

We describe the maturity of an organization with respect to APIs with three stages: beginner, advanced, and expert. The following table describes the three stages in more details.