by CAPRA J'NEVA
API Experience
Developers don't think of themselves as customers. Convincing a team of 1200 developers building experiences for other developers that they needed to work with Experience Designers was no easy task. But an API or an SDK is nothing more than an interface made of code instead of pixels. We created the API Experience or APIX program to help Autodesk scale it's platform coherently, with the same attention to design patterns and customer feedback (in code and documentation) as we would expect from any user interface.
The Team
1 XD architect, 1 Content Designer, with participation from technical writers, and sponsorship of our internal developer advocacy and success team
Timeframe
1 year
My Role
Senior Manager of Design & Architecture, Project Lead, Product Management expert
Impact
125
Developers and Product Managers being educated in APIX Program (WIP)
100%
Percent of Product Divisions with APIX Champions
17
APIs and SDKs in production with APIX practices
Why should Experience Design contribute to platforms?
Developers are users too. At Autodesk Platform Services our deliverable is a platform for developers to use.
Without experience design, the platform team was delivering an incoherent set of APIs that used different mental models, different call flows, and messy documentation with no clear information architecture. It was difficult to find what you were looking for, understand what you could build with the platform, and figure out how to put APIs built by different teams together. Sometimes even step-by-step tutorials left out the most basic steps.
Given that 64% of our platform's customers are "Citizen Developers" we needed to involve our customers in the design of our whole system, but especially the APIs themselves.
How it works
From the first problem brief to the public beta and launch, our program helps engineers, product managers, experience designers and technical content designers work more effectively to define the API or SDK together. Together they get iterative customer input on the simplicity, usefulness, clarity, performance and supportiveness of the API and its documentation.
We trained across all API-producing divisions and roles to help our teams deliver world-class APIs. Our program instructs teams how to build proofs-of-concept that will live on as sample code, simple quick methods of getting feedback at any stage of development, how to conduct code quality audits and measure developer reactions to the product's usability during beta and general availability.
What we did
Recognizing the need for cross-functional collaboration on the program and difficulty getting designers technically able to audit code, we focused first on building buy-in from our VP and senior-director leadership, then on building learning pathways that include videos, written content, templates and examples.
We launched and advertised the program by identifying and messaging key collaborators, and we keep it alive by holding weekly community practice groups and study halls. After the first 10 students, the program grew organically to over 130 participants and spread company wide, with more than one product team opening a specific new engineering role focused on design of APIs.
