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Consumer - Evaluate

Once consumers discover an API, they need time to evaluate whether it meets their needs. Do yourself a favor by providing a streamlined, hands-on experience, allowing consumers to play with real functionality and learn about resources and capabilities by doing something, rather than just reading about it. Giving them the information they need to make an educated decision about whether an API will satisfy their needs makes them feel empowered and helps them understand how the API fits into the business solution they want to build.

Elements

  • Explore - Enable consumers to explore as much of the surface area of an API as possible, perhaps without even authenticating, so they can learn what is possible.
  • Execute - Provide the ability to execute each request, response, publish, and subscribe, making sure that learning about an API is as hands-on as it can possibly be.
  • Examples - Make sure there are always examples for each element of an API, allowing API contracts to be mocked and providing rich documentation showing how they work.
  • Documentation - Provide rich documentation with useful descriptions, examples, and other information to help consumers get started using each API.
  • Workflows - Go beyond reference documentation and provide actual business workflows consumers can use to accomplish their workplace goals.
  • Demonstrate - Show consumers how the API works, providing tutorials, videos, stories, and other content demonstrating what is possible when you integrate APIs into applications.
  • Feedback - Make it easy for consumers to provide feedback as they evaluate an API, capturing as much data from their experience as possible to inform your API roadmap.

Investing in the evaluation stage of a consumer-centric API life cycle helps reduce consumers’ time to first call, or more importantly, time to first transaction. You are making it as easy as possible for consumers to begin generating value in their applications and on the API platform.

There are many signals consumers consider when evaluating an API. This is the stage of the consumer life cycle where you are most likely to lose partners and public users, who may have other options for APIs. Your internal users may have other options as well. But if they don’t, make it easy for them instead of creating friction.