API Design Backgrounds - who succeeds?

[williamspaul-1]

Thinking about groups you've worked with, what are the backgrounds typical of API designers that have been successful at developing "Lovable API" designs?

The most obvious one for me is folks who have had to consume apis before -- App and Web developers have seen a lot of patterns, but what kinds of other backgrounds lend themselves to successfully transitioning to design?

[Marsh]

Great question, and one that is not easily answered—probably because there are many paths to the top of the mountain.

Having to consume APIs brings firsthand experience, so it's definitely important. But sometimes that means repeating the same, painful patterns because they're familiar. The trick is to be able to imagine other alternatives and cast yourself as a user into them. This requires empathy—the same skill that makes for great user interface designers—after all, an interface, whether programmatic or graphic, is a the affordance offered to the consumer of the service.

One more critical aspect IMO is to design and test early (iterate). For a GUI, that's often with paper and then clickable prototypes before a line of code has been written. For an API, it's writing a design spec in a format like OpenAPI, and then using that to drive documentation or even mocks that enable you to engage with real client-teams to understand how well it suits their needs. Also, it's much easier to iterate on your designs before any server-side code has been written. Curiosity will help here, too.

Finally, because an Application Programming Interface is so "efficient," naming things is a critical skill for designing great APIs. Before you can name something, you have to capture that thing's true nature. But finding the right word can make all the difference in the world…