on 19-Apr-2013 07:12
If you’ve ever developed for an enterprise IT department, and had to please the end user, you know very well that they don’t care about what your technical limitations are, they care about getting a tool that helps them do their job better. Oh some will commiserate with you about your challenges, and the best of the business side will compromise to get to a product that helps, even if it’s not perfect, but much like everyday consumers, they want what they want, and you either provide it or not. The thing is, in the enterprise, the pool of users is much smaller than for a commercial application, but the users are more focused on what they need, precisely because there are less of them.
On thing that many vendors fail to comprehend is that this “I need what I need and you provide it or you do not” approach applies just as strongly to enterprise developers. While most business to business (B2B) vendors (both hardware and software) understand the need to provide a useful, generally easy to learn user interface or command line, often that understanding does not extend to APIs.
Don’t make API consumers
into this guy.
There is a mentality of “We’re all developers here…”, which is true, but developers have different priorities. Just as the bulk of end users will not use an application that is poorly documented, non-intuitive, and complex, the same is true for the bulk of enterprise developers. They have a goal in mind, are trying to get their job done, and if your API is slowing them down or making their work harder, they will look for alternate ways to achieve their goals.
Oh, for sure there will be a small percentage that dig in and learn the API no matter how confusing and undocumented it is, for a variety of reasons ranging from earning geek cred to project requirements demanding it. But if given a choice, the vast majority of developers will seek an easier way to do what needs doing. They have timelines and deadlines, and will not let something like poor documentation interfere with those requirements.
Yes, stability and predictability of APIs is essential, without those items the toolset will not get used. But without documentation and an intuitive design with predictable types, requests, responses, etc. many developers won’t even get to the stability part. When the tool cannot be figured out in the time available, stability is entirely irrelevant.
So what do you need? Well, I have years of both writing and using APIs, and here are a few tips from me, no doubt others have a lot to add to the conversation:
In the end, the point of an API is to get people to use it. Invest in the API, treat it like a product, even if in your business case it is a feature, not a product. It was developed for a reason, give IT the tools to make that reason real.
And save us all a ton of time trying to figure out how to use it, so we can focus on the overall application, not your tiny bit of it.