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Usability of Web APIs

04.Jan.2009

With the attention increase on user experience, the care with usability when designing a web application exploded. Now there’s a general awareness, some good applications for testing and lots of usability companies out there.

Fire Eagle's developers page

Building APIs is now a sort of requirement for most web based services too. There are cases where it’s even the main feature. And you have already many APIs out there.

But I was wondering if besides user experience, developers are also concerned with their prosumers experience. When building your web applications, are you asking/paying other developers to play with your APIs, build applications and give feedback? There’s a lot of information on building generic APIs, best practices and so on. But web APIs (mainly REST) have unique characteristics. Just think of the fact that not only programmers are using them now, but all sorts of prosumers.

I believe there’s still little discussion on this matter and this will become a bigger concern. Any resources to share on this matter?

[Update]

Filipe Correia shared on the comments this good post by the creator of Migratr tool.

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2 Comments

I've stumbled on this post which reminded me of your's. I've rather enjoyed reading it.

filipe correia / 17.Jan.2009 at 05:03pm

I struggled to find such an article. Curiously the original post was written on the same day as mine. Thanks for the note, I add it to the post above.