Nida I Zamir April 22, 2022

You create a great API and invest resources, time, and energy into it, but it turns out it’s not being adopted as much as you had anticipated. While your first instinct might be to investigate the API, there could be other factors at play here..

For starters, is your API documentation in-sync with the API? Do you provide only HTTP references or language-specific documentation? Are there any code samples that your API users can copy-paste directly onto their IDEs? Are there any SDKs that your users can integrate easily into their applications?

This might become a little overwhelming until you shift your perspective to how your API users are interacting with your API. Understanding your API user’s journey can help you identify where your API Portal may need more focus, so we break that journey into three phases:

  • Discovery
  • Exploration
  • Integration
Webinar Notes

In this webinar, APIMatic’s Chief Product Architect, Mehdi Raza, and API Problem Solver, Keith Casey, present this perspective in detail and how mapping your API Portal’s features against each phase make it much easier to create a streamlined developer experience for your users. This eventually results in more adoption of your API as you provide them an experience for their use case specifically.

Mehdi goes through examples of existing API portals from the API consumer’s point of view and discusses the landing page, language-specific documentation styles, good and bad code samples, SDKs, and more. The interactive presentation is followed by an informative and conversational Q&A session, one question being: 

Q: If you could make one improvement to any API portal, what would be the one thing that people would benefit most from?

A: The one thing that people can benefit most in the explore phase especially is getting the use-cases of your API users laid properly, and figuring out which ones are the most important. So that you can make them the front piece of your API portal, and it helps out your API users straight away.

Webinar Notes

[0:17] Introduction and premise

[2:58] Low adoption after your API launch, what went wrong?

[5:48] Understanding the API consumer journey

[10:48] Optimizing the API Portal for the Discovery phase

[11:10] Experiments for webinar viewers (good and bad API Portal)

[16:48] Optimizing the API Portal for the Exploration phase

[23:47] Optimizing the API Portal for the Integration phase

[26:28] Code samples: best and worst practices

[33:10] SDKs: why are they important, and how are Stripe and other big names using them?

[37:52] Last trick: the secret behind API adoption revealed

[40:35] Q&A session

Watch The Webinar

Additional Resources

For any questions, comments, or feedback, please visit our website or request a demo with our experts.