Tag Archives: support

Why no one wants to use your API

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A brilliant, undiscovered app developer just logged into the front page for your API program (please don’t tell me you just emailed a PDF), and made their first successful call. They’re frustrated, feeling like they don’t understand what just happened, and generally just exhausted.

Hopes of impressing colleagues with a quick demo espousing the ease of adoption have been dashed. They are eagerly digging through your content trying to find a way to explain the value of what your API brings to his company.

This is too hard!

…you might be about to lose out on the most serendipitous moment in your companies’ future. Developers you have never met might have the potential to change your future…but only if it’s easy to get started.
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How to localize your API

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Full disclosure: I was born and live in the USA, American English is my native language, and I spend USD every day. However, I work with customers in 18 countries and regions on five continents, and the list is getting bigger all the time.Internationalization localization and currency

Operating a business in the global market is not as trivial as it might seem, if you’ve never seen it through. Everyone not only speaks different languages and has different currencies (not to mention driving on the different sides of the road), but they also have different cultural norms. In many situations, we can merely provide raw values for dates and currency and avoid formatting. However, when content includes localizable information, especially dates and currencies, display formatting needs to be sensitive to the localized culture.

If you’re considering making the jump off of your own soil to the rest of the globe, hopefully this will give you some insights.

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