Tag Archives: UX

Is end-user API UX a Utopia?

I have been working as a User Experience designer at CloudWork for the past 6 months and I’ve faced many challenges and opportunities while building an easy to use product that automates business processes and synchronizes cloud-based applications.

The UI and UX of the application was very easy to create compared to the actual UX of the service. The uncertainty and the number of dependencies for creating a successful integration between cloud applications is so high that it seems almost impossible to guarantee the Quality of Service.

The main issue is the lack of standards. Each application has a different API, different logic, different nomenclature. Even applications of the same class, e.g. CRM, are completely different beasts. This makes it really hard to guarantee the same solid integration between CRM A and APP X compared to CRM B and APP X. This can make creating a consistent User Experience very difficult.

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What is API User Experience?

According to ISO 9241-210, User Experience, or UX, is “a person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service”. Additionally, Wikipedia has a broader definition, covering many aspects of the way users interact with a system:

[UX] involves a person’s emotions about using a particular product, system or service. User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership. Additionally, it includes a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system. — bolds added by me

So, if APIs are, by definition, Application Programming Interfaces, API User Experience can be defined as follows:

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