Introduction to Components of API Experience

What will we learn?

API experience encompasses all documentation and tooling made available to customers to assist them in learning about and integrating with our APIs. Aside from the tools, the API experience also includes customer support channels and developer relations efforts, which have a big impact on how customers use our APIs.

Each step of the customer journey can be mapped to multiple components of the API experience. In this chapter, we'll look at which industry standards exist for API experiences and what the key components that make up an industry-standard API experience are. This will include:

• Industry standards for API experience.

• Creating API documentation.

• Providing developer tools.

• Instrumenting support mechanisms.

By the end of this chapter, we’ll have a toolbox of API experience components that customers look for when evaluating APIs for integration.