Prioritizing User Research

User research in API product development

Earlier, we learned how to identify the target audience and how to segment our target market. Once we’ve chosen a market based on a high-level strategy, the next step is to dig deeper into that market and start doing user research to learn more about all the user personas in that market.

User research is a close partner team for all Product Managers (PMs). When building API products, we start by first learning who our customers are. We can do this by establishing customer personas and mapping the customer journey for each of these personas. A developer’s journey is a map of sequential steps across all our documentation, tools, and marketing channels, such as blogs, videos, and others, that our customers use to learn about our product offering, assess whether it is a good fit for them, develop and integrate with our APIs, and use the product actively.

The primary users of the APIs we build are going to be developers. However, developers may not always be the only users. There are several other team members who are not developers but who are also part of the decision-making when it comes to choosing a set of APIs for the purpose of their project. This could include the product manager, security professional, software architect, and so on. In a B2B setting, different stakeholders make decisions, and each one needs a different set of information to evaluate our API offering. In the same way that there are several teams and team members involved in the development of APIs, our customers also have a number of team members who collaborate in the process of discovering, evaluating, integrating, deploying, and monitoring their integration using the APIs we produce.

It is the responsibility of UX researchers to generate trustworthy insights that can serve to direct the decisions made by product teams. Good intuition is an asset in the process of developing user-friendly and impactful products. The product development process is heavily reliant on UX research insights, and poor UX research insights can lead to poor product decisions based on facts and/or conclusions that are inadequate, inconsistent, or erroneous. On the other hand, it’s up to PMs to correctly evaluate ...