HE360 API Dev Portal
Guiding customers to better access our data
Overview
HawkEye 360 is currently working on providing our customers API’s. One of our first API’s provides customers with status information on their collections. In order to provide a seamless experience, we also had to think about creating an API dev portal that would provide our customer’s developers the tools they need take advantage of our API’s.
Goal
Create an API dev portal that guides Developers and Customers through our products and provides tools in an appropriately structured manner for ease of use.
Role
UX Design, User Research, Information Architecture, Interaction Design and UI Design
01
Discovery
What is an API? Why do we need one?
The first step in my journey was simply to understand APIs, dev portals and their primary users (developers). This meant a lot of researching on my end and conducting user and stakeholder interviews.
I interviewed 5 internal developers—
The interviews were mostly conversations at first where I asked users:
What is your experience using a dev portal?
What are you looking for when using a dev portal?
02
Understanding
After interviews were done I began to identify behavioral variables, pain points, needs, and goals.
I presented my findings to my manger and the PM at the time. The first few meetings were simply getting on the same page. Presenting my work so far helped keep everyone in involved and grounded.
The PM and I the first user we’d focus on would be the Developer. Solving their problems and providing them with a good user experience was something we could grow on. Especially since our first API would simply focus on providing collections
03
Nailing the Sitemap & Content
Before designing anything, I wanted to make sure that the user journey and specific user flows were being met.
I came up with my list of basic actions a user should be able to complete.
I then met with various stakeholders to insure these things were enough for our Phase 0 and I that I covered most use cases.
04
Design Concepts
I came up with a couple different concepts, and continued to meet with stakeholders and other secondary stakeholders, to insure the brand was being met.
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A couple outstanding problems and side notes came up.
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More information on our products
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No need for a landing page
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The need for a “person of contanct” — who is going to own that.
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How would customers get access?
How we solved for these was to save some issues for later phases, and adding it all in later on. Our phase 0 concept was meant to be very simple, and targeted to already existing customers.
05
Working with Developers
Upon handing off the style guide, and mockups and meeting with them. We came across a couple issues, one being another limitation to the Kong API dev template environment.
Because we’re unable to edit the html of the profile page, our developer contacted support, who told him there wasn’t much he could do.
In this case I ended up having to redesign the page, especially since the developer had basically tried the best they could to get it to look the way I’d intended.
There are moments when you have to be flexible with design, especially if it is going to benefit the final product, I’ve learned to choose my battles. And in this case. It was an issue with Kong, and in a way out of our hands. If we built our own website from scratch dev would have to own it, but like I said earlier, we wanted non-dev people to be able to edit the content and maybe even own it eventually.
06
Validation & Next Steps
The Dev Portal was reviewed and underwent usability testing and QA testing. The results showed that the API dev portal had just enough information that made developers comfortable enough to interact with our API. There were some more detailed questions that came up that developers were certain about, but the information we provided was enough to get startede.
We hope to add more content to the dev portal that will lives easier for devs that work with our data. We plant to include a FAQs page, information about all of our data and APIs as well as an easy to use search engine.