Design Software API for User Experience

1. Notes for the video

by François Chollet

1. Notes for the video

One Core Principle: Every design decision should be made with the user in mind.

Three Rules:

Deliberately design end-to-end workflows focused on what users care about.
Reduce cognitive load for your users
Provide helpful feedback to your users

1.1. Design end-to-end workflows focused on what users care about

Good APIs are designed as holistic workflows, not as a set of atomic features
Good APIs closely map to domain-specific notions that users are familiar with
User-centric design is solution-oriented
Checkbox-driven APIs are problem-oriented

1.2. Reduce cognitive load for your users

Good software makes hard things simple
Poor software makes simple things hard
Automate everything that can be automated
Minimize the amount of user input: infer what can be inferred
Reduce number of steps in each end-to-end workflow
Make steps simple to remember, consistent, intuitive
Use consistent and standard naming conventions
Provide good defaults.
Good software works out of the box.
Introduce as few new concepts as possible.

Litmus test: If the cognitive load of a workflow is sufficiently low, it should be possible for a user to go through it from memory without looking up a tutorial or documentation after having done it once or twice.

1.3. Provide helpful feedback to your users

Have a place where users can ask questions
Invest in high-quality documentation
Catch user errors early and anticipate common mistakes
Provide detailed feedback upon user error
A good error message should answer:
- What happened, in what context?
- What did the software expect?
- How can user fix it?

References

Backlinks

François Chollet