Four steps to excellent API design in China

Gartner predicts that by 2024, the number of developers worldwide will reach 28.7 million, an increase of 3.2 million from 2020. Most of the increase will be in China, and based on current trends, China's developer growth rate will be between 6% and 8% in 2023.

Application programming interfaces (APIs) can be used to support integration between applications, provide a modern multi-channel user experience, and create customer and partner ecosystems. Without adequate API standards and skills support, it will be difficult for software development teams to design APIs that meet developer expectations. Poor API design will lead to a cumbersome developer experience, resulting in fewer consumers adopting APIs. Therefore, improving API design should be a top priority for Chinese IT leaders.

To design efficient, reliable APIs that meet consumer needs, IT leaders should ensure their teams understand API use cases, apply standardized API design practices to design APIs for optimal performance, and train their teams (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Four steps of API design

API use case identification and interaction

To design an excellent API, the software development team must clearly understand the value it can provide to the business and consumers. Different enterprise organizations and API consumers have different needs and expectations. To meet these requirements, the software development team must determine who the API users are and how they will use the API.

Clarify the purpose. IT leaders must ensure their teams clearly understand the purpose of the API—in short, how API consumers use the API’s functionality and interact with its services. Understanding the purpose of the API enables solution architects to make design decisions that best suit the needs of API consumers, such as functionality that aligns with business use cases and expectations.

Create and adhere to API standards

Over time, IT teams will expand their API portfolio to meet the needs of specific products, services, and applications. Without standardized and clear API design guidelines, API designs will be diverse and lack consistency. As a result, API consumers must spend time learning each method and are more likely to make mistakes. To reduce this complexity and increase developer productivity, software development teams must establish a unified API design approach to maintain clear code deployment logic and functional implementation. The following three ways will help IT leaders achieve this goal.

• Choose the right API type

• Follow the principle of standardization

• Ongoing API governance

Improve API performance by limiting payload size, enabling cacheability, and using asynchronous request patterns

A well-thought-out API design also needs to consider performance. The performance of an API depends largely on how well it responds to different request types and fluctuations in the number of requests. For example, China's e-commerce market has developed rapidly in the past few years, the scale of online shopping transactions has expanded rapidly, and the number of online shopping users has doubled year-on-year.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world in 2020, the massive shift from offline to online consumption has further stimulated the rapid growth of China's e-commerce industry. Displaying a user's current orders is a typical e-commerce use case scenario. Applications can obtain order details through APIs, but if users want to view all orders in one interface, the API will return more data than before, and the backend will also generate a higher load. IT leaders must ensure that their teams consider which patterns to use to improve performance and include them in API guidelines. For example:

• Reduce or limit the size of the payload

• Enable caching

• Use asynchronous requests/confirmations/votes

Long-term training of team members to continuously design excellent APIs

In the 2022 Gartner March Hot Topics Survey, 43% of IT leaders listed lack of skills as one of the biggest challenges facing API strategy. As API technology continues to evolve, it is able to provide richer and more complex capabilities than ever before.

All IT team members should actively participate in long-term training on APIs and development. APIs will only perform optimally when API users are consistent with the scenarios expected by the designers. Throughout the life cycle of API design, development, and use, IT leaders must arrange continuous coaching and education to improve the team's mastery of API technology and ensure that APIs always meet and effectively meet business needs.