How APIs are key to successful digital transformation

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Apple won praise earlier this year when it revealed that apps that had used Touch ID — the company’s well-established fingerprint-based authentication system — would automatically support Face ID, the new facial recognition system launched for the latest iPhone.

Replacing an entire user interface (UI) paradigm while requiring no action from app developers is a neat trick, and it’s one Apple accomplished via application programming interface, or API, design. Though the user-facing experience is dramatically different, the experience is the same for iOS developers leveraging the API for authentication for their apps.

This sort of API-centric approach is key to modern app development strategies. The Face ID example is dramatic because of the obvious UI change and because it is a particularly elegant and complicated example — but it follows the same broad principle that, say, Google uses when it updates the Google Maps APIs; in most cases, developers whose apps use Google Maps for their navigational services need to make little or no modifications to their code to receive new API improvements. Many widely-used APIs are designed and managed this way, with the goal of both minimizing the extent to which developers must intervene to keep their apps functioning and ensuring that when intervention is required, the necessary action steps are clearly documented.

Here’s the essential point in all this: while proper API design and management may be of obvious importance to a huge tech company such as Apple or Google, it’s also increasingly critical for virtually all other enterprises.

Most organizations have digital assets that can be leveraged at scale by providing third-party developers access to them — for example, an authentication service, navigational capabilities, media assets, shipping and logistics functionality, weather data, or access to a marketplace or user base. Whether or not the organization thinks of itself as a “tech company,” these digital assets will need to continue delivering value even as the enabling technologies change. Business done today on a smartphone’s touchscreen might be transacted tomorrow via a voice interface, augmented reality (AR), or some other emerging model.

This means the APIs providing access to a company’s digital assets will need to transition from one change to the next without introducing friction, either for end customers or the developers who use APIs to translate these assets into new products and digital experiences. Indeed, as user experiences transition toward voice and gesture interfaces, other “Zero UI” or “screenless” UX models, AR, and other emerging platforms, sophisticated API design and management may become non-negotiable aspects of modern business.

Good API design keeps developers productive during moments of rapid change

API design is an essential competency because in today’s fast-moving economy, successful APIs can’t merely expose digital assets — they need to make those assets easy for developers to repeatedly consume.

For many businesses still rooted in waterfall development or other legacy processes, IT teams may be accustomed to classic integration techniques — such as APIs built as one-offs to connect systems for a specific project. These approaches often just pass web services through an API layer, without any adjustment to accommodate modern development methodologies. Instead, APIs should ideally be designed as products that developers can continually leverage.

Because well-designed API products abstract front-end development from back-end complexity, they help ensure that as changes occur — whether simple feature updates or major UI shifts — neither the developers building with the APIs nor the apps and services those APIs power will be unnecessarily impacted.

Designing APIs as products means, among other things, observing best practices that promote an intuitive, reliable experience for developers. URL styles, for example, should be handled in a consistent way that doesn’t just connect systems but rather empowers developers to understand and easily work with underlying assets.

These design considerations are equally valid whether the APIs are used inside or outside the organization. Well-designed APIs should, in combination with agile development cycles and governance, help to accelerate first-party application production. Similarly, when a company makes well-designed APIs available externally, it can often leverage outside developer ecosystems for growth.

APIs should additionally be supported with robust documentation, a self-service portal, and a product management team that harnesses user data and other analytics to maintain API performance and improve offerings via constant iteration.

API management: maintaining control while unlocking ecosystems

Analytics and other management tools are just as important as design decisions. An easy-to-use API isn’t actually useful if the company can’t control and monitor how traffic drives through it, which apps and developers are using it, how API usage contributes to business KPIs, etc.

Indeed, API management is important not only because it can help a company to maintain its offerings and monetize its assets but also because it allows the business to leverage others. Preparing for the future isn’t just an issue of designing APIs that keep your services relevant and accessible across technology advancements — it’s also an issue using other companies’ APIs to fill go-to-market gaps.

As interfaces such as voice and AR become mainstream, most businesses won’t have direct expertise in these areas. Many businesses will integrate these interfaces not by developing their own infrastructure and software from the ground up but by harnessing APIs from others. Today, for example, few companies invest in proprietary search technologies but many apps nonetheless include search functionality — because those apps’ developers have leveraged Google, Bing, or some other resource. For many companies, the same will likely be true as new shifts arrive; those companies will focus on their strengths, expressing them as APIs, and combine them with complementary assets from others, also expressed as APIs, to create richer, more cohesive connected user experiences and to expand into new markets.

Use APIs for stability in a changing economy

It’s easy to get giddy at the transformative potential of new interaction models. For example, if the AR capabilities currently available in smartphones can be miniaturized for fashionable glasses people actually want to wear, it would be not only a major technology advance but also potentially a fundamental change in how people perceive and interact with the physical world.

But even as the user experience completely transforms, there will still be familiar APIs beneath the surface, mediating the shifts. Businesses that don’t specialize in AR or voice or whatever the “next big thing” happens to be will leverage APIs from those that do. User interactions will still involve APIs calling customer databases, product inventories, and other systems. APIs can be points of stability, even as market dynamics, interaction models, and user preferences continue to change faster than ever.

This post is sponsored by Apigee. | Content written and provided by Apigee.