The most important API metric is time to first call, According to TechCrunch PI publishers among Postman’s community of quite 15 million are working toward more seamless and integrated developer experiences for his or her APIs. Distilled from many one-on-one discussions, I recently shared a study on increasing adoption of an API with a public workspace in Postman. one among the most important reasons to use a public workspace is to reinforce developer onboarding with a faster time to first call (TTFC), the foremost important metric you’ll need for a public API.
To understand a developer’s journey, let’s first take a glance at factors influencing what proportion time and energy they’re willing to take a position in learning your technology and making it work.
Urgency: is that the developer actively checking out an answer to an existing problem? Or did they hear about your technology en passant and have a light curiosity?
Constraints: is that the developer trying to satisfy a deadline? Or do they need unlimited time and budget to explore the possibilities?
Alternatives: is that the developer required by their organization to use this solution? Or are they choosing from many providers and considering other ways to unravel their problem?
Developer journey to an API
With that context in mind, the subsequent stages describe the developer journey of encountering a replacement API:
Step 1: Browse
A developer browses your website and documentation to work out what your API offers. Some people gloss over this step, preferring to find out what your tech offers interactively within the next steps. But judgments are formed at this very early stage, likely while comparing your product among alternatives. for instance , if your documentation and onboarding process appears comparatively unorganized and riddled with errors, perhaps it’s a mirrored image of your technology.
Step 2: Signup
Signing up for an account may be a developer’s first commitment. It signals their intent to try to to something together with your API. Frequently going hand-in-hand with subsequent step, signing up is required to get an API key.
Step 3: First API call
Making the primary API call is that the first payoff a developer receives and is oftentimes when developers begin more deeply understanding how the API fits into their world. Stripe and Algolia embed interactive guides within their developer documentation to enable first API calls. Stripe and Twitter also use Postman public workspaces for interactive onboarding. Since many developers already use Postman, experiencing an API in familiar territory gets them one step closer to implementation.