Designing great APIs: Learning from Jony Ive, Orwell, and the Kano Model
summary
Claims five concrete principles — minimal surface, get out of the way, design for extremes, predictable, and excite users — and shows concrete tools and outcomes: a production Zencoder API with 150 parameters but sensible defaults, use of REST consistency and HTTP codes, namespaced versioning and UUID keys, JSON validation, request logs, sandboxes and SDKs. Built an API request builder that users love and measurable delighters (docs with account data, replayable requests) that actually increase satisfaction.
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