An API Design Process in Terms of Usability: A Case Study on Building More Usable APIs for Smart TV Platform

Author

Sunghoon Lee ; Sanghee Lee ; Sumi Lim ; Jiyoung Jung ; Sangho Choi ; NeungHoe Kim ; Jung-Been Lee

Author_Institution

CTO Software Capability Dev. Center, LG Electron., Seoul, South Korea

fYear

2014

fDate

21-25 July 2014

Firstpage

567

Lastpage

571

Abstract

Products are released based on various platforms. An Application programing interface (API) is important to develop platform based applications effectively. Previously, we had some difficulties in developing applications using our platform APIs. Their name was ambiguous, and their functions were not primitive, and even their documentation was not enough to refer to. Therefore, we had to maintain our platform APIs. In this paper, we propose an API design process and API evaluation guidelines. "API Analysts" elicit functions from requirement documents. "API designer" design APIs for the functions following the guidelines. "Technical writers" produce documentation for the APIs. "API reviewers" evaluate the APIs and API documentation conforming to the proposed guidelines. Proposed process made our platform APIs more convenient to use for developing applications.

Keywords

application program interfaces; digital television; electronic engineering computing; API Analysts; API Designer; API design process; API evaluation guidelines; API reviewers; application programming interface; smart TV platform; technical writers; usability; Androids; Documentation; Guidelines; Measurement; Terminology; Usability; api; applicaton programming interface; platform product; process; requirements; software; usability;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer Software and Applications Conference Workshops (COMPSACW), 2014 IEEE 38th International

Conference_Location

Vasteras

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/COMPSACW.2014.95

Filename

6903191