API Design Reviews at Scale
Venue
CHI EA '16 Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM New York, NY, USA, pp. 849-858
Publication Year
2016
Authors
Andrew Macvean, Martin Maly, John Daughtry
BibTeX
Abstract
The number of APIs produced by Google's various business units grew at an
astounding rate over the last decade, the result of which was a user experience
containing wild inconsistencies and usability problems. There was no single issue
that dominated the usability problems; rather, users suffered a death from a
thousand papercuts. A lightweight, scalable, distributed design review process was
put into place that has improved our APIs and the efficacy of our many API
designers. Challenges remain, but the API design reviews at scale program has
started successfully.
