I’m always working to help API providers understand the importance of designing their API developer portals, with a larger audience in mind. Not everyone who visits your portal, will be the one integrating with your API, and providing information for non-developers about the value delivered via API resources, can go a long ways to reach the media, and decision makers at companies who will be potentially be making decision around integrating with a service.
I look at a lot of API portals, and always enjoy the ones that speak to the widest possible audience. I also enjoy when there are entire sections dedicated to providing tools and resources for non-developers. One example of this, that I found recently is available over at the transcription and translation platform from Rev, on the page they have dedicated to Zapier. I’ve written before about companies referencing their IFTTT and Zapier integration, but I think Rev’s approach needs highlight because they provide a full page, with actual links to specific types of integrations.
Rev provides some valuable information on what Zapier is, what you can do with Rev and Zapier, and actually walks you through how to actually setup this up, on a page that is given the same prominence as the API documentation (important!).
Rev provides you with direct links to put Rev to work, by transcribing from YouTube and Vimeo, and workflows for putting these transcripts on Dropbox, Google Drive or Box. You can click on links that take you to the detail page on Zapier, where you can get up and running with the recipe. I added Zapier as a building block a while back, but I really feel that it is quickly becoming an essential building block, something all providers should be considering in 2015.
I think it is really important to provide ready-to-go reciprocity tools for any API platform. I also think it is important to show them alongside API documentation and the other tools meant specifically for developers. This is the power of web API over historic API approaches, in that APIs aren’t just for developers. Web APIs exist to provide quick and dirty solutions to problems that anyone faces in their business or personal worlds, and I think Rev’s use of Zapier represents this very well.
