RapidAPI

RapidAPI is the world's largest API hub, used by over three million developers. Find, test, and connect to thousands of APIs — all with a single SDK, API key, and dashboard.

Find APIs that you need for your project, embed the API into your app, and track the usage of all your APIs. Create an API and make it available to developers on the RapidAPI Hub.   

Developers can consume any API in their app by using a unified format. View and watch the API requests, latency, and error rates. Providers can add APIs to the hub to make them available to RapidAPIs' user base. Enterprise customers use RapidAPI as an API hub to prevent resource duplication and speed up the development process.

Case Study 1: API Versioning

The Challenge

API providers and enterprise developers need a way to enhance their API without breaking the user's application. Providers need a way to configure A/B testing of the versions. API users need to be able to upgrade to a new version without breaking their existing code.

My Role

I worked with the PM and engineering to ideate, research, and design ways for users to create API versions. I created high-fidelity prototypes and interviewed users to validate the designs. Worked with our development team in Tel Aviv to ensure the designs were implemented properly.

Process

I started with a baseline study of the current flow to better understand the issues. I worked with the Product Manager and engineering team through some brainstorming sessions. After consolidating ideas I put together some wireframes. After a few reviews with other colleagues, I refined them into mock-ups. These were then turned into high-fidelity prototypes and reviewed by our users.  I presented the findings along with the revised flow to our CEO & VP of Product. I worked with engineering and the PM to ensure the flow is as spec'd.

Discovery

We facilitated discussions with users and learned 78% did not understand the current API versioning flow. Users struggled to find the settings. Once found, it was not clear if the settings applied to all versions or just one.  Others expressed interest in further customizing each version. 

95% of users understood how to create an API version. Many couldn't figure out where to change the version displaying in the API hub.  The version status choices of active, current, and deprecated did not resonate. The help text further confused them.  15% of users abandoned the process completely when coming into contact with the status selection.

30% of API providers were unsure how subscriptions would work with many versions. Would subscribers have access to all the versions or would each version be a separate plan?

We needed to rethink the navigation and how subscriptions & versions would work together.

Results

The information gathered helped us focus on the features needed. We simplified the navigation and created global settings that applied to all versions. Version-specific settings moved within each version. Providers can also use API versioning to do A/B tests.

All API versions share the same billing plan. Developers will be able to use any of the versions available if they have a subscription. I provided engineering with new designs and documentation.

The API version feature launched in February 2021. We've received a lot of positive feedback from the developer community and our enterprise users. The addition of API versioning increases efficiency for API providers and consumers to update APIs with improvements. As a result, one large enterprise signed and several extended their contracts.

Case Study 2: Enterprise Themes

Challenge

Enterprise customers want a way to control branding for their own implementations of RapidAPI. To help with a few strategic sales we had two weeks to design a way for them to do this.  The designs needed to be development-ready within two weeks to reach a deadline for a large enterprise customer.

My role

I worked with one designer to define and create how this would work across the app. We worked with developers to help with the workarounds of the current implementation.

Process

We looked at how several other applications handled branding. This included Kong and Slack. We evaluated what they customized and how they labeled it. We also looked at how things were implemented to see what impact our changes might have. The platforms were using Ant Design’s React UI Library (a production-ready solution for admin interfaces). We used AntLive Theme to test if custom colors would pose any risk or cause ADA issues. We did an audit of all the CSS styles & components. Based on the audit we created a comprehensive list of all the components. We met with the CEO, VP of Sales, VP of Product & R&D manager to review the findings & come to an agreement on the level of customization.

We agreed to allow brand customization on the logo, hero images, primary brand color, secondary brand color, primary button color, navigation color, and header 1, 2, 3, 4 colors. Using these customization elements, we created a visual guide for the engineers to use.

Discovery

We had to explore developer constraints a lot. Some of our customization suggestions would break how some of the styles were tied together. I did a lot of quick feedback rounds with Development and Sales. With the project time constraint, I wasn't able to interact directly with clients. To get the best feedback, I worked with the support and sales teams to get feedback based on what they’ve seen in the past.

In working through iterations some questions surfaced. Will customers understand what each element controls without visual feedback? Can we display a live preview of the changes?

Engineering shared some technical limitations with having a live preview. We couldn’t offer a real-time preview and had to use a CTA instead. We also learned from the Sales VP some of the users were less technical than expected — to address this we explored and tested different labels.

Result

Themes were implemented, launched, and made use of our shorter list of components. The final solution provided a preview to help less technically savvy users.

Two large enterprise deals were able to close with this implementation. Eight enterprise customers updated their branding on their own within a month of the launch. Three of those customers had multiple organizations to customize and made use of the ability to have multiple themes. No reported issues with contrast in enterprise instances. In the future, we would recommend adding the ability to customize the CSS to have better control over the branding and mitigate contrast issues.

Development no longer needed to worry about spending time on customizing customer branding. Support received fewer requests for branding-related activity. Thanks to the new theming capabilities, organizations can get to market faster with branded marketplaces.