Using Design to Drive Our First API Product

Role
Product Design Lead — Enigma

Focus
Leadership, Design Management, Product Strategy, Team Alignment, Visual Design, Creative Direction, Interface & Interaction Design

Introduction

The Console allows developers to quickly integrate Enigma’s SMB data into their existing processes. People who use the console can set up their own organizations, mange team roles and permissions, add new products to their team’s API Key, and monitor their team’s usage.

The Zero to One Challenge

Enigma was pivoting from a services-based company that made data tools tailored to their clients, to a product-based company selling their data via a set of APIs. To guide this transition, I was part of a small 6-person squad dedicated to this new developer-centric API product experience.

Research and Discovery

As the product design lead, I started the discovery process with our UX Designer Matt Horan — we held 20 internal interviews with frontend, software engineers and product managers to learn how they discovered, evaluated, and integrated API products into their work.

The Opportunity

We ran a competitive analysis of a ton of other API driven companies and data providers to understand how they structured and packaged their products. The old guard companies delivered their data reports via static PDFs that were rarely updated. We found a gap in the market for fresh high quality data delivered in a developer-friendly way.

Outcomes

We learned devs in larger projects usually collaborated with a business-oriented stakeholder to implement a given api into their project, this informed our content strategy at large. We also learned that devs needed varying levels of guidance for integrating APIs so we developed three ways across our platforms to interact with the API.