Cognitive dimensions of notations
Proceedings of the fifth conference of the British Computer Society, Human-Computer Interaction Specialist Group on People and computers V
Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces
CHI '90 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
IEEE Software
Why are APIs difficult to learn and use?
Crossroads
Informing API Design through Usability Studies of API Design Choices: A Research Abstract
VLHCC '06 Proceedings of the Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
How to design a good API and why it matters
Companion to the 21st ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications
The Factory Pattern in API Design: A Usability Evaluation
ICSE '07 Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Software Engineering
Queue - API Design
Usability evaluation for enterprise SOA APIs
Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on Systems development in SOA environments
The implications of method placement on API learnability
Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering
Improving Documentation for eSOA APIs through User Studies
IS-EUD '09 Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on End-User Development
A case study of API redesign for improved usability
VLHCC '08 Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
Usability challenges for enterprise service-oriented architecture APIs
VLHCC '08 Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
What Makes APIs Hard to Learn? Answers from Developers
IEEE Software
API peer reviews: a method for evaluating usability of application programming interfaces
Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Useful, But Usable? Factors Affecting the Usability of APIs
WCRE '11 Proceedings of the 2011 18th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering
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The usability of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is one of the main factors defining the success of a software based framework. Research in the area of human computer interaction (HCI) currently mainly focuses on end-user usability and only little research has been done regarding the usability of APIs. In this paper, we present a methodology on how to use and combine HCI methods with the goal to evaluate the usability of APIs. The methodology consist of three phases - a heuristic evaluation, a developer workshop and interviews. We setup a case-study according to the methodology, in which we are evaluating the usability of a service-oriented framework API. The goal was to explore different HCI methods and compare the applicability of such methods to find usability problems in an API. The case-study combined qualitative and quantitative methods in order to investigate the usability and intuitiveness of the API itself. It allowed us to identify relevant problem areas for usability related issues that could be mapped to specific types of HCI methods. Examples for this are e.g. structural problems, which are identified mainly in inspection methods, while problems regarding errors and exception handling are mainly identified during the hands-on example part of the developer workshops conducted. The resulting problem areas allow us to develop a first classification of API related usability problems that are making the relevancy of usability issues for APIs more explicit and applicable.