Developer API Experience:

Increasing Developer Adoption & Activation

Company

Stripe

Role

Product Designer

Industries

DevOps, Fintech

Year

2025

Closing the Activation Gap

As developer platforms multiply, successful adoption and activation become crucial. Developers need more than just documentation; they want interactive, step-by-step guidance, especially for complex integrations. In this project, we tackled a 40% drop-off rate between API key generation and the first successful API call. We also recognized that every hour of friction could lead to a 3% decrease in conversion rates.


How might we empower developers to achieve their first successful API call quickly and efficiently by providing interactive guidance and real-time validation for API implementations?

Who is responsible for API activation?

This phase was all about understanding the developer perspective. I scanned developer blog posts, forums and articles to learn about common goals and pain points in and out of the context of the API experience.

Today's Stripe API Experience

After gathering more context into the developer workflow, I took a deep dive through Stripe documentation to piece together today's picture.


  1. API Key Generation

    • Log into Stripe Dashboard

    • Navigate to “API Keys” section under “Developers”

    • Generate and copy API key and paste into file in IDE

  2. Review Stripe Documentation

    • Familiarize self with Stripe’s API documentation and setup

    • Browse through Stripe’s API offerings

  3. Copy Code Samples

    • Follow step-by-step guide to create a customer by copying a code sample, validating in IDE and copying the next code sample

  4. Integrate Relevant API Request

    • Search through Stripe API documentation to find API request for specific use case

    • Integrate API request in code files

    • After steps are followed successfully, first test API call is complete 🎉


Strengths: robustness, intuitive dashboard, clear information architecture with a "Get Started" section
Weaknesses: overwhelming amount of information, unclear sequential order for getting started


Comparing Top Developer API Experiences

Amongst blog posts and developer forums, Stripe is commonly noted as one of the top developer API experiences.

Common features of highly rated developer API experiences include high-quality, organized documentation, interactive tools and tutorials, sandbox environments, code samples and community support.


Common Pain Points:

  • Missing or Inadequate Documentation: Lack of getting started guides, SDKs, code samples, or tutorials

  • Difficult to Find Key Information: Developers might struggle to find essential information like API keys or authentication details.

  • Unclear or unhelpful error messages can make debugging frustrating.


Algolia received high praise amongst developers for its robust documentation including sandbox environments, easy step-by-step breakdowns and comprehensive tutorial format.

Key Developer Needs

Interactive Tools

Developers prefer interactive tutorials over static documentation.


Practical Examples

Developers value access to code samples and working examples they can adapt.


Real-Time Validation

Real-time feedback is crucial for validating API calls and preventing frustration.


As a leader in developer API experience, Stripe needs to further innovate outside of existing standards for developer onboarding and traditional reliance on documentation enhancements and interactive tools.

Leveraging and Enhancing Existing Functionality

Stripe has a strong potential starting point for enhancing the developer API experience with their existing Visual Studio Code extension. A feature that caught my attention was the ability to generate code snippets.

"Quickly generate code snippets for common scenarios or basic API requests. After generating a snippet, you can tab through it to fill in your values."

Proposed Developer Workflow

  1. API Key Management Directly in IDE

  • View and paste existing test, dev and live API keys

  • Create new API keys

  • Use a suggestion function to paste API keys


  1. Generate Code Snippet for API Request

  • Utilize Stripe for VS Code’s existing functionality to generate code snippets for the required API request

  1. Security Best Practices

  • View API Key details

  • Rotate API Keys and auto-update all uses without breaking changes


  1. Real-Time Validation

  • Validate API Keys and get real-time feedback

Value & Impact

Reduce context switching and room for error

Allows developers to stay within their main developer tool without having to revisit documentation and break their workflow, in turn reducing room for error


Reduce time-to-first-successful-integration

API Key Management is integrated directly in the developer workflow, providing quicker access to required API requests and eliminating intermediate steps of referencing documentation


Real-Time Key Validation

Real-time feedback to help reduce friction in debugging

Next Steps

User Testing

Conducting live usability tests with a representative sample of developers


Ongoing monitoring and iteration

Monitoring performance metrics and synthesizing user insights to drive future iterations


Additional Enhancements

Explore additional features such as managing permissions


Marketing VS Code Extension

Encourage use of Stripe’s VS Code Extension as a core part of developer onboarding (reduce gap of 2M+ customers vs 100K extension downloads)

Interested in collaborating? Contact me. 🤝

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