HUBTALK #1 – DX, or the need to apply UX rules within tech environments
Nowadays, providing developers with intuitive tools and seamless experiences has become the key to boost usage of products and services, specifically in enabling innovative sectors, such as Open Finance, to reach their full potential. The concept of Developer Experience, or DX, has erupted recently: the primary user of the product is the developer, and he/she expects it to be smooth, seamless, and rich in terms of features, allowing him/her to save time, move intuitively, and therefore work efficiently. In other words, the developer expects to spend some quality time while using the company’s product(s).
Radu Popa, CTO at LUXHUB, discusses DX and its role in the current world where change is constant, and where customers do not hesitate to switch tools whenever they feel like it.
Promoting innovative products to developers
In a world filled with developer portals and development platforms, not investing in DX might result in a significant drop in usage and might even endanger the company’s products. Users – and in this case developers – heavily influence the market as they decide which tools are fit, efficient and enjoyable to use. In fact, in the world of agile development and refactoring, rejecting a product based on usability and switching to new ones has become the norm.
“DX is at the intersection of UX and development principles. It is all about the rich experience you provide the developer with, when he/she is using a specific product, along with the related documentation, frameworks, open-source solutions, APIs, etc.” highlights the CTO of LUXHUB.
Simply put: developers are to be treated as first-class citizens in the context of the product, in other words, as customers!
In B2B models, solutions delivered “as-a-service” – and that is the case for APIs – are not offered to end-users, but rather to third-party developers. They are integrating them within the products they develop, destined for end-users. “Furthermore, when talking about tech solutions as-a-service, there are many and inherent interactions with the developers of such solutions. Developers, either at the consumer or provider side, are customers,” adds Radu Popa.
As highlighted by the CTO, “Developers are explorers by nature, they are problem solvers. They don’t just code: they debug, maintain software, test, harden security, fix bugs and operate. Almost in equal measure”. The choice of available – and great – Software-as-a-Service offerings becomes ubiquitous. Yet, technical excellence is not enough: smooth development journey, comprehensive documentation and usage examples, support and analytics, etc., all contribute to DX.
