Designing for developers

Most of this post comes from my experience designing Postman, a collaborative platform for API development. Hopefully this helps folks who are designing dev-tools in understanding their audience better.

Lesson 1— Developers love to break things. They will use your product in ways you haven’t imagined. Their data will make your app slow to load if it isn’t optimised for the right things. They will play with internals of your app to make it appropriate for their use.

Lesson 2— Developers love to fix things. For every time a developer breaks your product, two more will try to fix it. Even if you think your product doesn’t need fixing. If you design your product for specific use cases, they will create workarounds for doing more. You should leverage the community, provide them ways of tinkering and share their creations.

Lesson 3— Everyone is a developer. If you think that for being a software developer, you need to know at least one software language, think again. With the rise of the No-code movement, everyone who has access to internet can develop something. Unless you’re working on a complex B2B offering, think about the huge market that is no-code developers and how your product can add value to this market.

You can take each of these lessons as a constraint and learn to live with it. Or you can think of them as an opportunity to make your product better!