dotJS 2024 - Lea Verou - API design is UI design

You may think that usability principles are something that is only relevant to visual designers. However, every time you write a function, a class, or a component, you are creating a user interface. Every time you use someone else’s component, or a utility library, or even the browser’s native APIs, you are _using_ a user interface. Great APIs follow user-centered design principles just as much as visual interfaces, and APIs that are painful to use tend to be designed in a vacuum, removed from the actual user needs they are designed to serve. In this talk you will learn the principles that make APIs dreadful or delightful to use, distilled from Lea’s experience reviewing proposals for new Web technologies as a W3C TAG member, creating & managing dozens of successful open source projects for over a decade with thousands of merged pull requests, and doing a PhD on this very subject, at MIT.