If you missed our webinar on Applying HCD Principles in Building API Services, here’s a quick recap!
On October 12, Softrams held a public webinar about Applying HCD Principles in Building API Services. Attendees heard from our Chief Technology Officer Murali Malina, the Director of our HX Practice Chris Hodowanec, and our Lead UX Strategist. The webinar introduced attendees to human-centered design (HCD) principles, application programming interfaces (APIs), and why it is imperative to rely on HCD to drive the strategy as you build API products and services.
Chris Hodowanec started the discussion by providing more information about HCD and how we leverage at Softrams. Using HCD, we put users at the front and center in the design process, ensuring that we fully understand their context of usage, realities, situations, behaviors, expectations, and values so we can identify right solutions. By using an HCD approach when building software, teams could make design decisions based on evidence collected from real or prospective users, improve culture and team-alignment, and provide better outcomes for our customers.
After the introduction to HCD, Murali Malina discussed what APIs are and why we use them. APIs define the ways that we interact with a software system and help you unleash so much more value by enabling your product or service to be leveraged in different use cases, some times use cases that your team may have never even imagined. For example, our Provider Vetting API was built to enable real-time provider verification in a specific context, but soon we found out how this API can be leveraged by other organizations and teams in a completely different context. This build once, leverage in many ways to empower others, “platform approach” will enable a variety of services to be created on top of your APIs. The API-first strategy then is a natural choice in many cases at Softrams for a variety of these benefits, to get more out of the services we build in the future.
Lastly, our Lead UX Strategist gave an overview of a case study in which we used HCD and APIs to provide an efficient solution for healthcare providers and facilities. Our team conducted listening sessions with healthcare providers, followed by a two-pronged research study. They learned that providers were looking for more automation when retrieving data files. Using this survey research, the team developed a command line interface (CLI) tool using an API Key. Users were selected to try this solution in a demo and provide their feedback. As a result of this HCD research, smaller healthcare organizations can now get the same competitive advantage and efficiency of the larger, more developer-centric ones with the simple, accessible CLI Tool.
At Softrams, we believe that “building software is a human process,” and ensure that this principle drives us as we develop services. We use HCD and APIs to meet the needs and wants of our customers. Be sure to attend more Softrams webinars in the future for more inside looks at how we develop our services.
