Postman: Analyzing user problems

User Personas and Pain Points

Developer Demi

Demi is a backend developer with 4-5 years of experience. She builds and maintains Restful APIs for a web application/service. She is familiar with multiple coding languages and reads technical documentation daily.

Demi faces the following pain points:

• She needs a way to quickly test and debug APIs. For this, she needs to quickly create API requests and fire them, and inspect the response for potential problems.

• She frequently works with front-end developers and needs to keep them informed of any changes happening in the API spec. For this, she needs an intermediate document (also called the swagger document) which is the source of truth for the API spec. She needs to maintain this manually and needs to make sure it is up to date.

• She is also in situations where she needs to integrate another API into her code. For this, she requires good documentation for the API.

Product Manager Pramod

Pramod is a product manager with 7-10 years of experience in the industry. He needs to frequently fire API requests to gather data to analyze. He also needs to monitor the live APIs for any potential problems. Pramod has some experience in using software but relies on the UX heavily. He does not have a lot of experience reading technical documentation.

Pramod faces the following pain points:

• Pramod needs a searchable repository of live APIs to find the correct data he needs. He also needs docs to help him use the API correctly.

• He needs an easy way to see analytics on existing APIs so that he can catch potential problems.

• He also needs a way to track the status of in-development APIs so that he can better estimate the development time.

QA /Tester Tania

Tania has been in Quality Assurance for 3-4 years. She is primarily responsible for rigorously testing the APIs before they can be released. She also needs to write automated test cases which can run periodically or on demand so that legacy APIs and functionality can also be regularly tested. She interacts with API documentation daily and has also written the documentation in the past.

Tania faces the following pain points:

• Tania needs a platform where she can configure everything in an API request. Since she needs to test the API from every angle, she needs a platform that provides her with the ability to configure her API requests extensively.

• She also needs the APIs to have mock data.

• She needs a place where she can write multiple test cases (create test suites) and run them together as a single execution. She also needs granular data regarding the execution of the test cases like execution time, storage used, size of response, etc.

• She frequently needs to communicate the robustness of the API she is testing and any problems she has identified with the development team. To do this she also requires a summary of the test case execution. This summary should be tweakable so that she can add her thoughts.

Front-end developer Freddy

Freddy has been a front-end developer for over 4-5 years. He develops the front-end websites that the users interact with. He needs to work closely with the backend developers so that he can contribute to the API design. He needs APIs with detailed documentation so that he can integrate them.

Freddy faces the following pain points:

• He requires collaboration tools so that he can discuss with the backend developers who are creating the APIs.

• He needs detailed documentation so that he can integrate the APIs.

• He also needs the APIs which are in development to have mock data so that he does not have a high reliance on the backend team and is unblocked from his work.