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API Sketching Example

Explore the API sketching process by designing the onboarding API responses with ALPS. Learn to iterate on JSON message formats to enhance clarity and usability in API communication. Gain practical skills in refining API designs through quick, inexpensive sketches that improve overall interface quality.

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Sketching the Onboarding API

Like the pencil sketches Gehry uses to explore possible building designs, we can create API sketches to explore our API designs. For example, in the Onboarding API project we’ve been working on over the past several chapters, we have the startOnboarding action defined in our ALPS document when we added action elements. Let’s walk through a sample design sprint for just this one element of our API.

For starters, our ALPS document includes the following element that describes the startOnboarding action:

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{"id" : "startOnboarding", "type" : "unsafe", "rt" : "wip"}
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Now, we need to turn that into an actual message that would be sent from the API provider to an API client application. One possible API response might look like this:

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