The Advantages of Sketching

Advantages of low-fidelity sketches

Sketching APIs offers a handful of advantages. Sketching is a great way to try things out and quickly get feedback from others on our ideas. When it takes so little time to try something out, we can afford to try several ideas before we settle on our preferred implementation approach. Sketching APIs can even help us be more creative when it comes to translating the design documents into working API examples.

Also, because the sketches are just small samples of responses, we don’t need to do lots of work ahead of time. Sketches are simple, standalone snippets that convey our ideas without the need to write actual code and deploy it on a server somewhere. Even if we don’t plan to go through lots of iterations of our sketching, we can take advantage of the low-tech nature of sketches and ignore the corner-cases, exceptions, and other minor details we’d be forced to deal with if we tried to sketch our API in actual working code.