Improving Software API Usability through Text Analysis: A Case Study

Technical writers who want to be more involved in the earlier stages of software product development must often find ways to demonstrate how their skills can benefit the initial design process. This case study describes how the application of technical communication skills and tools helped improve the usability and clarity of a new application program interface (API) by performing a text analysis of the API elements. The case study presents the theory upon which this approach is grounded and describes how the theory was applied to analyze a specific API. The paper concludes with a review of how this analysis method could be transferred to other projects and how the tools used in this analysis can be applied to benefit the design, development, and documentation processes of APIs.