A Feld Study on Improving the API Usability of Software Platforms for Consumer Electronics Devices

摘要

Providing highly usable APIs is considered to be a foundation of any software platform since an API is a basic unit which is used by software developers to develop on a platform. Furthermore, it is even more critical that a software platform aims to build an application ecosystem. There have been researches on API usability such as how to design a good API how to improve API usability, how to measure API usability, etc. However, there has been no empirical field study of how to improve the usability of API for a software platform which aims to build an application ecosystem especially for CE devices. The software platform we have worked on is the open source Tizen platform. Tizen platform was introduced in 2012 and has been adapted to CE devices such as smartphones, TVs, wearable devices, refrigerators, etc. We present lessons learned from multiple public releases of Tizen platform APIs and SDKs to improve Tizen API usability consequently to improve the usability of the application development environment noticeably by introducing Tizen. NET.