A great developer experience = A great user experience.
But how often has your development team looked through documentation (or code in an open-source product), and wondered what the hell is going on? Too often I’d say! And what happens next? Your developers disappear down the rabbit hole and waste precious time trying to piece together answers from developer forums when the whole thing could have been avoided if the provider had delivered a great developer experience in the first place.
There are three crucial reasons why it’s important to incorporate a great developer experience in your workflows (regardless of whether you’re building or buying a product).
1. Faster shipping and greater productivity
At any one time, a single development team is juggling multiple systems, repositories, dependencies, tools, and platforms in order to do their job. They don’t have the time to try and work through yet another javascript component that is poorly documented, maintained, and creates more headaches than heart skips.
By having a well-planned developer experience, you’re removing the blocks that stop developers from quickly getting their tasks done. The end result is that the development team’s workflow is enhanced, higher productivity ensues, and projects ship faster.
2. Ability to focus on your core features
When your development team is relieved from untangling a messy technical experience, they can focus on developing your core business features – which is where your brand’s innovation and productivity lie – to create greater value for your company.
3. More people can use the product
Lowering the complexity of a developer tool means non-developers are also empowered to use the tool. That opens a wide range of new opportunities. Firstly, more people are involved, which creates a bigger think-tank of expertise. Secondly, resource allocation efficiencies are achieved, because those personnel with stronger coding skills are able to focus on higher-value and heavy code projects. And lastly, you save your company’s most important resources – time and money.
Tiny’s Developer experience
At Tiny, we’re always looking for ways to improve the lives of developers. We spend a huge amount of time examining how TinyMCE’s experience can be enhanced, so that it’s easier for developers to quickly create great products.
With each new iteration, it’s all about making content creation a delightful experience for everyone (developers and end-users alike). For example, in Tiny 5.7 we further improved our developer experience by providing them with greater control over customization. Some recent updates include:
- The font_css option to add custom fonts
- New table and columns behaviors for a more flexible table editing experience
- New and enhanced features to Spell Checker Pro.
At the moment, we’re on the lookout for even more suggestions to improve our developer experience, so if you have 10 minutes to spare please add your thoughts to our The State of Rich Text Editor Developer Survey.
If you have an idea you'd like to see become a new feature, we suggest you check out the TinyMCE Roadmap!
Food for thought
Coming back to my initial statement that a great developer experience equals a great user experience, try to answer: Can you make your product or organizational operations more developer-friendly? Or more importantly, how would it create greater value for your team and users?
There’s always more work to be done to make developers’ lives easier. Because when developers no longer have to disappear down rabbit holes for a simple fix, everyone wins.
If you’re in the business of making your developer’s work a better experience, check out the Tiny website, view our pricing plans, or connect with our Tiny experts!
