Consistency, technical accuracy, up-to-date documentation – are the main benefits that we value in automatically generated API documentation. Swagger/Open API seems to be the most popular standard of the growing API community and has been evolved greatly in last years. But the default Swagger UI, which is being used by most of Swagger-powered documentation portals, provides very limited functionality and poor UX that doesn’t serve all the needs of forward-thinking and innovative API developers.

At Adyen we challenged the basic Swagger UI and created our implementation from scratch. Our new API Explorer portal combines efforts of data-driven UX research, interaction-focused web development, and Swagger-tailored content workflow. There were quite some interesting lessons learnt by our team, let’s share our experience and improve developer experience with API Explorer!