Designing and evaluating the usability of an API for real-time multimedia services in the Internet

In the last few years, multimedia technologies in general, and Real-Time multimedia Communications (RTC) in particular, are becoming mainstream among WWW and smartphone developers, who have an increasing interest in richer media capabilities for creating their applications. The engineering literature proposing novel algorithms, protocols and architectures for managing and processing multimedia information is currently overwhelming. However, most of these results do not arrive to applications due to the lack of simple and usable APIs. Interestingly, in this context in which APIs are the critical ingredient for reaching wide developer audiences, the scientific literature about multimedia APIs and their usability is scarce. In this paper we try to contribute to fill this gap by proposing the RTC Media API: a novel type of API designed with the aim of making simple for developers the use of latest trends in RTC multimedia including WebRTC, Video Content Analysis or Augmented Reality. We provide a specification of such API and discuss how it satisfies a set of design requirements including programming-language agnosticism, adaptation to cloud environments, support to multisensory multimedia, etc. After that, we describe an implementation of such an API that has been created in the context of the Kurento open source software project, and present a study evaluating the API usability performed in a group of more than 40 professional developers distributed worldwide. In the light of the obtained results, we conclude that the usability of the API is adequate across the main development activities (i.e. API learning, code creation and code maintenance), with an average usability score of 3.39 over 5 in a Likert scale, and that this result is robust with respect to developers’ profiles, cultures, professional experiences and preferred programming languages.