Introducing Worldpay for Developers

Launched on 21 August,Worldpay for Developershas an entirely new look and feel – most notably, a code-friendly dark-mode user interface that was the product of extensive research and testing, as well as detailed discussions with our development teams.

That’s no accident: the site’s been built to make life easier for developers, especially those using our APIs. The landing page features our omnichannel APIs, particularlyAccess Worldpayfor online payments andIntegrated POS Clientfor point of sale.

Clear, simple navigation

Exploring further, a newOverviewpage for Access Worldpay lets you immediately get to work with the relevantAPI referenceanddocumentation. It also helps you explore the platform’s full potential by highlighting the best APIs to enable you to Connect, Verify, Pay or Optimise your payment solutions.

We’ve also made it easier to stay informed about our latest API updates and releases.What’s Newprovides release notes for recent API changes and previews what’s next in line. Meanwhile, we’ve developed ourNewsroomto incorporate regular blog posts; these explain who we are and how we work, or provide deep dives into the technical decisions underpinning Access Worldpay and our products.

Which API, when?

Because we’re developer-led, we understand how hard it can be to figure out which APIs are best suited to specific situations. To help out, a new tool within the Access Worldpay documentation covers four common use-cases:

• Checkout– for taking customer payments while still meeting the lowest PCI compliance level, SAQ-A.
• One-off payment– for accepting one-off payments from customers without storing their card details.
• Payment with a stored card– when saving card details to help customers make future payments more easily.
• Recurring payments– when setting up agreements to authorize regular future payments from your customers.

After selecting a use case, simply answer a few questions – these help us understand your requirements and adjust the resulting process accordingly. You’re then shown a payment journey and an integration tutorial, both tailored to address the goals you identified.

Beyond these tools, the site also hosts our new developer community. We know how important it is to get fast, accurate information when you’re integrating systems, so every page footer links you directly to our developer community so you can quickly get your questions answered by our internal teams.

User-friendly interface

Sharing experience and expertise is a core function of our new site; in fact, it helped start the project in the first place. In June 2019, we joined forces with our UX team and held a series of workshops with internal stakeholders from Implementation, Product, Technology and Solution Consultants.

These helped us define and understand our developer audience, and informed how the site should look. In particular, our discussions with developers made plain the importance of providing a dark interface. Besides minimizing eye strain, dark backgrounds reduce visual distractions and make it easier to highlight different colours. This is why it’s now best practice to display API references in dark mode, and a major reason why we decided to lead with a dark-mode UI for the site’s initial release.

Flexible, sharable, scalable

The workshops also helped us identify the site’s requirements and specifications. First, it had to provide a single solution with enough flexibility to enable different teams to build bespoke journeys for their own developer community without compromising the overall appearance or brand consistency.

We also needed to use reusable and sharable modular components that every team could use, combine and augment with their own code or content in order to create new tools, widgets and features. Finally, we needed its structure to be simple and scalable to allow new teams to expand and improve the site in future; to introduce new features; and to let it be tested and maintained easily by a wide spectrum of people, such as specialised tech writers and product owners.

Constructing a service

Given these parameters, we chose to take a wholly innovative approach to developer experience by constructing it as a service, with a micro-service architecture. Besides offering a common infrastructure and a consistent appearance, this structure provides the coherent rules and taxonomy that allows us to clone it and give other teams a packaged solution with enough flexibility to let them build any content they needed.

This is also why Worldpay for Developers uses standard components – it’s hosted on an Amazon server and was built with commonplace tools, such as Angular, GitHub and Jenkins. It means different teams can all use these same tools to create their own, bespoke developer experience with their own content and code components.

What’s coming next?

In practical terms, designing the developer experience as a modular service has enabled different Worldpay development teams to write the documentation for their own APIs and put these on the site straightaway. For example, the Integrated POS team manage their own content, as do Access Worldpay and all the other teams at Worldpay. The result? Much faster delivery of key content to customers.

Still, Worldpay for Developers is a work in progress. This is our first release, not our final word. We’re always working to improve our product with new features and capabilities – next in line is mobile optimization, more use cases and tutorials, and a light mode UI. And central to this process is your feedback, which helps us get better and give you the experience you want and deserve. So please help us out by clicking on the smileys you’ll find on each page and telling us what you think. It’s the best way to help us help you get the most from our APIs – which is exactly what Worldpay for Developers is all about.