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Depending on the need or solution a planned web application is meant to resolve or provide, integration with existing systems is pretty much inevitable. There’s hardly a web development project today that doesn’t have some level of third-party vendor integration, whether for consumer features, connecting site analytics and marketing metrics, or integrating business process applications into a website.
With integration, organizations can create a seamless experience for their consumers. Authentication can come from numerous, verified sources; data can be consistently and accurately updated across multiple accounts. Time, effort, and money is saved by allowing automated processes to carry the bulk of tedious processes.
![With integration, organizations can create a seamless experience for their consumers.]()
6 Considerations When Planning an Integration
There are a few things to think about before embarking on such a task. Good planning and design rely on understanding the right criteria.
- Determine your use case: What solution is your integration providing? Understanding this will drive the rest of your integration planning.
- Consider your user: Think about the user types who will make use of this integration; are there groups? Individual users? Administrators? Answers to these questions will drive your application’s purpose.
- Consider embedding: Keeping a user on your site or within your application creates a seamless experience. However, choosing to not embed means that your team doesn’t take on the work of additional maintenance. Deciding which is more important can decide whether or not embedding should be included in your integration.
- Automation or interactivity: With automations, integrations are limited to governance rules. Interactivity offers more flexibility for users. However, either can be limited by your team’s development resources.
- Identify needed services: Where does your application need to connect? Aside from market leaders establishing must-haves, your end users’ demands will tell you what cloud services you should link to. From there, the ones that present the best business opportunity should take priority. Competitive differentiation is another metric by which to measure needed integrations.
- Build smart: There isn’t a one-size-fits-all roadmap for integrations; what you decide to integrate with will depend on the ultimate purpose of your application. Choose what augments that initial goal, creates value for your business, and will attract customers over the long term.
By considering the above, you can proactively avoid issues from cropping up while you're in the middle of a project.
