Creating Use Cases
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What is a Use Case?
A use case is a written description of how users will perform tasks on your website. Each use case begins with a user's goal and ends when that goal is fulfilled. It captures:
- Who is using the website
- What the user want to do
- The user's goal
- The steps the user takes to accomplish a particular task
- How the website should respond to an action
How Do You Write a Use Case?
Write the steps in a use case in an easy-to-understand narrative. Kenworthy (1997) outlines the following steps:
- Identify who is going to be using the website.
- Pick one of those users.
- Define what that user wants to do on the site. Each thing the use does on the site becomes a use case.
- For each use case, decide on the normal course of events when that user is using the site.
- Describe the basic course in the description for the use case. Describe it in terms of what the user does and what the system does in response that the user should be aware of.
- When the basic course is described, consider alternate courses of events and add those to "extend" the use case.
- Look for commonalities among the use cases. Extract these and note them as common course use cases.
- Repeat the steps 2 through 7 for all other users.
