Most of my audience doesn’t know what a use case is, but it’s really easy. It is computer speak for the story of how someone uses your product.
All of us use Use Cases all the time. It’s that story we tell to one another. For example, the law’s named after people; Megan’s Law, Katy’s Law, etc. In this case something happened and to prevent that use case from occurring a law was enacted behind the banner of a single person.
Another example, that comes up a lot is welfare. I don’t know how many times I have heard that rant about people sitting at home, not working, not married, having babies. This is the welfare mom. Funny, how a compassionate civil service is tippified by it’s abuses and not it’s intentions.
Yet, I’ve seen the other side of this. I spent a number of years on “welfare” in high school and college. My mom was on it for a long time. We are nothing like this use case. And to see the onerous requirements laid on people forced on welfare is an eye opener.
I have not met anyone with a Use Case for someone who gives up their economic freedom, all of their money and all of their posessions, the ability to work freely, complete lack of privacy, in order to eat and pay bills. Our society does not now this person. Most people think, “I work so should they.” And see here is his reason, insert Use Case, for why we should just do away with welfare.
What about another example?
The starving artist who deserves to be paid for their work. This Use Case is the very basis of our copyright law. Replace artist with inventor and you have the basis of patent law. Both of these Use Cases are bogus.
A few acts dominate the music scene followed by hundred of lawyers to ensure their rights. Do the Beetles look poor? they haven’t produced anything in 50 yrs. Yet we pay as much now as then. I wish I had a job for which I could work a few days or months and then get paid for that labor for 110 years (I live in America not Britain). There are certainly starving artists whose rights are being violated, but that’s not typical.
Or the inventor with a good idea rushes to the patent office to secure a lock and prevent being cheated out of his work by competitors. Far more patents are filed these days by huge corporations who have effectively removed the rights of workers to substitute, in this case, for the legal fiction of a corporation. No one is starving here. In fact, different companies often hold patents on the same piece of technology and use them to threaten or got to war.
Use Cases are used to explain why we have laws. They are a simple little story that nearly everyone can understand. Accuracy is secondary. In looking at our society we should endeavor to discover the real or typical Use Case and not the first, most sensational, simplist one to come along. Writing laws for the imaginary only helps the imaginary and hurts all of us in the real world.
