Use Cases As Documentation

Burdette Lamar - Apr 3 '18 - - Dev Community

Ben, here on dev.to, replied to a post with this: "Can you further describe this use case?"

And that got me thinking....

First, that when I write doc for a project, I should be thinking more about use cases, and less about features.

Users do not want "features," they want solutions. A use case outlines a problem and a solution, while a feature may be a solution in search of a problem.

And second, that I should consider actually organizing the doc around use cases, rather than around features.

In one of my GitHub projects (the largest one), I built a family of "tour pages" (linked together with prev/next navigation). The tour covers the features in the project.

What if, instead, I built a family of "use-case" pages, emphasizing the problem/solution paradigm? Wouldn't the table of contents show users what problems are solved by the project?

I'm going to spend some time exploring this.

Meanwhile, any thoughts you may have will be welcome.

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