There is an entertaining “use case” quote about a student that wants to get laid with the help of your software, which is currently cyling through different blogs.
Do you really want to make your software as simple as that? I am confident you can’t just say ‘yes’ here. This is only one of all the possible use cases after all! It might not be appropriate for your software. The project management system that we are developing is not targeted at students, it is specially created for small-to-medium sized businesses like ours. These businesses want to manage their work online or want to manage all the communication regarding a project (including communications with a client) in one place. Why in the world we would want to use a student as a use case?
We do need all these tasks, documents, discussions, files, bugs in one centralized place. So does it mean we are not thinking about our users and instead we create a product that “managers want to buy”? Absolutely not! We just think about different users. Our imaginary users consider Basecamp to be too simple for their needs and Microsoft Project — too complex.
PS. Just to make it clear. I am not arguing that you need to think about your users. I completely agree. Just don’t forget who your users really are.
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