The 3 ‘U’s in Defining a Use Case

A Use Case is defined as a potential usage of a product or service for a particular customer. It is or generally should be the first step in assessing who your customers can be.

To define a Use Case, the following 3 ‘U’s need to be defined:

Usage: This is the first U and states the solution offered by the product or service. For example, a use case for a crowd-funding platform can be ‘helping companies with thin credit files raise money’.

User: This is the second U and refers to the potential user of the product/service. In the example above, a ‘startup’ can be the user.

Utility: This is the final U and measures the utility of the solution offered to the user. A case which does not offer adequate utility to a user constitutes a weak use case and should be disregarded. In the above example, the utility of crowd-funding platforms is high for startups as the latter find it very difficult to raise money from traditional investors and in different geographies.