Question

In an event like a customer provides information that a admin person uses to interact with system, do i specify the actor as the user or the admin who interacts with system.

Also in Event Table, Source will be the same actor as the above question?

Answer 1

Answer is: it depends on your problem context.

Are you designing the system to meet the Customer’s needs – or the Administrator’s?

• If it’s the Customer, then the Actor is the Customer. However in this case, your Use Case effectively represents a Business Process. Step 1 is a manual step in which the Customer passes the info to the admin. In step 2 the Admin enters the data. Which means step 2 is actually a system-level Use Case in its own right.
• If it’s the Admin then the higher level business process is outside your scope – so you only have to deal with the system level Use Case (step 2 above). In which case the Actor is the admin and you don’t specify customer as source.

In practice, even for scenario 2, it’s worth noting in comments somewhere that the info comes from the customer to the admin. However, it’s important you design the UI from the admin’s perspective – not the customer’s. An admin will typically perform the same operation many times, so needs an interface that is efficient. A customer might perform the operation much less frequently so needs an interface that provides more structure and support (e.g. “wizards”). Forcing one to use an interface designed for the other can cause frustration, innefficiency and/or failure.

hth.