About the Project Proposal  Comparative Analysis  >> Audience Assessment Schedule  Budget Executive Summary Members Mohammed Shamma Rick Murtha Qunyan Mao Jennifer Lee	Universal Locator Home Audience Assessment   Customer Profile   Location: people who need location information for cities (greater metro areas) Lifestyle: on the move, busy, juggling multiple responsibilities, travel Situation: people unfamiliar with a particular geographical area (eg. Tourists, business travelers, prospective residents, new residents, prospective business owners), people comfortable with the online world. Age: 15 and up Income bracket: on the Internet it would be the same as the online population, for stand-alone implementations, it would be much broader, eg. a ULP on a plane would attend to the needs of air travelers. Gender: Not gender targeted.   Implementation   Justification: People are very visually oriented. Textual information is useful to a point for many, but people like a graphical representation of information in order to better orient themselves. Mapping takes this a step further by providing geographical context. This is the usefulness of GIS. The ULP would utilize a GIS as the basis of its implementation. However, as mentioned in our mission statement, the ULP would go above and beyond the basic functionality of mapping sites currently available.   Implementation: Two possible implementations of the ULP are a standard Internet site (www.ULP.com) and stand-alone implementations. One specific example of the former would entail linking the home site to portal sites such as search engines. Some specific examples of the latter might be: Kiosks on the street; Cars (such as the Acura TL’s satellite navigation system). Portal sites (as a new utility on search engine sites); Airplanes Hotels Car rental agencies Customers/Consumers     It is often the case that one’s customers and one’s consumers are not one and the same. For example, parents buy diapers and babies consume them. The case of the ULP is similar. Some prospective customers are search engines, municipal governments and community-based services. However, it would be individual consumers accessing the service. Search engines, for example, would pay dearly to link to the ULP if they could cover their costs by justifying higher advertising rates to their advertisers.   Problem Solved     The ULP’s usefulness arises from its ability to reduce the disorientation people unfamiliar with a particular area feel. The various mapping/locator sites currently available are domain specific, ie. they address only ATMs for example. The ULP solves a problem by providing convenience of use all on one site. By having a ULP, user would no longer need to bookmark five, ten or even twenty different single-purpose locator sites. So, why can’t somebody simply create a site linking existing locators? They can and do, but they do not provide a uniform user interface.
	Last Updated: October 25, 1998