Evan Turner

Evan Turner is a recruiter for Hewlett Packard, large tech corporation, and travels frequently for business to college recruiting events and job fairs. He has been working for HP for over four years and enjoys his work. He feels that finding and hiring good employees is a fabulous way to improve the company, and, although he is not involved in any production or creative area, in this way does his part in producing high quality products.

Evan is 43, has a wife, Ashley, and twin babies, 18 months old, named Shandra and Tate (aka Tater Tot). Evan met his wife Ashley at HP, where Ashley worked in marketing. Ashley left her job when the twins were born. Evan accepted a promotion to his current job, which offered higher pay, but also required more travel. They own a three-bedroom house in a desirable suburb of Vancouver, Washington, and one car, a Volvo wagon.

Evan typically stays at a hotels close to the location where he is meeting and tends to eat near or at the hotel. He occasionally takes groups out to dinner as part of his job. He does not need very much information beyond a certain range or area, but needs the information in an easy to transport (preferably light-weight) and handy package. He always travels with a PDA and therefore would be interested in having this information available online.

• Convenience
• Save time. Wants to locate information quickly and efficiently: doesn't want to have to flip through a disorganized book simply to locate a restaurant nearby that is open late.
• Not interested in investing a lot of time into researching; his information needs are still fairly specific.
  
• Not to feel stupid or frustrated, and to impress his recruitees and colleagues
  
• To have some information about possible restaurants and entertainment venues in a restricted geographic region (ie. near his accommodations) in the event that he has some free time before or after his meetings.
  
• Focused on saving space in his luggage.
  
• To find the best possible place to stay within his budget, although convenience and comfort are primary.
  
• Having just the information he needs, and only the information he needs

[Logs in as previous user, creates a quick guide, buys it, downloads it.]

Evan is sitting in his office, working on some recruiting materials in preparation for his next tour of college campuses in the spring. His phone rings. His boss has come down with pneumonia and won't be able to make his trip to LA to recruit engineers from the technical college atUSC. He needs Evan to attend in his place, and the plane is leaving in four hours. His assistant is working on the details of getting the travel arrangements changed. Evan doesn't want to let his boss down.

His boss had been planning to visit some friends living near LA and so set up a schedule that would require him to be in LA from Thursday through Monday evening, leaving him with most of the weekend free, a weekend that Evan now needs to fill himself. The hotel is fixed but Evan will need some information on things to do in the area. He's also decided that since he'll be there for such a long time, he'll arrange to have a lunch meeting with some perspective employees on Saturday.

Because Evan is so rushed for time he won't have the time to go to a bookstore to find a guidebook. He's used TraveLite, a new service on the Internet that allows business travelers to download information that is specific to their destinations, before and so he goes back to the site to see what they can offer for LA. He figures he can download the information and read it on his laptop on the plane. He goes on line and quickly locates TraveLite, perfect. If he can quickly construct a guide and download it to his laptop, this will save him both time and weight in his luggage.

He logs in to his account. The first thing he's asked to do is specify his destination. He does this by typing "Los Angeles" directly into the search box, although he could have used the map provided as well. Typing directly was quicker. He chooses restaurants, top sites to see and do and transportation information to include in his guide. As he adjusts the guide, the price of the guide is updated dynamically on the screen. On second thought, he wants fewer restaurants and clicks on change restaurants, he picks the neighborhoods around USC and then hits continue. He is satisfied that this is enough information to give him the background and information he needs.

He saves the guide. He goes to the purchase the guide section, clicks on PDF format. He already has all his billing information in the purchase section so he quickly moves through buying the guide, downloads it to his laptop and heads to the airport.