Re-Thinking a Poor User Experience

One of my favorite things to do in my free time is salsa dance. Arlington has a variety of clubs, restaurants, and dance studios that offer salsa classes but perhaps of the most popular is The Salsa Room. It’s been a couple of years since I visited The Salsa Room since I had taken up classes at another bar so I hadn’t visited their website in a while.

I run a Meetup group for people in Arlington to have fun and meet friends and I was attempting to plan an outing to the Salsa Room so we could take a class. I clicked on their website, which conveniently popped up at the top of the google search, but was immediately re-routed to their facebook page:

When I’m organizing a Meetup event there are a few things that are very important to add in the description: place, time, price, and what to expect. Well, on the Salsa Room’s facebook page the only thing I was able to glean was their location, that they were CURRENTLY closed, and when this Fade2Black event was. But since I didn’t want to go to Fade2Black, I started poking around trying to find the regular schedule for their salsa and bachata classes, their hours, and what they charged.

But try as I could, schedule and price information was NOT to be found. I clicked the information section but to no avail. Their events section did feature up-coming events, but only the more high-end weekend events. There was no regular schedule section. I knew that they offered regular classes during the week but even their Yelp page was vague on the details about it. I found out that their website had been completely shut down and now they just deferred to their facebook page. I’ve seen a few companies successfully rely on ONLY their facebook as a website, but in order for this to work well, you have to include everything a functional website would include.

So, for my re-work on their website, I started my sketching out a wireframe for a website. Considering the fact that the Salsa Room is a restaurant and a dance join, there is no reason why they shouldn’t have a website. They need to clearly state when regular classes start, how much they cost, and any rules they have (such as prohibiting outside water, or not allowing you to use product on your dance shoes that may hurt the floor). Here’s the wire frame I sketched out:

I was thinking about the hierarchy on my navigation and to how help users quickly glean the most important information from the web page. I felt like there needed to be a “classes” button in the navigation that had a drop-down with the sections: “Class Times, Class Descriptions, Class Prices, Rules or FAQ.” I also thought about what would be included under my other buttons. I listed out other important pieces of information such as calendar, map, events, ect. Next, I put together a quick wire-frame in InDesign. Here’s what I came up with:

I think this is so much clearer for the user. Pages can be great when they’re simple! There’s no clutter and every questions you come to the page with can quickly be answered by the clear navigation! Then I included a slide of how I wanted my drop-down navigation to look:

It’s amazing to me how easy it would be for the Salsa Room to create a simple website that not only would look a lot more polished than JUST a facebook but would also lessen the burden of trying to find out the simplest facts about their business. I feel that it’s probably common for business to resist paying for a website even though the finished product would create more revenue by offering clarity to their customers!