Linda’s Tavern – Capitol Hill

Challenge:

Linda’s Tavern is a local bar/restaurant in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, WA. Linda’s Tavern opened in February 1994 and is one of the few remaining businesses that have not been demolished in favor of new gentrified buildings on the Pike / Pine blocks West of Broadway.

Opened by Linda Derschang (a Colorado native who moved to Seattle in 1987 to open a clothing shop), Bruce Pavitt, and Jonathan Poneman (the founders of local record label Sub Pop), Linda’s opened with four beers on tap and no food, and became an immediate institution “a place musicians worked and hung out, a place to meet your friends and talk for hours.”

The current website (https://www.lindastavern.com/) does not have a convenient, quickly accessible menu presence on the home page, nor is the current menu in HTML. Menus are all combined into one scrolling set of JPG images and do not include their happy hour menu, beer or cocktail lists. The proposed redesign includes sample menus on the home page with links to the full menus on individual pages with images of featured menu items. Menus for beer, wine, and specialty cocktail menu will be added.

Event information is not located on the current site, this includes regular annual, weekly, and special events hosted throughout the year. A banner of upcoming events will be added, each event will link to the event calendar page that will contain details of the events.

The general business information and location, as well as specialty (brunch/happy hour) hours, are not immediately available. Proposed footer redesign will include a map location as well as hours for business, including happy hour and brunch times.

Process:

The design process encompassed researching local restaurants and websites as well as becoming more familiar with Linda’s Tavern itself. Interviews were conducted with several people asking what they expected to find on the current site, what worked and what did not. Most people indicated that the menus being all on one page and having to scroll was a detriment and needed to be fixed. Interviewees also asked about “Events” that Linda’s is known to host throughout the year and want to see this information readily.

Design steps included getting pictures of the location and any artwork that the business has inspired. I was able to cull images from their social media pages. First-round layouts were designed using artwork created by a patron and a ‘wall cabin’ feel that goes hand-in-hand with the cowboy feel that the imagery and decor in the restaurant provides. Colors were chosen for the two layouts pulling from the background images used in each version – a brighter green to match the painted background and more neutral earth tones for the cabin wall.

The logo was designed using the existing logo on the current website with a custom HTML name and slogan added. Content on the pages was broken into a hero image on the home page with three call-to-action (CTA) locations staged underneath, backgrounds and accents were chosen to match the colors for the layout as well as take into consideration the cowboy look and feel they currently have. The CTA boxes will function as hyperlinks to the Events page and the Contact page (which will have an embedded Google map). The CTA for the menus will link to individual pages with the menus in a two-column design layout.

Results:

A focus group was used to review the current site and the proposed layouts. User Experience feedback on ease of use was conducted and it was determined that the most important information should be on the home page including easy access to the Events section as well as immediate views of menu content. The CTA boxes were removed and replaced with menu snippets for each of the menus that will be on the drop-down navigation as individual pages. Each menu block ends with ‘Full Menu’ links to direct you to the menu page of interest. The menu for Happy Hour also includes the time range for the happy hour. The banner with Event posters will be a hyperlink to the Events page. The navigation was streamlined and placed below the logo banner, the footer was expanded to include pertinent business information. The final background was changed to a neon sign that appears in the main window of Linda’s Tavern.

Final Adobe XD Prototype

A final prototype was designed using Adobe XD. Changes to the final layout include limiting sample menus to two menu options, happy hour and brunch. Please click through to enjoy the final project.