The owners of Decker Creek "B&B&B" were experiencing calls from guests to check availability even though their calendar was on the first page of their website. This led to wasted time and frustration for the owners. When I reviewed their existing site, shown at the left, I thought it likely that guests were overlooking the site calendar which was tucked away in the bottom left corner, a location where a user's eye does not typically track in heat maps when scanning a text-heavy page such as this. Additionally, because no call to action or other unique formatting was applied to the calendar, there was no other indicator to call the users' attention to this location on the page.

The owners were also looking to optimize their site for responsive experiences. 

Pat, Byron and I met in person. Sitting at their dining room table, together we hand-sketched a few quick prototypes that we hoped would resolve both the issue that guests were not checking the calendar before calling, while also giving the site a new look and responsive framework. Pat and Byron made it clear they wanted to try to keep to a similar look and feel; I suggested we try one similar and one a little different just to see what would resonate with users.

Based on our sketches and discussion, I designed two desktop-size prototype solutions. I enlisted four of their former guests to help me with a quick think-aloud-protocol test of booking a room at decker. 

In the end, the design shown here resulted in users' self-serving quickly; when tasked with "booking a room" at Decker, all four subjects took the step of checking availability prior to calling (the other design had only 2 of the 4 checking availability before calling). The customer is also highly pleased with the results having kept the "country B&B" feel of their site while also optimizing the entire experience for mobile environments.

Decker has since closed for business.