This is an ongoing case study and project.
Tulsa Clubhouse is a locally owned event space available for private rental (parties, weddings, showers, retirement events) that also hosts a free weekly community event, Second Story Sessions, where local musicians perform new work or practice for their peers. The business was preparing for a rebrand and website redesign, and needed UX research to inform structure and strategy before applying new visual design.
Tulsa Clubhouse's website was attracting a growing volume of high-intent visitors — traffic had grown more than 400% year-over-year, and roughly a third of engaged visitors navigated straight to the pricing-equivalent page — but converting almost none of them into inquiries. Click-to-contact rate sat under 1%, and the site had no dedicated space for the venue's biggest differentiator, its weekly community event. The site functioned as a brochure, not a booking or community-building tool, leaving the business dependent on referrals and word of mouth rather than the website itself.
Help a high-intent visitor on the rental page take the next step, when today under 1% do?
Help visitors self-sort into "private rental" vs. "community event" within the first few seconds on the homepage?
Introduce Second Story Sessions in a way that builds a returning audience, given returning visitors currently sit at just 8%?
1,742 sessions over 12 months produced only 14 total contact clicks (9 phone, 5 email, 0 WhatsApp) — a sub-1% click-to-contact rate
81% of all sessions start on the homepage; of visitors who go deeper, 33% head straight to the pricing-equivalent page, a strong buying-intent signal
53% of visitors drop off after the first page, and 60% of those who reach the pricing page leave without contacting anyone
Returning visitors sit at 8%, and social referral traffic at 11% — both below the benchmark for fast-growing peers in this venue category (25% social)
The rentals log shows revenue is currently driven by referrals and repeat clients, not the website
I audited three comparable Tulsa event venues. The data helped me understand conventions for pricing transparency, booking flow, and audience segmentation: Vinterra (upscale wedding/event venue), The Bellview (historic building; weddings, social, and corporate events), and Zora Studio (small multi-use space, closest in scale to Tulsa Clubhouse).
Based on the analytics and audit, the five pages the owner requested were mapped into a structure that puts the conversion gap and the community differentiator at the center: Homepage forks into Rental Inquiry, Community Events, and About, with Rental Inquiry and Community Events both leading into a Contact/Booking page carrying the embedded HoneyBook form.The audit refined what belongs inside these pages rather than the page structure itself — the Rental Inquiry page needed to absorb pricing and availability signaling that competitors spread across multiple pages, and the Community Events page needed elevated visual/content treatment as a differentiator, without adding pages beyond the owner's original five.
To keep both sides of the marketplace in view while designing, I built two personas grounded directly in the survey data above:
She's the reason the Rental Inquiry page leads with "Starting at $X / evening," shows capacity and setup options immediately, and embeds a live availability calendar instead of forcing an inquiry just to ask "is this date available?" Every one of the current site's weak points (sub-1% click-to-contact, 53% bounce rate) is arguably her bouncing off exactly the friction this page now removes.
They're the reason Second Story Sessions got a full dedicated page instead of a buried nav link, with atmosphere photos and a plain "doors open 7:00 PM, free admission" callout instead of a sales pitch.
Using ValidateThat.io, I created a tree test to ensure the menu labels didn't cause confusion for Tulsa Clubhouse users.
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Two independent respondents hit the same friction point unprompted — that's a real signal, not noise.
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