Design study · County government · Michigan
Michigan's Shoreline County, built to get things done
A county website concept organized around the three transactions that make up most county web traffic, with an accessibility audit that did real work.
Concept only. Not an official Cheboygan County website.
- County website design
- Press-to-search
- Tax payments
- Parcel lookup
- Board agendas
- Accessibility audit
Cheboygan County — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
County government is administratively sprawling and behaviourally narrow: most visitors are paying taxes, looking up a parcel, or finding a board agenda. A department-organized site makes all three harder than they need to be, and county sites in particular accumulate accessibility debt quietly, because nobody owns the whole surface.
The approach
Search is elevated to a press-to-search interaction so it is reachable immediately rather than hunted for, and the three high-volume tasks — pay taxes, look up a parcel, find a board agenda — are given direct paths rather than department routes. The accessibility work is treated as remediation with a measurable result rather than a compliance statement: the audit cleared 123 violations, which is the kind of number that means the pass was real.
The result
Ten routes covering taxes, parcels, board agendas, and search, with an accessibility audit that cleared 123 violations.
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