Design study · Township government · Michigan
The front porch of Houghton Lake
A township website concept for a community of 1,119 on Michigan's largest inland lake, where the population — and the questions — change with the season.
Concept only. Not an official Lake Township website.
- Township website design
- Ask surface
- Ordinance search
- Task-first navigation
- Accessibility
Lake Township — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
A small township has the same obligations as a large one — ordinances, permits, meetings, assessments — with a fraction of the staff to explain them. On a seasonal lake, the audience compounds the problem: year-round residents who know how things work, and seasonal owners and visitors who do not and who mostly have ordinance questions, about docks, burning, short-term rentals, and noise.
The approach
An answer-first Ask Lake Township runs over the township's own pages and ordinances, which is the highest-leverage thing a township this size can build: ordinance questions are exactly the ones that consume staff time and exactly the ones a grounded answer surface handles well, because the source text is finite, authoritative, and already published. A task-first front desk carries the rest, and the redesign is accessibility-first rather than accessibility-audited after the fact.
The result
Eleven routes with an answer surface over the township's pages and ordinances and a task-first front desk.
Have something similar in mind?
Need a civic tool with this shape?
Stoa designs and ships resident-facing tools, internal workflows, and public service interfaces that stay fast, legible, and accessible from day one.