Michigan Supreme Court
The Michigan Supreme Court collaborated with C2 to revamp its website, ensuring it's user-friendly, mobile-optimized, and adherent to accessibility standards. Catering to over 10 million annual visitors, the new site provides vital information seamlessly and enables efficient internal management of vast content.
The Challenge
The Michigan Supreme Court (“the Court”) is the highest court in Michigan, consisting of seven justices. Each year, the Court receives over 2,000 new case filings to review appeals of decisions by the Court of Appeals, cases of attorney and judicial misconduct, as well as a small number of matters over which the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction.
As the front face to the State of Michigan for the Michigan Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals, and the State Court Administrative Office, the Court needed its website to better fulfill its business, administrative, and information dissemination needs. The Court wanted to transition its existing website into an accessible, secure, and engaging destination for valuable resources and information about the courts.
The Court partnered with C2 to re-imagine and deliver a best-in-class constituent website experience that delivers the right content to the right stakeholder, at the right time and in the right format. As a result, the new courts.mi.gov website provides equal and fair access to information for all constituents of Michigan.
With over 10 million user visits each year, the site is a critical source of information to media outlets, legal professionals, and to the judiciary community. With a growing demand for digital self-service during COVID, an increasing number of users visiting the site from mobile devices meant the Court needed its site to be optimized for mobile display and comply with the latest accessibility standards so it could engage and serve all users.
Having large amounts of content and metadata, the Court desired a website that was easier to manage and publish visually consistent content in an effective and meaningful way. Internally, the Court’s existing search functionality made it difficult to index its large amounts of metadata and content to surface relevant, timely information.
With over 10 million user visits each year, the site is a critical source of information to media outlets, legal professionals, and to the judiciary community. The Court partnered with C2 to re-imagine and deliver a best-in-class constituent website experience that delivers the right content to the right stakeholder, at the right time and in the right format. As a result, the new courts.mi.gov website provides equal and fair access to information for all constituents of Michigan.
With over 10 million user visits each year, the site is a critical source of information to media outlets, legal professionals, and to the judiciary community. The Court partnered with C2 to re-imagine and deliver a best-in-class constituent website experience that delivers the right content to the right stakeholder, at the right time and in the right format. As a result, the new courts.mi.gov website provides equal and fair access to information for all constituents of Michigan.
With over 10 million user visits each year, the site is a critical source of information to media outlets, legal professionals, and to the judiciary community. The Court partnered with C2 to re-imagine and deliver a best-in-class constituent website experience that delivers the right content to the right stakeholder, at the right time and in the right format. As a result, the new courts.mi.gov website provides equal and fair access to information for all constituents of Michigan.
Solution
The new site is the culmination of an intensive and collaborative effort between the Michigan Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals, the State Court Administrative Office, and The C2 Group. Active practitioners of agile software development, C2 worked with them to manage the project per a tight sprint schedule and against an ever-changing backlog. Powered by Optimizely’s Digital Experience Platform (DXP), the new courts.mi.gov website serves as a “virtual open door” to the courts.
The codebase was developed with the next developer in mind, providing better separation of features and functionality, which has allowed its developers to jump in and understand, in addition to managing their own releases and development cycles. Leveraging a hybrid-headless content management system (CMS), the Courts is in full control of providing an intuitive and search-driven experience by tagging content with relevant metadata to filter by keyword, filing date, judge, business court, opinion category, and more. The new content hierarchy enables the Courts a more clean and concise way of changing and publishing content in multiple formats and delivers a drastically improved user experience with a simpler website design.
Combined with using modern JavaScript framework, Vue.js, the Court’s website indexes search queries and parses content from legacy databases almost instantly, allowing visitors to quickly find what they’re looking for. In addition, the Court’s web team can now confidently create and publish consistently designed and accessible content with the help of a Court-branded design system and baked-in tooltips and documentation throughout content editor workflows.
Visitors to the new website can easily access features such as appellate court case information, business court opinions, up-to-date court forms, resources on the judiciary’s response to COVID-19, court-community outreach efforts, helpful “How Do I” tips on navigating the court system, court-related news, and much more. For court users, the site offers easy-to-find publications, administrative memos, manuals, model orders, and other important guidance for court operations. With one click from the homepage, users can find links to view proceedings across the state of Michigan and access appellate and trial court live streams, including the statewide trial court Virtual Court Directory.
Enabling self-service with faceted search
A key innovation on the new site is the three unique experiences for general, case and opinion, and business courts search. C2 configured Optimizely Search and Navigation for the general site search to index and promote the most relevant resources across the entire site by type including documents, forms, pages, events, and media. Meanwhile, the Court developed an API to index its internal database and metadata to surface case, opinion, and order results in chronological order. The advanced search filter can be further segmented by case number, attorney name, appellate court, and much more.
Notable elements of the new website:
- Configuring Optimizely Search & Navigation for three unique experiences including general, case and opinion, and business courts search
- Intuitive web design and digital self-serving functionality
- Optimized for mobile devices and operating systems
- Faster operations and performance utilizing Vue.js, a modern JavaScript framework
- Meets the latest WCAG 2.1 AA web accessibility compliance guidelines
- Enhanced security to protect data, maintain public access, and head off any potential hackers
- Internal process improvements with baked-in requirements and documentation for content workflows and design efficiencies
