How HyperCreative Helped Modernize Michigan’s Water Withdrawal Assessment Tool
Modernizing a legacy government application takes more than a visual refresh. It requires better workflows, stronger user experience, smarter integrations, and a technical foundation that can support future growth.
That is the kind of work HyperCreative helped support on Michigan’s Water Withdrawal Assessment Tool (WWAT), a critical application used to evaluate proposed large quantity water withdrawals and determine whether a registration can move forward or requires a site-specific review (SSR).
This effort combined user experience (UX) strategy, workflow improvement, system integration, mapping, and technical modernization to help move an important public-facing platform toward a more usable and sustainable future.
The Challenge
The Water Withdrawal Assessment Tool plays an important role in Michigan’s environmental review process. It helps assess the likely impact of proposed water withdrawals on nearby streams and rivers and supports decisions about whether additional review is needed.
Like many long-running public sector platforms, the system had grown more complex over time. The project materials describe an environment shaped by aging technology, fragmented workflows, increasing integration needs, and administrative friction for both internal staff and external users.
This was not just a user interface clean-up. It was a broader modernization effort aimed at improving how the system works, how users move through it, and how it can evolve over time.
HyperCreative’s Contribution
Based on the project materials, HyperCreative helped support a modernization effort that touched several critical areas:
– modernization of the user interface and user experience for the Water Withdrawal Assessment Tool
– improved registration and workflow usability
– support for Michigan Login (MiLogin) and more modern authentication patterns
– stronger visibility into site-specific review and administrative processes
– integration planning for messaging, geospatial services, and calculation tools
– modernization support for the platform’s long-term architecture and maintainability
This kind of work is where HyperCreative brings real value: helping organizations make complex systems easier to use while keeping technical and operational realities in view.
Improving the User Experience of a Complex System
One of the strongest themes in the project documentation is that the work focused on functionality, not just appearance.
The enhancement scope included improvements such as:
– registration user interface and user experience updates
– stronger internal table interfaces
– better screening results and notifications
– site-specific review management enhancements
– a “My Registrations” experience
– map improvements with filtering, search, and styling
– support for drawdown calculation workflows
Together, these changes reflect a larger goal: reducing friction, improving clarity, and making a complex regulatory system easier to navigate.
Supporting Technical Modernization
The project also involved meaningful technical modernization behind the scenes.
Source materials point to work involving:
– modernization away from older legacy application patterns
– improved integration with statewide systems and services
– support for updated application programming interfaces (APIs)
– stronger alignment between front-end workflows and back-end services
– more reliable support for environmental calculation and geospatial workflows
A major stream of the project included support for updated Hunt99 streamflow depletion tooling and improvements to the registration process needed to support those calculations. That kind of work requires more than design sense. It requires the ability to connect user experience decisions with technical implementation and operational constraints.
Preparing for the Future
Another important layer of the project was its connection to future water use reporting modernization.
The source materials describe a broader direction in which the Water Withdrawal Assessment Tool becomes more tightly connected to reporting workflows, pump registration data, annual usage reporting, compliance visibility, and administrative analysis.
In related planning materials, the vision for the Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) Water Use Reporting (WUR) system points toward a more unified architecture with improved onboarding, stronger data relationships, better reporting workflows, and more sustainable long-term system design.
That matters because it shows this was not just a short-term improvement project. It was part of a bigger modernization path.
Why This Case Study Matters
The most successful digital modernization efforts do not stop at making software look better. They improve the experience for users while strengthening the systems underneath.
HyperCreative helped support a project that brought together:
– government software modernization
– user experience improvement
– geospatial tooling
– workflow redesign
– reporting and compliance needs
– long-term technical planning
That is the kind of work required to modernize complex platforms that still matter to real users, real staff, and real operations.
Need Help Modernizing a Legacy Platform?
If your organization is dealing with an aging application, difficult workflows, or a system that no longer fits how your team works, HyperCreative can help.
We support modernization projects where strategy, user experience, technical constraints, and operational complexity all intersect.
Contact HyperCreative to talk about your next modernization project.