State of Michigan — Unemployment Insurance

The Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency runs one of the largest claimant-facing systems in the country — 270,000 residents at peak, every one of them under financial pressure. The frontend that mediates that experience matters in a way most marketing software doesn't.

I worked on the React modernization of the claimant portal. The team replaced legacy markup with typed components, refactored the application's state model to be predictable across the multi-step claim flow, and shipped accessibility fixes that meaningfully changed who could complete a claim unaided.

The work has the trade-offs every public-sector frontend has: a legacy backend (.NET) you're not rewriting, a regulatory surface that constrains every change, and a user base that includes the most digitally vulnerable members of the state. Type safety wasn't a developer-experience preference — it was the only way to ship changes confidently against a system that touches real benefit checks.

[PLACEHOLDER — fuller detail on the React migration architecture, the team I coached through it, and the specific accessibility wins coming.]