My Role and Strategy

I was a team-of-one for the majority of this project, as the Senior Design Strategist at Systems Limited. I was joined by a dedicated UI designer during the last stretch of the project. I was responsible for the design direction, execution, stakeholder management and delivery. I also oversaw development and ensured what we designed was translated to the final product.

Understanding the service from the ground up

Before designing screens, we needed to understand the service citizens were actually experiencing. Access to those land record services still depended heavily on physical visits, staff mediation, and procedural knowledge that was rarely visible to users beforehand.

To understand where friction truly existed, I conducted field research across three high-volume Land Record Service Centres, representing urban, peri-urban, and rural contexts. Locations were selected using service volume data to focus on environments where digital intervention could have the greatest impact.

I interviewed citizens while they waited, spoke with service centre officers and administrators, and observed complete journeys from arrival to resolution. Rather than studying interfaces, the research focused on time, behavior, and decision-making inside the service itself.

What we learned quickly

People were more digitally ready than the service assumed.
While waiting, many were already using smartphones for everyday tasks like videos, games, and browsing. Our estimate was that around 80% of visitors had smartphones and access to data, even in non-urban locations.

Service demand was skewed toward simple tasks.
From centre statistics and staff input, roughly 90% of requests were basic land record lookups or checks that could be handled digitally. The remaining 10% still required in-person steps such as biometrics or physical documents from other departments.

Avoidable trips and preparation.
More than 50% of citizens interviewed and observed had over-prepared, carrying large sets of documents and bringing all involved parties, unsure of what might be required for the service they were availing. 

The hidden cost of uncertainty

Across interviews and observations, the same patterns repeated:

• Visitors frequently took time off work for a single visit.
• Large folders of documents were carried “just in case.”
• Simple status checks created long queues.
• One complex case could delay dozens of others.

For many citizens, uncertainty created the greatest burden. People were not always completing transactions. Often they were simply trying to answer one question:

Has my record been updated yet?

During fieldwork, the human impact became impossible to ignore. Elderly citizens, including individuals with medical conditions or limited mobility, waited for extended periods, sometimes in wheelchairs or resting on benches, for services that could potentially have been done or prepared for at home digitally.

The problem was no longer abstract. Poor service design translated directly into physical and emotional strain.

A Clear Opportunity

Service centre data and staff insights revealed that roughly 90% of requests involved simple record searches, lookups, or verification checks that did not inherently require in-person interaction. Only a smaller portion of services required regulated steps such as biometric verification or legal modification of records.

The system treated all visits equally, even though most demand could be supported digitally.

This revealed a clear opportunity: digitization should not attempt to replace service centres entirely, but should redistribute effort, allowing simple transactions to move online while preserving in-person interaction where legally necessary.

Turning insight into a workable public service

The research revealed that citizens did not struggle because the services were inherently complex. They struggled because preparation, verification, and service delivery were disconnected from the systems meant to support them.

Design therefore began not with interfaces, but with the service itself.

The objective was to create a digital experience that citizens could trust, operate within legal constraints, and realistically support millions of users across diverse literacy levels, devices, and environments.

Service blueprint before screens

Before any interface work, I mapped detailed service blueprints for core transactions such as record search, verification, and issuance. These blueprints captured the full lifecycle of each service, including user actions, backend checks, regulatory requirements, departmental handoffs, and outputs.

The blueprinting process was conducted collaboratively with government stakeholders and engineering teams, allowing operational realities to shape the design from the beginning rather than appearing as late-stage constraints.

This work became the shared source of truth guiding product development.

One boundary quickly became clear: while citizens could access and request records digitally, legal modification of land records required regulated in-person verification. The design therefore focused on supporting hybrid journeys, digitizing preparation and high-volume interactions while preserving physical steps where law demanded them.

Testing in the real environment

Early wireframes were tested directly inside service centres rather than controlled environments. Observing citizens interact with prototypes allowed rapid validation of comprehension, confidence, and perceived legitimacy.

These sessions reinforced several principles:

• complexity reduced understanding quickly
• users valued reassurance more than efficiency
• clarity mattered more than feature richness

Designing for the widest possible audience

Personas were developed from service centre data and field research to represent the highest-volume users:

• farmers managing agricultural land
• real estate agents handling frequent transactions
• older citizens navigating unfamiliar digital systems

These personas helped anchor decisions around literacy, confidence, and time constraints, ensuring solutions remained inclusive at scale.

Designing for legitimacy and trust

A major challenge was not usability, but credibility. Land ownership services are perceived as serious, legal processes. Early testing showed that users questioned whether digital results would be officially accepted. If the experience felt informal or experimental, trust collapsed immediately.

To address this, design decisions balanced simplicity with institutional legitimacy:

• clear, predictable navigation
• minimal information per screen
• official visual tone aligned with government identity
• visible progress indicators and confirmation states
• familiar interaction patterns rather than novel UI concepts

The experience needed to feel both approachable and authoritative.

Establishing a scalable design system

Before moving into high-fidelity design, we created a mobile-first, bilingual design system aligned with government branding.

The system supported English and Urdu, accommodated right-to-left and left-to-right reading patterns, and prioritized simplicity, consistency, and accessibility across devices.

More importantly, it created a reusable foundation capable of extending beyond this single product into future government services. Design moved from interface output to public digital infrastructure.

The service was designed around a simple model:

A citizen submits verified inputs and receives an official land record as an output.

Most design efforts focused not only on the transaction itself, but on also everything surrounding it, helping citizens understand when to act, what to prepare, and what would happen next.

The launch of Punjab Zameen marked a shift from digitized records to digitally accessible public services. What had previously required travel, waiting, and mediation became increasingly predictable, self-directed, and mobile-first.

Expanding access to critical government services

Within its first two years, Punjab Zameen reached over 1 million active users, eventually growing beyond 2 million users as adoption continued statewide. High-volume interactions that once consumed entire days could now be completed within minutes.

Users increasingly approached service centres prepared, reducing failed visits caused by missing documentation or incorrect service selection. For many citizens, especially those traveling from distant areas or managing mobility challenges, digital preparation significantly reduced physical and time burdens.

Reducing pressure on physical service centres

By shifting simple record lookups and status checks into digital self-service, Punjab Zameen redistributed demand across the service ecosystem.

Service centres experienced reduced counter pressure, allowing staff to focus on legally required in-person processes such as biometric verification and record modification. Visits became more predictable, queues more manageable, and interactions more purposeful.

The mobile application evolved into a primary entry point for land record services rather than a supplementary channel.

Establishing a digital-first service model

The success of Punjab Zameen influenced how PLRA approached future modernization efforts. Mobile access became a foundational service channel, and additional digital services were introduced following similar patterns, including specialized applications supporting land inspection and related workflows.

The project demonstrated that large-scale public services could be modernized without bypassing regulatory frameworks, aligning legal compliance, operational feasibility, and citizen experience within a single system.

Professional and organisational recognition

The engagement was recognized internally for both delivery and impact. I received Performer of the Quarter, and the project was awarded Project of the Quarter (2022), reflecting the scale of collaboration required to carry a complex public service from field research through successful launch.

Punjab Zameen reinforced a lesson that only becomes clear through time spent inside real services: public systems rarely fail because people lack capability. They fail because services are designed around procedures rather than people’s time, understanding, and circumstances.

The two weeks spent inside service centres changed how I approached the problem. Watching citizens wait for hours, including elderly individuals with limited mobility arriving in wheelchairs or resting on benches, made the cost of poor service design tangible. The challenge was no longer about improving efficiency or usability. It was about reducing uncertainty and unnecessary hardship.

Many of the most impactful design decisions were not dramatic features, but small moments of clarity: requirement checklists, appointment visibility, saved records, progress indicators, and service history. These elements helped transform intimidating government interactions into manageable steps.

The project also demonstrated the value of aligning legal, operational, and technical stakeholders early. When verification authorities, engineering teams, and government leadership worked from a shared service blueprint, design stopped being a downstream activity and became a mechanism for coordination. The result was a rare outcome where citizens, service centre staff, and government stakeholders all benefited simultaneously.