Renewing eGB, the electronic land registry tool used by every notary office in the canton of Zurich

eGB, the electronic land registry, is the specialised application that notary offices across the municipalities of the canton of Zurich, and the cantonal land registry offices, use to manage legally binding land register entries: ownership, liens, easements, annotations. I was brought on as lead UX designer to renew the application, covering the UX concept, screen design, and the ongoing collaboration with engineering through implementation.

My role spanned the full arc of the work: building the UX concept and screen designs, consulting directly with the client’s subject-matter experts, and staying involved through implementation rather than handing off a set of screens and moving on.

The users are legal professionals working under strict formal requirements. Every table, label, and interaction had to remove ambiguity, not just look clean. The data carries legal weight, and a misread table cell or an unclear selection state is not a minor usability issue in this context.

The application also spans many distinct case types: ownership changes, liens, easements, deployed across separate environments for different notariats. Any pattern I introduced had to hold up consistently across all of them, not just the specific screens directly in scope.

Rather than approaching this as a series of individual screen redesigns, I framed it as building a shared design language for dense, legally precise data: table content rules, interaction patterns, and a button taxonomy that any new screen could inherit rather than reinvent. The dossier/flyout navigation, the panel that orients a user within a case file, went through several rounds of concept iteration before I landed on a version that gave people a reliable sense of where they were.

Working closely with engineering and the notariats’ subject-matter experts, I documented concrete, testable rules: how table content aligns and truncates, how multi-line content is handled without breaking the grid, and when an overflow menu replaces a growing list of actions. Alongside it I built a button taxonomy: primary, secondary, table actions, icon buttons, down to the exact syntax for a button label, so two designers working on different screens would still arrive at the same button for the same situation.

I ran usability testing directly with notariat staff, since eGB is a tool they rely on daily, and synthesised the findings against the application’s actual modules, the shell/flyout, eGB, Leistungen, and Rechnungen, turning specific pain points into prioritised measures rather than leaving them as general impressions.

The design system now spans the shell, eGB, Leistungen, and Rechnungen modules consistently, used daily across notary offices in the canton of Zurich. Usability testing surfaced specific, addressable issues: unclear selection behaviour, ambiguous dossier orientation in the flyout. Both were converted into concrete design measures rather than staying as general feedback.