Scientific Research Validation Design

The Term Finder for Wolter Kluwer’s OVID

The story of OVID traces back to Hell’s Kitchen in the early 1980s. It all began with Mark Nelson, a contributor to MedLine, who started aggregating and publishing medical journals from his apartment. By the early 1990s, Nelson was distributing content via CD-ROMs and preparing for a public offering, transitioning from the name CD Plus to the more evocative “OVID.”

During my tenure at Wolters Kluwer, I had the privilege of serving as the lead designer for OVID and its various iterations. Together with my team, we launched the first major addition to the platform in years: the Term Finder, a feature born out of extensive contextual inquiry with researchers.

While observing researchers at Yale crafting intricate search queries in OVID’s proprietary machine language, we were initially struck by their apparent lack of frustration. Despite navigating disparate systems to traverse MeSH headings, they approached the process with an air of calm. This, however, wasn’t satisfaction—it was resignation. As one researcher put it, they were simply “doing the best with what we have.”

Seizing the moment, I reminded the team, “We’re the group that can build things that don’t exist!” This sparked an eye-opening realization among the researchers. The lead researcher responded with the words every UX designer longs to hear: “Well, what I really want is…”

Back at the Wolters Kluwer lab, we reviewed our resources and I designed a high-fidelity prototype that addressed the researchers’ aspirations. The Term Finder was born, embodying the outcomes they had envisioned.

Conclusion

The journey of creating the Term Finder was an exercise in deep collaboration, innovative problem-solving, and user-centered design. Below are assets and reflections from that journey. You can see the Term Finder in all its glory in the video below.