PubMed Redesign

This project proposes a redesign of PubMed, a research database for biomedical literature. Accessing relevant literature is an important step in the process of conducting scientific research, and PubMed provides a key service in this area. We sought to understand the concerns of people who conduct biomedical research, identify areas for potential improvement with the existing platform, and propose improvements to the PubMed interface in order to enhance the research process.

This project was created in collaboration with Matan Berson, under the guidance of Professor Michael Corrin at the University of Toronto.

We focused on the process of finding scientific papers in PubMed. Our process began with speaking with researchers and graduate students to understand the challenges they faced and to observe their research process.

We organized our findings to reveal key trends and insights in PubMed’s user expectations and emotional responses throughout the research process.

Based on our user research, we design a prototype solution and tested it on researchers and graduate students. After a few iterations, we came up with our final proposed redesign.

In our design, we sought to enhance the process of creating effective search queries, and also give users immediate feedback as to the effectiveness of their searches.