01 · Find
Search across the collection
Search case metadata and writeup text, then refine by species, diagnosis, body system, collection, and year.
Noah’s Slidebox · Davis-Thompson Foundation
A searchable home for veterinary pathology slides.
Search, study, and share cases—with ongoing improvements informed by how people use the library.
Explore Slidebox- Client
- Davis-Thompson Foundation
- Work
- Website & application development
- Focus
- Search, viewing, and learning from use
The challenge
Make a specialist collection easier to explore.
Noah’s Slidebox brings together veterinary pathology slides contributed by individuals and institutions around the world. Each case can include detailed metadata, an image, and a supporting writeup.
A useful library needs to connect those pieces. Visitors need ways to narrow the collection by species, diagnosis, or body system, then move from a search result into the slide and its educational context.
The development work
Connect search, viewing, and the existing website.
The development work brought a custom browsing interface together with the foundation’s existing WordPress case data. Search covers both case details and the text of supporting writeups, while structured filters help visitors refine the results.
The viewing experience keeps the slide and writeup close at hand. Visitors can zoom into a whole-slide image, switch to the accompanying document, and share a link to a specific position on the slide.
02 · Study
Look closely at the slide
Open a zoomable whole-slide image and move between the image and its supporting writeup.
03 · Share
Point to the same detail
Share a link that preserves the slide’s zoom and position, giving someone else a precise place to start.
04 · Connect
Use the existing content
Bring WordPress case metadata into the application so the library builds on the foundation’s established content workflow.
Learning from real use
Observe the friction. Improve the experience.
We use behavior recordings and interaction data to understand how people search, explore cases, and move through the library. This helps identify where the interface needs to work better for its users.
In Noah’s Arkive, the foundation’s related pathology image library, session recordings surfaced spelling and missing-space problems. Those observations informed work on search suggestions for queries that return no matches.
- 01 / Observe
See where people get stuck.
- 02 / Understand
Connect the behavior to a usability problem.
- 03 / Improve
Use the evidence to guide development.
The AI work
Natural-language questions, grounded in real cases.
An earlier “Ask Noah” beta let visitors ask questions in everyday language. It combined local search with an AI model that could search cases, retrieve details, and calculate counts using tools connected to the collection. Answers included case citations so visitors could inspect the source material.
From AI exploration to a focused browsing experience
The Ask Noah beta was retired as the product evolved. Today, Slidebox centers on structured search and slide viewing. The AI work remains part of the project’s development story: connecting a language model to real data, designing tools it can use, and making its sources visible.
The result
From finding a case to studying it.
Slidebox gives visitors a connected path through the collection: find a relevant case, inspect its image, read the writeup, and share what they are looking at.
Development around a real task
The project shows how a custom web application can make a specialist collection useful by connecting its content with the tools people need to explore it.
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