An interpreter on the ward in under a minute, in 64 languages.

In a consultation the interpreter is the only person who hears everything. The app had to get out of the way and let them work.

The brief

Ouvi was founded in 2019 by Joana Seixas, a Portuguese and English interpreter who had spent eight years on hospital wards in Leeds. By 2021 it ran a video interpreting service in three hospitals, with 380 interpreters on its books covering 64 languages.

The product had been built quickly and it showed. Clinicians picked from a list of 64 language names in English, often with a frightened patient beside them, and one call in five connected in the wrong language. Most urgent conversations still went through relatives, sometimes children, because it felt faster.

The idea

Ouvi is Portuguese for “I heard”. We built the product around that moment: the clinician taps once, the patient points at their own language written in its own script, and an interpreter appears. Choosing the language became something the patient does, not the nurse.

The identity is deliberately quiet. One warm coral, a heavy rounded sans that stays legible on a scratched ward tablet at arm’s length, and a wordmark whose dot over the i becomes the live indicator when a call connects.

What we made

Identity and wordmark
Clinician app for ward tablets and desktops
Interpreter app: availability, calls and notes
Language picker in 64 scripts
Accessibility review to WCAG 2.1 AA
Ward posters and onboarding cards

A ward tablet and a laptop showing the Ouvi app in coral and white, with printed onboarding cards on a pale pink surface — The clinician app on a ward tablet, the interpreter app on a laptop, and the cards that go up beside the beds.

How the mark moves

The wordmark lands softly and the dot over the i lights last. In the app the same dot is the live indicator: when it glows, someone is listening.

An older patient’s finger touching a coral panel on a tablet resting on a hospital bed table

One tap, then the patient chooses

The picker shows every language in its own script, ordered by how often it is asked for on that ward. In testing, patients found their own language in a median of four seconds.

An interpreter wearing a headset at a desk by a window, listening to a video call in soft evening light — Interpreters work from home or from small hubs. The app tells them the ward and the kind of appointment before the call connects.

What changed

median wait for a video interpreter
Across all calls in the first six months. A face-to-face booking had taken two working days.
of calls in the wrong language, down from 21%
Patients now choose their own language, written in their own script.
hospital and GP sites within eighteen months
Up from the three hospitals in the original pilot.

Who made it

Orvel

Anjali RaoCreative directionLondon
Tomás FerreiraProduct designLisbon
Freya LundResearchLondon

With

Client team: Joana Seixas, Owen Hartley, Priya Natarajan
Engineering: Ouvi product team
Research participants: 26 clinicians and 14 interpreters in Leeds and Bristol
Accessibility review: Mira Kostova
Photography: Hana Weir

Next project Harbour hotel, 2020PolcarrowFourteen rooms in old net lofts on a Cornish harbour, with a website that answers questions instead of selling.