The EU-funded MultiMatch project aims to overcome language barriers, and media and distribution problems currently affecting access to on-line cultural heritage material. Partners are developing a vertical search engine able to harvest heterogeneous information from distributed sources and present it in a synthesized manner. To design such a system, user requirements were initially gathered and then translated into specific design features to ensure that the search engine developed was consistent with user needs. This paper presents these user requirements, the initial design of the MultiMatch system, and technical discussion of the system architecture and components used to turn these design implications into a working interactive prototype. Following this, we discuss user evaluation and present results from an initial user study. These are being used, in addition to other input, to drive the functionality and design of the final system.