Knowledge workers (e.g. healthcare information professionals, legal researchers, librarians) need to create and execute search strategies that are comprehensive, transparent, and reproducible. The traditional solution (command-line query builders offered by proprietary database vendors) dates from the days when users could access databases only via text-based terminals and command-line syntax. This article presents a new approach in which users express concepts as objects on a visual canvas and manipulate them to articulate relationships. This offers a more intuitive user experience (UX) that eliminates many sources of error, makes the query semantics more transparent, and offers new ways to collaborate, share, and optimise search strategies and best practices.