Digital pathology has the potential to transform the practice of histopathology, but there are significant barriers to the full clinical adoption of the technology. Amongst these the inefficiency of virtual slides is a particularly important factor, one which has been largely overlooked by the digital pathology community. Previous work by the author has shown that diagnostic tasks take significantly longer with virtual slides than with the microscope (on average 67% longer). This has a serious negative impact on pathologists' acceptance of the technology, the cost-benefit ratio of clinical adoption, and the willingness of pathologists to undertake large scale evaluations and validation studies of digital pathology. The inefficiency of virtual slides is caused by the inferior performance of current digital pathology software compared to the microscope. In this thesis, a comprehensive and methodical approach to designing and evaluating a better digital pathology workstation is described. In chapter 2, detailed and systematic study of the work done in the pathologist's office and the use of the microscope is described. From this, a list of requirements for a digital pathology workstation is generated. In chapter 3, these requirements are summarised and designs for an optimum digital pathology workstation are presented. In chapter 4, several prototype digital pathology workstations are evaluated experimentally. These prototypes focus on the single most significant improvement that can be made to the workstation to better support the work of the pathologist - increasing the resolution of the display and the speed of image delivery. Experimental comparison of these prototypes against the microscope is carried out to measure their performance and identify areas for improvement. After an iterative process of evaluation and development, an evaluation of the final digital pathology workstation prototype shows equivalent performance to the microscope in both diagnostic areas evaluated. Several areas for further improvement and future work are described.