Bringing Usability Testing to the Front Lines: IV Smart Pump Evaluation with Critical Care Nurses at a National Conference

Intravenous smart pump (IVSP) usability evaluations are often conducted in single-site laboratory or simulation settings, which can limit access to experienced frontline nurses. This methods article describes a field-deployable, conference-based approach for evaluating IVSP usability with practicing critical-care nurses. The method brought a standardized simulation environment to a national critical-care nursing conference while preserving experimental control through consistent pump stations, scripted clinical scenarios, counterbalanced device order, and common data-collection procedures. The approach integrates direct observation of programming performance with wearable eye tracking, physiologic monitoring, subjective workload ratings, healthcare-specific usability assessment, think-aloud comments, and device preference ranking. The method is intended for researchers, health systems, manufacturers, and nurse-engineer teams seeking a scalable way to evaluate bedside technologies with intended users. • Adapts traditional laboratory-based usability testing into a portable, conference-based method. • Combines standardized clinical tasks with multimodal measures of visual attention, workload, usability, and performance. • Provides a reproducible framework for evaluating medical-device usability with frontline clinicians.