Methods triangulation for designing a high-fidelity prototype for heart surgery: advantages and limitations

This article is part of the design of a surgical device in cardiology for circular cutting of the aortic valve. In this context of future use, the consequences of device misuse can be critical but it is impossible to perform user tests for every design iteration. The authors present the methods they applied to circumvent the evaluation in real-life situations and to develop the usability of a prototype. The methods used are known (heuristic inspection, task modelling and artificial situation testing), the interest is in their combined uses at this stage of device design. Overall, the results tend to show that triangulation of methods is really interesting if it crosses artificial and real data collection methods.