ICU Medical Infusion Pumps

Overview

ICU Medical, a global leader in IV therapy, set out to expand on the success of its award-winning Plum 360™ infusion pump. The new Plum Duo™ was designed as a dual-channel system featuring a full-color touchscreen and enhanced safety and efficiency features. Following strong test market results, ICU also initiated development of a single-channel version, the Plum Solo™.

This project involved far more than simply combining two existing pumps with a touchscreen. Introducing new features required revising and creating use cases, developing safe and intuitive touch interaction models, and balancing a clean, efficient interface with stakeholder preferences. The goal was to enhance the user experience while maintaining compliance with industry standards and regulations.

Project Summary

Role

Lead UX Designer

Responsibilities

Concept to launch UX u0026amp; UI Design, Interactive Prototyping, Design System

Collaborators

Ru0026amp;D, Marketing, Sales, Product Owners, System Architects, Software Engineering u0026amp; Development (domestic u0026amp; international), Compliance, Legal

Timeline

Q2 2018 – Q4 2023

Design

Tools Used

Adobe Illustrator

Visual Design asset creation and custom naming for unique identity across design and development repositories

Axure RP

Task flow diagrams, low / high fidelity wireframes, custom reporting, interactive prototypes with data driven variables, conditional logic and gesture input

WebAIM

Contrast checking tools for HE75 and WCAG AA compliance

Chrome Plugins

‘Window Resizer’ for prototyping and ‘Let’s Get Colorblind’ to verify contrast compliance for colorblind users

GitHub

Shared repository for handoff of artifacts to other team collaborators

Deliverables

Task Flow Diagrams

To lay the groundwork for the new platform, I started by validating system-level requirements and existing use cases to identify if and where new features could fit within established workflows or if new workflows were required. This process revealed opportunities to streamline tasks and improve usability without disrupting familiar patterns. I then developed detailed task flow diagrams that captured every interaction, decision point, and system response—including error handling. Through multiple rounds of review and iteration, these flows evolved into a shared blueprint that guided both the design direction and the development of system logic and state machines.

Sizing and Layout

Following the ANSI/AAMI HE75 standard, touch-target and typography sizing was derived based off of the display’s PPI so that they would render at desired physical dimensions for proper interaction and readability. Using those as base-level constraints, I then calculated a grid for the UI components to adhere to. Late stage feature additions and/or revisions to requirements sometimes could not adhere to the grid, but the best effort was made to find an acceptable balance between change requests, UI constraints, and UX outcomes.

Concepts

Once the content areas were defined, effort was placed on creating the UI content itself. Various concepts were created, evaluated and iterated upon to arrive at the final design. Throughout the process, design evolution reflected the changes in content prioritization, feature additions and changes, and changes in stakeholder visual preferences. Many concepts were prototyped to interactively demonstrate interaction models and system visual feedback.

Colorblind contrast examples

Wireframes

This is a paragraph about the wireframes

Once concepts were approved, they were brought down to a low-fidelity, gray-scale variant that sanitized them of color, text values and other conditional attributes. This allowed the wireframes’ UI images to scale over time without requiring updates if a color or label changed.

The design leveraged common components, sometimes called ‘masters’, for reuse and consistency in the design. This permitted global behavior to be defined at that level and any instance of a common component would possibly include instance-specific behavior in addition.

All attributes were annotated using footnote ID numbers that corresponded to callouts on the UI image. The annotations were broken up into separate tables: General Description, Visual Design, and Typography.

Initial wireframes also defined valid & default values, conditional logic states, and more. Essentially, the ‘when’ and ‘why’. However, a single source of truth for developers was needed and those details were moved out of wireframes to system-level requirements. This made iterative changes easier to maintain for the project.

Interactive Prototype

Interactive prototypes were created for multiple reasons. First, as a tool to help convey concept design intent for a shared understanding and informed decision making. Secondly as another tool that product owners and content creators could use to test text strings and labels for proper fit while maintaining compliant size for desired distance readability. And lastly, based of wireframes for usability testing. These prototypes were very functional but dynamically populated values, conditions, and limitations sourced from data tables based on cumulative decisions made by the user.

Usability Testing

I helped create the protocol and moderator guide for several rounds of testing. As an observer of the testing, I captured my observations and helped determine the cause of any usability issues revealed as well as provide insight as to various methods that could be employed to resolve them.