In order to ensure that the design requirements of engineers during the design of surgical instruments meet the actual use requirements of physicians, a differential study of the performance of engineers and physicians in the use of surgical instruments was conducted. Through simulated surgical experiments, critical tasks and non-critical tasks were set up, and oculomotor data (pupil diameter and average saccades amplitude) and questionnaire data (overall evaluation and evaluation of each index) were collected from 12 engineers and 12 physicians. The results of their differences were obtained through a four-pronged analysis. The results show that in the critical task, doctors have dilated pupils with higher cognitive load. Attention differences: doctors use primary and secondary attention allocation strategies and engineers use average attention allocation strategies. In the critical task, the physician focuses his attention compared to the engineer, with small sweeping amplitude and high information search efficiency. Device attention: in the noncritical device, the engineers design redundancy beyond the actual needs of the physician. Device evaluation index attention: safety is the common concern, comfort-related evaluation variability is large. It can be seen that attention should be paid to the differences existing between the designer's perspective and the user's perspective, to find the key points of design and optimization, to optimize and design surgical instruments from the actual clinical needs of physicians, and to improve the usability of surgical instruments.