User Testing with the Bernina 145 Sewing Computer
Today I'm going to learn to sew... so I thought it would be most important to be able to write letters with the sewing machine. Since I'll soon be creating garments for myself, it would be very useful to sew my email address in them, in the event I lose them.
Description
My wife's Bernina 145 Sewing Computer is very well designed and extremely usable. I had never tried to operate it before and found that I could navigate its controls without opening the instruction manual. I even figured out that the Bernina 145 can stitch simple alphanumeric characters into fabric. My wife has found that the interface for entering characters into the stitching memory is pretty weak. As I'll demonstrate in the videos of the operation, it takes many button presses to navigate through the character set. I believe the character-entry process could be improved without even adding any buttons to the control panel.
The initial operation I began testing was entering "JACK.SMITH[AT]SERVER.COM" into the machine's memory.
The following video documents my attempt to complete this operation.
Analysis
It turns out that notating and evaluating this particular operation is a greater level of committment than I had anticipated. There are many, many button presses. There are also a number of ways to complete the entry