My First Encounter with the Usability of a Sewing Machine - PART 1

Finally, I got myself what I had been wanting for a lifetime, a sewing machine! It is not an exaggeration when I say "a lifetime" considering how long I've known to sew and mend things, by hand of course, and for how long I've wanted to automate the process, or at least partially. This habit of mine, or an essential life skill for women in my grandparents' generation and a good part of those in my mom's, is finally turning into a serious hobby for me by this cute investment - white with blue floral design.

As an end user who wants to get things done rather than to learn, I made what I considered to be a smart buy. I bought the simplest model (and the cheapest!), thinking it would be easier to use than an advanced model because there would be less features to confuse me. In addition, based on the general belief that roughly 70% of the job can be performed using 30% of the features in software applications, and that these percentages are applicable to household appliances and machines too, I did not think I would need the extra fancy features. It is a wonderful thing for a tool to have a "high ceiling" [1] since it promotes development, but as a beginner I was more concerned with it having a "low threshold" [1] to enter. Coming in as a complete novice, I was sure that it would take me a while to reach a point where I feel like needing to break out of what the machine has to offer.

Taking the machine out of the box, I immediately recognized some parts of it: the pin, the fabric holder, the spinner holder, and the paddle -- all reminded me of what I had seen with my mom's Butterfly Sewing Machine as I last remember seeing back in elementary school when she occasionally used it for mending. As someone who rarely reads instruction manuals, I wanted to play with the machine and see if I could get it to work just by tinkering [2] now all the familiar parts of the new machine seemed to be calling for me. But tinkering appeared to be risky [3]. What if I break it? It's an expensive piece of toy. What if I hurt myself? The needle is huge! And I had no idea how to even start tinkering, for example, how do I set up the thread (or "threads" as I learned later)?

To get started quickly, a quick-start guide seemed to be necessary. Luckily, there was one - the "Quick Reference" with terse explanations, simple illustrations, and the steps clearly labeled [4]. Unfortunately, my attempt to follow the Quick Reference quickly fell apart. The illustration for Step 2.2 of the 9 steps that showed how to thread the upper thread was so confusing that I had to abandon the upper thread and instead try the lower thread as I wasn't ready to give up on the "Quick Reference" yet. So how did that go? Not well. Maybe after all, the Quick Reference was meant to be a "reference" for someone who had succeeded with setting up the machine before as opposed to a "How-to-Start Guide" for a complete dummy like me.

Ok, now the "Quick Reference" had failed, what else? There was a full manual with 30+ pages, and there as a DVD. Again, I went with the printed manual believing that it would take me less time to find what I needed since it was a lot easier to navigate with paper than with a DVD. And sure enough, I quickly learned that it did not have what I wanted. The illustration for Step 2.2 was exactly the same illustration as the one in the Quick Reference.

Now what? The DVD I guess...

[1] "high ceilings" and "low thresholds" are two characteristics of tools supporting creativity proposed by Ben Schneiderman in his paper "Creativity Support Tools" published in the Communications of the ACM in 2002. Link here.
[2] Tinkering and playfulness can benefit learning and problem-solving. My group's paper on gender differences in tinkering with debugging features in a spreadsheet environment shows this point. The paper can be found here: OSU ftp, ACM Portal
[3] Perceived risks is one of the three components of the Attention Investment Model that explains and predicts human decision making. The other two components are perceived costs and perceived benefits. Simply put, a person is likely to pursue an action if he/she perceives the costs and risks of doing so to be low and the benefits to be high. 
[4] A discussion of the pros and cons of textual and video instructions can be found in this paper on teaching spreadsheet debugging strategies to end users. Paper is here: explaining debugging strategies