Halloween Candy Machine | Part 8 of 8
The Halloween user experience
User reactions to the kid-powered candy machine
This is a standalone article within a multi-part series.
Halloween was a delight for Nora and her friend Osa, a delight for the trick-or-treaters, and a mixed bag for me. I was sent into a last-minute panic by a simple but ill-timed woodworking mistake. I was also peeved by some hiccups that no one else really cared about.
This writeup covers both sides of the coin. Though the emergency fix forced me to cut some corners, the user reactions were as fascinating and unexpected as I could have hoped for.
Decoration and Design
Nora woke up early the morning of Halloween, and I assigned her the task of decorating the candy machine’s foot pedal. This accomplished three distinct purposes. First, the candy machine was looking rather spartan and desperately needed some color. Second, the foot pedal needed some functional signage to tell people what to do. Third, doing the artwork helped give Nora extra ownership of the project.
Nora’s artwork was the perfect finishing touch, and the task itself was the perfect way to keep her busy while I continued to work on the important stuff.
Which brings me to a software engineering rant. When a project has a designer on the team, there is something wrong with the project if the engineers make all the important aesthetic and usability decisions, and the designer’s only contribution is to create on-demand decorative elements like the foot pedal I farmed off to my 6-year old.
There were a lot of visual design decisions that went into the candy machine before Nora even came close to the foot pedal: all the dimensions and proportions, the curved shapes of the seesaw’s axel brackets and housing, and the angles of the foot pedal and seesaw. In real-world software projects, it’s important and sometimes very difficult to correctly articulate the true design decision points up-front, and bring the designers into the room early enough to contribute their expertise.
What often happens instead is that the unvoiced design decisions slide to the engineers by default during a rushed execution phase, leaving the designers with nothing better to do than fairly meaningless decorative work.
The Near-Disaster
I made a fairly elementary woodworking mistake when I constructed the full-sized version of the tower, but I didn’t realize it until pretty much the worst possible moment: at about 2:00pm, three hours before the first wave of little kids were due to arrive.
A close-up of one of the photos from the previous section helps reveal the problem. There simply isn’t enough contact area between the sides of the tower and the crosspieces at the base for nails and glue alone to hold it together. Repeated testing of the candy tower caused both sides to come loose.
I was able to construct beefier crosspieces and fix the problem, but this bled time and left me frazzled before Halloween had even begun.
I barely had time to put everything back together before the kids started arriving. There was also some pumpkin carving that needed to be done, which ate even more time off the clock. (Moral of the story: If pumpkins are on your kid’s critical path, do not leave them till the last minute.)
All the distractions limited the amount of tweaking I was able to do to the angles of the slide and foot pedal and the length of the foot pedal lever. I had intentionally built these with considerable room for adjustment, but they required screwing and unscrewing in order to be adjusted. My first guess turned out to be my final guess because I ran out of time to make any further guesses.
Below is the near-final configuration, right before I realized the candy tower’s bottom crosspieces were falling off.
The Main Event
The plan for the afternoon and evening was that Nora’s friend Osa would come over to our house and her mother Evangeline would help me document the candy machine’s grand debut. We would shoot video and take photos, greet the first wave of trick-or-treaters, eat dinner, meet up with the girls’ other friend Anna, and finally go trick-or-treating ourselves, leaving the candy machine at the mercy of the big kids.
As can be seen from the very first video in this article series, our timeline got quite compressed. We were still trying to work out camera angles and shoot generic videos of Nora and Osa when the real trick-or-treaters arrived.
Here is another video showing the continuation of that same wave of kids, which illustrates some of the issues that could have been fixed with better tweaking of the slide and foot pedal angles. As shown by the kids’ reactions, I was the only one who could have cared less.
“That’s so awesome!”
The kid in the blue shark costume did two things that were fairly typical of the younger kids. He didn’t step down fully the first time, so no candy came out. There’s a slight catch in between tilting the seesaw and activating the slider. A lot of little kids paused at that catch. Then when the candy didn’t quite make it all the way down the plastic chute, he waited expectantly for it without realizing that it was never going to arrive. As shown in the video, an older kid eventually grabbed it and handed it to him.
The angle of the slide chute would have been easy to fix, if I’d only had time to remove and adjust the slide pieces.
The foot pedal would have required more experimentation, but it was clear that a longer lever and shallower angle would have made it easier for the very youngest kids to operate the foot pedal. The string had a bit of stretch to it that threw off my initial calculations, but I could have worked around this if I’d had just a bit more time for fine-tuning.
In the end, there was only one kid that was too small and light to operate the foot pedal at all, and that was unfortunately my two-year old son Elias. Even the three-year-old trick-or-treaters were able to manage, with adult help. We were able to coach them to jump a little to get the slider through its full range of motion, but Elias was too young to know how to jump.
Here is a video of Evangeline trying to coach Elias through the foot pedal operation. He’s interested, but clearly intimidated by the tilt.
He still had fun, though. I’ll offer this video as a consolation prize, because it’s adorable:
“G-V-V-R” spells ‘butterfly”. Now, ghost. “B-O-O” spells “ghost.” Spells ghost.
The littlest kids who needed the most help were the earliest arrivals. The bigger kids, as well as a few curious adults, all managed without any problems.
By the time we were ready to do our own trick-or-treating, the Kit Kats were running out and I fearlessly topped off the stack with Hershey’s bars. With the anti-candy-jam weights in place, the slightly smaller size of the Hershey’s bars turned out to be a non-issue.
The User Reactions
Here are my notes of all the user reactions, lightly edited for clarity and annotated with commentary.
Any kid, given the opportunity and permission, will gleefully empty the entire tower. Nora several times, Cody, Osa.I found this fascinating to watch. Nora tested the candy machine through so many half-successful iterations and never got tired of it. Her 6-year old cousin Cody helped with the testing on a day when we were still struggling with the weights, but he didn’t care. He would have emptied the tower over and over again if his grandmother hadn’t arrived to pick him up.
As for Nora’s friend Osa, she was with us the entire afternoon and evening of Halloween, socializing and helping out.
Nora and Osa loved being the instructors.In between waves of coaching trick-or-treaters, Osa repeatedly snuck over to the candy machine and operated it herself.
The next chunk of user interaction notes reflects the design imperfections I was eager to fix for next year.
The slide had about a 10% catch rate. I placed it too low.Little kids get such an expectant look on their faces, waiting for the candy to keep sliding when it gets stuck on its way down the plastic part.Hesitant kids needed to be prompted to step all the way down, or jump a little.Kids in a pack were more aggressive than kids solo and had better success.I designed against jumping kids, but didn’t realize I’d be up against hesitant kids. Does this reflect our relationship with technology?
There were a few users who were worthy of a more detailed character sketch.
All the neighbors were impressed.Ivan was the only one whose engineering brain lit up. Fascinated by the tilt-and-slider mechanism.Lerna’s reaction — had to come see it, but was a bit afraid to put her foot on the pedal! Took a minute or two to work up the courage.Group of EXTREMELY excited middle school boys. One of them: “How much? How much are you selling it for?”
My notes close with some thoughts about our relationship with technology:
A lot of people asked me “who built this?” I was curious whether no one asked “did you build it?” because they didn’t think Mom built it, but it turns out Jeremy got asked “who built this?” as well.I hung the candy machine low in part because I wanted kids to be able to look under the hood, but none did. I don’t know if it was because of the general chaos and excitement of the evening, or if the mechanics are intuitive enough, or if kids are used to black boxes and simply accept them.Getting kids excited about Halloween is like shooting fish in a barrel. Of course the contraption was a hit. And yet--I’m not sure if this is a reason for the enjoyment, but I’d like it to be--empowerment. Making this giant machine do your bidding when you push the pedal.Why were kids ok with the minor hiccups — having to step twice or jump a little to get the candy to come out? Why did all the kids who got a chance, systematically empty the thing and not stop until it was emptied? These are the kids who melt down when something isn’t working on the school iPad.What’s the age break where kids figure out the physics and realize that the stalled candy is never going to come all the way down the plastic chute?
I’ll leave these notes in question form because to be honest, I don’t yet have answers. Perhaps next year, with the next iteration, I’ll be closer.
Piggy Bank and Plans for Next Year
After I sent a video clip of the candy machine to a message chain of cousins, my brother sent this response:
Nora’s cousin Cody was onto me. Having figured out that our garage was full of awesome building supplies, he was determined to explore.
Shortly after Halloween, he unearthed a few pieces of scrap plywood and decided that he wanted to build a piggy bank. I asked him to sketch it out for me, and he did so in a matter of seconds.
I’m a sucker for this sort of thing. I want to teach the kids that their vision can be brought to life.
Years ago, I really did add balloons to Nora’s orange shirt, the one mentioned earlier as an example of how not to craft project specifications. Here are her specs again:
Toddler Nora: "I want an orange shirt."(Two months later, Mom brings home the perfect orange shirt.)Nora: "Where's the balloons that were supposed to be on it?"
I turned the balloons into a sewing project and let Nora pick out fabric and help come up with a design.
So the three of us built Cody’s piggy bank together. Having two 6-year old helpers was more than a little chaotic, but in the end, the kids did a lot of drilling and chiseling and hammering and gluing. After much begging and pleading, Cody even made a few supervised miter saw cuts. Sensible Nora wanted no part of any such thing.
Safety first. Even though this isn’t a how-to guide for woodworking with kids, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a few safety notes. Kids who hang out around power tools need to wear eye, ear, and respiratory protection. Clamp your workpiece to the workbench before cutting or drilling rather than trying to hold it down with a free hand you won’t have. And if the kids lose focus and start horsing around, put away the tools and call it a day. It’s not a race.
I promised Nora that next year, I would come up with plans for a simplified tabletop candy dispenser that she and Cody could build together.
