Four hours of my plane trip to the east coast last week were spent reading the book "
Slide:ology." The book is written by a very successful female entrepreneur in the bay area:
Nancy Duarte. She was one of the first of a few people to re-evaluate the value of slides and presentations, and to try and save people from boring and useless presentations. Over the years, people like her and
Garr Reynolds have done some great work in this field to educate people about the importance of presentations, and to improve the User Experience of Presentations.
Isn't making a presentation just to put up a bunch of slides, mostly just copying and pasting content from an existing report, and highlighting a few titles? When it comes to presenting it, no worries, I've already put all the things that I want to cover on the slides and I'll have my notes with me! Incorporating design concepts in powerpoint slides? Isn't using a company template or adding a few images enough for that? How long do I usually spend in making a presentation? Two hours at most!
Do some of the above thoughts "resonate" with you? If the answer is yes, your audience might not be getting some good presentation user experience ;)
Having been a graduate student, I had a few experiences going to big conferences. As a conference attendee, when you have up to 10 or even 20 presentations to choose from during one time slot, besides being totally overwhelmed by the great variety of topics, you want to spend your time listening to talks that you think might be the most valuable ones. I remember choosing to go to some talks because the topics were pretty eye catchy. Then 5 minutes later, I had to step out because I didn't think I could make it for the full 20 minutes of the presentation. Indeed, 5 minutes, from the moment I sat down and tried to listen, to the moment I was convinced that the talk, the topic or even the presenter was not engaging or interesting and it wasn't worth it for me to spend 20 minutes sitting there, that was the level of tolerance I could give to a presentation, and I might not be the toughest audience to please.
Would those talks potentially be useful to me? Of course, I might have missed out on a lot of great information and research ideas by not staying until the end. However, the valuable information apparently has not been presented in a more engaging way. In this world where peoples' attention span is significantly shortened by 140 words twitter posts and 5 minutes Youtube videos, you really cannot ask your audience to sit through a boring talk. Or maybe you could have them physically be there, but you might get a lot of tweets or Facebook post feedback afterward that you don't want to read :P
In a sense, the bad presentation user experience is very similar to a bad website user experience. In one of the usability studies we just finished here in EchoUser, the website we tested had great resources and content for users. However, the users were complaining that they could not get the information in a more efficient way, and they didn't want spend hours going through each page on the website to learn those resources. In that case, they would just close the website and never come back again. One of the user quotes was "I don't want to get an MBA on this."
Indeed, no one wants to get an MBA on your presentation, unless you are a professor and your audience are the students who actually want to get a degree out of this. So the user experience of your presentation, or in other words, how the audience feels about and what users will get out from your talk, is like this road you build between you and your audience. Are you building a wide "highway" or a narrow "country road"? Does it have good "road and traffic condition"? Those are crucial questions to ask to see if you are taking your users on the road and heading to their destination.
How can the user experience of presentations be improved? The above mentioned books have longer and more detailed answers for the question. In this post, let's just summarize them in three basic steps: structure, design and presentation. Interestingly, the idea of user centered design keeps appearing in those steps.
Step 1: Structure
You do have a great product or a brilliant idea to sell, but putting up the product information or using different adjectives to describe your product might not be the most convincing way to sell your content. Your presentation needs to a STRUCTURE. It does not need to be fancy, your first goal is to clearly layout:
A. What is the issue you are trying to solve here?
B. Why is the issue important?
C. What is your solution? How does it work?
D. How the future will be changed because of your solution?
Remember those advertisements which you watched and couldn't figure out what the products were? You don't want your audience to feel confused about what messages you are trying to get across. Too often, presenters forget to deliver the content step by step because they know about the content too well. They are not making the presentation from the audiences' viewpoint (they need some User Centered Design here). Going through the questions listed above will help users to sort out a clear "storyline" from your content, and make the presentation easier for audience to follow. Nancy Duarte has provided some brilliant ideas in her book Resonate on how to creatively and organically organize your content. At this step, you should be the director of your presentation content.
Step 2: Design
Again, think as if you are the audience (user) of the presentation, and ask the following questions: do you want to see a slide full of text? when you see a slide full of text, do you pay more attention to this text or to the presenter? do you feel convinced when you see cheesy images on slides? Are you confident that you can read text that is smaller than 12 point font on slides? ...
In front of the blank powerpoint slide, everybody should be and can be a designer. Besides copying and pasting, consider how your audience's experience will be when looking at your slide. If your answer is "No" to any of the questions above, then don't do that to your users. Don't let them struggle between trying to read your slides and trying to listen to your talk. If you do have a lot of content to cover, print the slides out as hand-outs, and give them out before the presentation, but keep the presentation slides simple. The book that I read on flight Slide:ology is a great book for people who do not have design background to learn those crucial but are often neglected design rules in slide design. Sometimes, thinking as a designer when making your slides could be as basic as pick Sans Serif fonts (e.g. Arial, Tahoma or Century Gothic) as opposed to Serif (e.g. Georgia, Times New Roman, Courier).
Step 3: Present
Presenting your slides in front of an audience is essentially the process of public speaking, which might be the most difficult part to improve in the presentation flow. Think about JFK's speech, think about Steve Jobs' Apple product release keynotes, think about those inspiring TED talks you watched, one common point is that the passionate or strategic ways presenters deliver the content made the presentation itself more engaging. The audience would laugh, applaud or even smile in tears following the presenter's tempo.
As a presenter, a speaker, it might be impossible for you to turn yourself into as charming a presenter as JFK, Ronald Reagan, Richard Feynman or Steve Jobs in a week. However, it IS possible that you could use a week to know all your content by heart and keep practicing, even if it'll just be a 20 minutes conference talk. Garr Reynolds is another big name in the field of presentation design/training, his latest book "The Naked Presenter" clearly sets the focus on "be a prepared presenter." According to his experience, the most effective way for people to stay calm, natural and confident in a presentation is to familiarize themselves with the content as much as possible. When you see a presenter who's reading his notes a lot, or pause for too long in between slides, that's a sign showing he's not fully prepared. How would you feel as an audience if the actor on stage could not remember his lines?
Different people might have different approaches to organizing and delivering their ideas and thoughts in a presentation. The process might not be like the 3-step flow I proposed above based on my take-aways from those presentation design books. However, I do believe it is useful to utilize user experience or user centered design concepts when designing presentations. Instead of forcing users' to close their laptops during presentations, try to value your audience and create an engaging presentation and communication experience for them. Creating a better presentation user experience = Making you voice heard in a better way!
