The Art of Presentation

User Experience August 22, 2008

I've seen and done a lot of presentations in my five+ years in the "user experience" industry and I get it. After teaching lectures to all sorts of students and then teaching at Apple to external developers and internal employees, you learn a few key things that most everyone is missing.

People tend to be quick to blame the tools when a bad presentation is given. But following the right guidelines, even PowerPoint can look amazing ;-)

1. Tell a Story

Whether you think so or not, your presentation is a story about whatever subject you’re presenting. The best storytellers keep the story universally understandable by describing things simply and not delving into too much detail, which could, potentially, be irrelevant. Realize what the core of your presentation is and work from there.

When you’re writing the script for your presentation, make sure it’s in story form. People will listen easier when there’s a story involved. Whether it’s a “step by step” process or recalling an actual story from your life, it’s always helpful. Standing in front of an audience and presenting a bunch of statistics is useless. You’ve got to capture the audience’s attention so that when you reveal stuff, they’re already emotionally invested. If Steve Jobs had just introduced the iPhone at the beginning of his January ’07 keynote without leading up to it, the reaction would not have been close to what it was.

2. Make it Visual

Don’t make your slides full of words. Just don’t do it! That doesn’t mean go the opposite way and put no words in. No, it’s got to be a healthy balance. You should be able to give your presentation *without* slides and still be compelling and interesting. The point of the slides is not to display what you’re saying but rather to enhance it through emphasizing specific points and providing visual illustrations. If you’re going to have text on a slide, keep it minimal – a few words at most. Really spend time on the visual quality by creating nice graphics to support your talk.

If you think statistics help, for example, create a visually interesting graph or animation. Don’t just pull some random chart from the Internet and paste it in – it will look awful.

When you’re in front of an audience talking, they’re listening to you subconsciously while they watch your presentation. People are visual creatures, so any visual stimuli will come first. This is why you need to include bullet points. As you speak, you are essentially telling a story, weaving between the specific points you want to emphasize. By calling attention to these words or phrases in your presentation, you’re drilling it into the audience’s heads – they hear it and see it, which creates the relation in their memory.

3. Know Your Transitions

When you’re standing up in front of lots of people, it’s easy to forget your train of thought. Make sure you keep track of which slides come after each other so that you can direct your talk and smoothly segue between topics. It’s okay if you don’t have the entire slide deck memorized. But if you know what comes after a given slide, you can add a few sentences in your speech that will make the transition easier. Nothing’s more jarring in a presentation than a seemingly irrelevant jump between topics.

And of course, don’t use too many transition effects. Both PowerPoint and Keynote have have a lot of fun stuff, but you can’t use them all! Pick two or three and determine what their meaning is. For example, you could use a cube transition to signal transitioning between large topics while you could use dissolve to signal transitions between subtopics. Too many different transitions hurt the focus and quality of your presentation. Remember, you’re telling a story, so it’s got to be smooth.

4. Cut Out Extras

Seriously, after the first draft of your presentation, you’ll have a whole bunch of stuff that’s just unnecessary. Don’t be afraid to just cut that out entirely. Make the time you’re on stage as interesting and relevant as possible without adding filler information. Weed out whatever information isn’t critical to your point.

5. Practice!

Having a story in mind helps you remember your presentation better. In fact, if you know the basic story idea, you don’t really need to practice as much, if you’re good at improv. Nevertheless, the more you run through your deck – even if it’s just reading slide-by-slide in your head – the better you will have an idea of its structure. You’ll notice that some parts are super easy to get through while others are harder. Get those easy parts down and it won’t be as nerve-wracking when you get up there. And if you do forget some stuff, it’s okay to glance at the computer or the screen. It’s better to do that than to try to fill the void by talking about something irrelevant or overly detailed.

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