SlideMagic Blog

The announcement that online file storage and sharing platform Box is adding a note taking app is another indication how the world of office software is changing (and that includes presentation design).

• Work and communication styles are becoming more informal. Overloaded with information, we want to get to the point, quickly, with buzzwords or formal verbal padding.
• Documents need to be readable (and editable) on mobile devices. Even more important, people need to find a document quickly on every mobile device that happens to be closest in reach.
• People work on documents asynchronously, in different locations, and in different time zones, without the need for a time consuming meeting to discuss small changes.
• More and more senior executives will make direct edits into documents, cutting out the traditional feedback editing loops involving secretaries, junior analysts,  (who used to be the in-depth experts in Office software), and print-outs/faxes.
• Ad-hoc presentations in small groups with random/frequent interruptions grow at the expense of orchestrated, big, planned presentations where we let the speaker finish before asking a polite question.

Software needs to follow culture.

Every story has a few key messages. And a message is not something like “We are a highly flexible, customer-satisfying, and scalable platform, that delivers return on marketing investment.” Things need to be more specific.

For example, you have a company pitch that makes your startup sound like - yet another - social network to the ignorant outsider, and you are not. Rather than making this important point verbally, explaining around the slides, it is better to take the issue head-on: write “We are not a social network” at the top of the slide and design the most powerful visual you can think of to visualize it.

Maybe use 2 charts. One can be incredibly simple: 2 circles, one says ”Social network”, the other “Us”. Then in the next slide (using the same headline) provide factual evidence/explanation why you are not. And factual evidence is not the same as writing a long bullet point: “We are not a social network” (duplicating the headline). You need to list some sort of feature comparison between social networks and your application.

In big corporates, preparations for an important presentation often start with one person preparing the template for the presentation, emailing it around to all relevant business units to be filled out. The final presentation design is simply a matter of slapping the filled in templates together into one big, boring, 30MB, 200 page, 10-hour slide deck.

I am repeating my hobby horse here, this presentation is the problem solving deck that contains all the relevant data. The challenge now is to distill from all that information a compelling story. And that story might well have a different structure/flow for each business unit.

So, my suggested process:

1. Yes, create that template, send it out
2. Create the monster file, clean it up
3. Have a conference call with each of the business units about the data
4. Then, give them freedom to express their story in their own way, with their own slides, within a strict time constraint
5. Share the monster document as backup/bed time reading

The word template can have 2 meanings. One is the standard background layout of a slide (many use banners, logos, and other graphics, I mostly use a white page), and the second one is a series of tables and data charts without numbers and/or words in them. In this post I refer to the latter.

Problem solving in a team can be really powerful. You split up the work to save time by working in parallel. You can discuss data, findings, and ideas with your team tapping into a collective brain that is bigger than yours.

I find that designing presentations though is best done by one person who has the pen. One style, one approach, one story flow, everything gets said once, everything that should be said gets included. Multiple captains on a ship create an inconsistent story.

That is also the reason that I am not a big believer in realtime office document collaboration, a feature that many software publishers try to implement. The fact that the Internet makes it possible does not mean that it is a good thing.

Team input is important, but only one person should have the pen to incorporate them into the story.

In many presentation design projects, I start by building some sort of overview slide that is highly dense, complex, but has the whole story/solution on it. This enables me to shuffle things around, split things up, merge things, until I feel confident that I can move the other way: simplify. The designer has to go to the bottom of complexity in order to save the audience from having to do the same thing.

Before starting a presentation design project, I need some basic guidance from my clients: dark or light background, custom fonts or not, Mac or Windows. Useful information.

A few times, I made the mistake of asking design (not content) input on specific slide elements: this way of putting pictures or that way, this type of titles or that, black & white or colour. It somehow did not work. As a designer you need to select the entire design approach in a consistent way.

I sometimes see something similar in interior designs of houses: individual elements look OK, but the whole composition together does not make sense.

Mixing and matching gives mediocre results.

Here is another argument against dense bullet points.

Most business presentations today are read on a screen (increasingly a tablet), rather than watched live. You might think that bullet points are actually good for reading on a screen. They are, BUT. People have become so impatient, and overloaded with presentations that they just “page down” a document quickly, reading the headline and thinking “OK, I get it, next…” [click] [click] [click]

The only way to slow that reader down is to break up that bullet point chart in multiple slides and write the important messages clear and in her face, supported by the right visual.

Often, detail can be good. Big-picture pitches are vague and generic, and sometimes even insulting to an intelligent audience. Diving in deep in selected aspects of your story shows that you know what you are talking about, and often, the big innovation might be coming from something very specific.

This is detail to adds to, builds on, one story line.

Details that distract from the main story confuse. Going off on a tangent, getting bogged down, are not going to help to convince an audience that comes in cold and which has barely had the time to get used to your funny sounding English accent.

Leave the side tracks for later (if at all), wait for the key idea to sink in.

Regular readers will know that I am busy developing a “PowerPoint killer” web app in my spare time (and financed with my personal savings). Many of you have signed up to be part of an early testing group. Here is where I am at, at the moment.

The key innovation of the app will be the approach to designing slides, and that engine is now more or less up and running. I am very pleased with the result, it runs exactly as I have imagined it in my head and jotted it down in PowerPoint (my web design environment, believe it or not).

My clients do not know it, but I am slowly changing my approach to (PowerPoint) slide design in such as way that it will fit the design approach of the new app, and I am testing to see where the philosophy breaks down.

The slide design engine, cannot be tested on its down, hence development work is now focussing on getting the more trivial parts of the application working (presenting on a screen, managing files, etc.).

When this is finished, I will release the app to a very very limited testing crowd that will not be intimidated by unexpected bugs. The objective is to test whether the methodology appeals to more people than just myself. After the green light and a more robust design, I will open the app to more people.

Please be patient as I am trying to juggle time and financing carefully. Watch this space.

The look and feel of your presentation is important. It contributes to 2 important communication objectives:

1. Helping to make sure that your audience actually understands what you want (believe or not, many presentations fail to reach this threshold).
2. Helping to make the audience do something (buy your product, invite you to the next meeting in the fund raising process, etc.)
3. Remember your story

For all three of the above you could go for a “wow”-style presentation with no money,  animations, slick graphics, and other visual effects spared to blow your audience out of the room

But the look and feel signals other things about you as well:

• Are you professional?
• Are you prudent with the investments people put in you?
• Are you trustworthy?
• Etc.

Some of my clients want a dense bullet point deck because it looks similar to all the other serious consulting and banker presentations they have seen. For most business presentations, you need to find that middle ground between the two extremes.