SlideMagic Blog

Yeah, yeah, we know that our audience matters and we should take it into account, but in practice, most of us dive straight into designing the slides.

Thinking of your audience is especially important for sales presentations. I have had a few clients situations where I was asked to help design decks that are used by a sales force that targets small business owners.

In those cases I actually imagine the actual/real owner of a restaurant or pharmacy who I have seen recently and wonder what it would take to convince her.

Together with a whole range of other product updates, Apple released a new version of iWorks (including Keynote) last night. I installed the Mac OS X Mavericks (warning, this will take your computer down for an hour) and played around with the new software. Observations in random order.

All iWorks apps are now free for people buying new Macs. iWorks was already a lot cheaper than Microsoft Office, but now the economic argument against enterprise adoption has been removed completely. Still, the huge installed base of both Windows hardware and PowerPoint with its familiar user interface will make it hard for Apple to make an inroad here.

What could help them is the cross platform compatibility. As of today, there is one file format both for desktop and mobile versions of keynote. I still do not fully understand iCloud, where my files are, where things get saved or not, but the duplication of a file when opening it on your mobile phone is gone. A step in the right direction, but not all the confusion has been removed.

Apple has also launched their suite of iWorks web apps. You can now edit and present Keynote presentations right from your browser. You can simply share a link to the presentation with your co-workers, rather than sharing heavy email attachments. More than one person can edit the live presentation. Many other services offer this feature, but personally I find it a bit scary when I loose control of how makes what edits (including deletions) in the master document. Anyway, that the feature is available does not mean that you have to use it.

Questions in market research surveys are long and wordy, partly because you need to make it unambiguously clear to your participants what you want them to answer, and partly because marketeers want to put their own language into the mouth of consumers (see a previous post).

When presenting the results of market research I often chop down these sentences to the bare essential. It makes them easier to digest. A small footnote sends people to an appendix where they can read the full prose.

If your corporation consists of business units, than your corporate presentation is likely to end up as a series of chapters, each talking about a different business unit. If the corporate centre is organised, then each chapter might have the same repetitive template/structure. Each business unit gets airtime based on how important it is (usually in terms of sales). The order of the chapters is probably in line with the seniority of the business unit leader. It all makes sense in the political structure of the company.

Your real story might be different though. A small business unit might have all the growth potential that your investors are curious about. A more junior manager might be a captivating speaker. The same presentation template might not fit the specific story of each business unit. Seeing exactly the same template 10 times is boring. And how do all the business unit stories link together to a bigger picture?

Sometimes it is better going top down than bottom up.

I get this request sometimes, with an attached presentation of another company. Most of the time, the example presentation is actually not that good.

My theory of why it still appeals to a client? It is written in the same corporate language that she uses. As a company insider in a similar industry, she can instantly decode the language and it all makes perfect sense. Two CEOs communicate to each other in highly efficient compressed CEO speak.

The problem is a competitor CEO is unlikely to be the audience of your presentation…

It is a question that comes back all the time: PowerPoint or Keynote. I have given my opinion in the past.

After I got my first Mac, I was really excited to be able to design in Keynote. Now, a few years later, I must say that both products are more or less the same to me. Keynote is cleaner, auto-aligns and distributes objects when you drag them, and does not have the problem of drawing guides that you move by accident, and has a tight integration with the iPad. PowerPoint has a more convenient photo cropping UI and a much better data chart engine (Excel).

But workflow is a very important consideration as well. If the people in your organisation find it difficult to get up the learning curve with Keynote, why torture them? This is especially true if people need to do a lot of copying back and forth between Excel and PowerPoint. Probably 90% of presentations are quick and dirty documents to discuss business data, and in those cases tight integration between the 2 programs is a big time saver.

In the end both applications can deliver exactly the same look and feel of presentations. When I tell clients that Keynote presentations do not automatically look better than PowerPoint ones, they are surprised.

So in short, it actually does not matter what software you use, it is your design that matters.

Two approaches to pitching your product. I prefer #2

1. Engineering approach: explain the layered product architecture and the solution process, and after this theory lecture you can make a perfect logical case about why your product delivers this great value to your customer.
2. Customer-focussed approach: highlight the big issues the customer has (to get that nodding head), go through the benefits that your solution offers and only hint at the technical magic that allows you to deliver them. If the customer is interested, you can do pitch #1 in a second meeting.

I have submitted price proposals to hundreds of projects and won/completed the majority of them, so I have gotten a pretty good sense of what presentation design activities cost time, and which ones do not. Use them to your advantage when negotiating a project with a freelancer.

Project time wasters:

1. The most important one: unclear story that needs sorting out
2. Lots of physical meetings
3. No clear decision maker on the client side, i.e. freelancer needs to collect and synthesise feedback into one voice
4. Requirement to run 2 parallel versions of the same presentation (different language, different audience)
5. Start and stop, pick up the project after a hiatus that was long enough for everyone to forget what it was all about
6. Inconsistent PowerPoint masters, i.e., client provides feedback pasted in the default PowerPoint template so all colours, fonts, and slide formats are messed up
7. Requirement for a text 1-pager that summarises all, with lots of iterations on the exact wording of the text
8. Related: communicating micro edits over the phone to the designer, rather than quickly doing them yourself in PowerPoint (text edits, slide order changes, etc.)

You that slide count does not appear in the list. Adding a few slides with a few new concepts to an existing presentation deck. Once you have understood the story/company, the marginal time required to add things to a presentation is low. Of course a 100 page deck takes more time to complete than a 10 page presentation, but still.

It might seem cool to have an interactive slide full of clickable links in your presentation. In yes, in a 1-on-1 meeting you could permit yourself the luxury of clicking back and forth through slides as you tell your story.

For a big audience, a linear story is much better. And when you need to click on a link in a slide, it is likely to be the exact same link/box/object every time. Why struggle with mouse pointers and try to hit that exact box when you can just click through the next slide that starts playing your video? The audience will not notice the difference.

This is a text editor that only allows you to use the 1,000 most common words in English (“thousand” is not one of them, hence they called it “ten hundred”). Try writing something, it is pretty hard.

Here is a blog where scientists use the tool to describe their research projects.