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Many bullet point heavy presentations are in fact speeches. You read and correct every paragraph over and over again and after hours and hours of work you see that you got it exactly right this is what you want to say!
Congratulations, you have arrived at the starting point of your presentation design project, not its end.
Whenever I need to send out a version of a presentation, I tend to do it in the morning after I had a chance to glance over things one more time, making small corrections here and there. Sending a deck straight after a big design push leaves errors that can easily be fixed by a well-rested mind. Story flow design in particular gets a bit hazy when you are in the trenches to turn out one slide after another.
Continuing my post from yesterday about interpreting feedback and deciding who to ignore, and who to believe.
In very short presentations (15 minutes) you can get away with a small glitch in your story flow. Your audience will get the whole picture fairly quickly, even if there was a slide bump in the way you told the story. You like to tell the story this way, the test audience liked it the other way, so be it.
A big red flag though will come from the sort of (content, substance) questions people ask.
Questions are important indicators of whether the audience got your message, or not.
Feedback can come from many different audiences, what to use, what to ignore? Some pointers.
Your mother will be really honest, but she loves everything you do, and is (likely) to be not credible when it comes to evaluating pitches, and probably also not the right target audience (if you are not raising from very close friends and family)
Busy venture capitalists are credible, and the right target audience, but not always honest (especially if they just turned you down). A vague compliment, your presentation is great, it is just not the right fit for us, could still mean that the presentation was a disaster. Small generic comments such as suggestions to cut the amount of slides, make better visuals, focus more time on the pain point, can create a lot of work for you completely uproot your approach to the presentation, while not necessarily true.
A geeky engineer can be honest, credible, but not the right target audience. When she thinks everything is absolutely clear, the other 99% of people might not be able to understand it at all.
In short, it is OK to ignore feedback from people. On the other hand, look out for genuine useful feedback from people who are credible, honest, and fit right into your target audience.
SlideProof is a neat PowerPoint plug in that cleans your presentation of common small mistakes - automatically. Misaligned boxes, titles, wrong page numbers, you name it. A bit like the Roomba vacuum clean robot, a spell checker on steroids. You have complete control over the changes though, so nothing unexpected will happen to your slides, which is crucial since my guess is that most of the vacuum cleaning of presentations will happen just before the live presentation.
Fixing small mistakes might not be crucial to get your message across, but it does make a huge difference in the overall impression you leave behind. A bit like polishing your shoes.
SlideProof only runs Windows so I did not have a chance to test drive it myself (I work on the Mac platform). Please share your experiences in the comments if you managed to check it out.
Many people write bullet point slides because they find it hard to come up with a visual composition of what they want to say. The trick: look at the basic action in your sentence:
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:
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.