SlideMagic Blog

Most web sites are designed around functional content rather than story: find our address, learn about our environmental policies, see how we value compliance, here is a list of all the products we sell. But is that what should get all the attention? Maybe a first-time visitor of a company web site is more interested in the story behind the company? That story should be eye catching. The functional information should be accessible, but does not have to jump at you when you enter.

Similar to PowerPoint templates, web site templates waste too much space on screen clutter. Multiple menu structures, lots of links, buttons. It is all too busy and confusing. The language on corporate web sites is full of clichés. The text sort of all say the same thing. Images are often the cheesy stock photos that good presentation designers try to avoid.

Corporates probably copy each other. They brief a design agency with “I want something like that”. As a result, the same concept gets repeated and repeated. Web design is probably mostly lead by technology developers, not story tellers. The structure, the layering, the architecture come first.

Maybe corporate web design is also ready for a revolution, and maybe story designers can play a big role in it?

You emailed the presentation to your boss, and it comes back the next day with the comment: “I edited it for clarity”. What this means is that she edited the text in the first few slides, but probably ran out of steam after page 14.

Bosses have this urge to take out the fountain pen and start scribbling (could you print that slide deck please?), especially on first pages. They do not take the time to digest the entire slide deck (20 minute story), but rather want to make sure the summary page is right. Make sure the vision is in. Make sure that we mention that benefit. Make sure to emphasize the long history of the company.

Editing text is useful for books or legal contracts, text on a presentation slide can only absorbed 50%. The audience will not remember how you put that sentence exactly.

So, spending a lot of time on carefully crafting sentences is not the best use of your time. Given that, why not focus on writing short, punchy headlines and add the nuances in your verbal explanation.

Marketing managers always want to make sure that every single benefit and feature makes it on to “the benefits slide”. ROI. Low cost. Flexible. Scalable. Effective. Efficient. Affordable. Listing more benefits means spending less slide real estate on each individual one (words, visuals). Your remarkable story gets diluted into a generic cloud of buzz words that people find on just about every other benefits slide that they have seen.

You conformed. Marketing managers expect this benefits slide. Customers recognize it as: “hey, here comes the benefits slide”. Everyone follows the script. Presenter presents. Audience does a quick email check. The usual stuff.

Benefits are all about standing out from the competition. Let your benefits slide stand out as well and focus it on what is really different about your company and your product.

Yesterday I spent hours trying to find the perfect analogy for a company that sell a complex storage technology. After a while I realized that while an analogy would be really good to describe one aspect of the story, it would be impossible to find one that covers all issues involved. The analogies become more complex than the technology itself.

Plan B: back to the drawing board and start explaining the technology itself with simple visuals, without analogies.

TED presentations take a bit less than 20 minutes. If you have watched a few of these presentations, you will have noticed that this time is more than enough to get a complex idea across in your presentation.

Apparently, 20 minutes is also the average time a grown up can really focus his attention (source).

Add these two observations up and you realize that you need to design your presentation in such a way that the full pitch comes across in roughly this time. Anything more can be added as additional case studies examples, other plot variations. Possibly again in blocks of 10-20 minutes.

A few people with a lot more knowledge than I have about attention span and the brain are reading this blog, feel free to add your perspective.

Think about how a movie director cuts down a movie.

• She does not just chop a few scenes randomly
• She does not double the speed at which the movie runs.
• She does not use picture-in-picture to cram two scenes in one screen shot in parallel.

Instead:

• She thinks in terms of time, not number of scenes. What can I do in 90 minutes?
• She thinks about plot lines, not scenes. Can we lose that flashback without impacting the story?
• She thinks about the overall story. Now that we cut a few plot lines, do we need to overhaul the whole story line?

You are your own presentation director.

The other day I was doing the first sales presentation design interview with a startup that soon will start selling storage systems for large data centers that will eclipse the performance of the big names in the industry. Two presentation options

1. Flaky chart: 2 columns, our performance, their performance.
2. Substance chart: a series of charts that explains how a totally new type of storage architecture can deliver these performance figures

The first approach does not stick, the second one does, even in the absence of a large number of customer examples.

How do you make up your mind? Think of this, consider that, go back, look at this. A slightly random process in which you jump from one aspect to the other. Once we are done with this process, we go through a more orderly check list to see we’ve covered everything.

Here are the implications for many of my presentations:

• Upfront, tease the audience something great is coming, but do not try to summarize or explain the whole pitch in a structured (=boring) way
• Tell the story using the structure a movie director would take, not the author of a business school text book
• Come back with an organized summary, the check list, to show the audience that we have covered all.

Joshua Foer, the author of Moonwalking with Einstein (affiliate link), shows an interesting technique to memorize a string of unrelated object: imagine them one by one positioned on a familiar path. Boiled egg on the driveway, duck at the front door, 17" MacBook pro at the bottom of the stairs, etc.

Speaking of ducks, the Hebrew word for duck is ברווז, or barvaz. Imagine that duck sitting in a cafe, having a coffee, while in the distance you can see that huge red vase sitting on top of the bar. Barvas.

It shows that our spatial memory is much stronger than our ability to remember a list of bullet points. It might have something to do with our ancestors whose key to survival was to remember the location of that apple tree, and even more importantly, the way back home.

Stories are a great framework to store and memorize facts and ideas. It comes naturally. This might also be an explanation of why you can remember an entire 2 hour discussion by just looking at a messy, incomprehensible white board full of scribbles.

A story. I just finished designing a sales presentation for a client that is pitching in a major mobile-related services tender. I started off with minimalist slides for a standup presentation that would be perfect to support the facts that were all written down in the tender submission documents. Rather than focusing on the details of the system specification, I focused on the track record of the company, the many reference installations, the experience in preparing for a successful launch.

Then came the call: “Don’t bother to present, we will email your slides to everyone involved and just use the time to ask some questions.”

It is actually understandable. The tender issuer can read product documentation, read web sites, and is overloaded with (the same) facts about the industry from all the companies competing for the tender. It would be have been polite to let a tender candidate speak, but it is not the most efficient use of the time.

So, I u-turned on slide design, as I feared that many of the tender committee participants would not bother to read through the full documentation and would rather rely on a PowerPoint file as preparation for the pitch. I added more slides, and added explanatory text on the slides.

Lesson learned: with these multi-million dollar tenders, stay in close contact with the person organizing the pitch meetings to make sure that you carry the right type of presentation document with you.