SlideMagic Blog

You had it all planned:

• Lights dim
• Lights on
• Intro speaker walks on stage and introduces the panel
• Roaring applause from the audience
• Panelists walk on stage
• Lights dim
• Intro video starts playing
• Lights on
• Panel sits down in their assigned seats

Here is what happened last week at the very first session of a conference:

• Intro speaker starts
• Microphone has no sound, tok, tok, tok,
• The panel is not ready
• Intro speaker tries to crack a few jokes, while looking back stage
• Panel starts walking on the stage
• Lights go out, makes it hard for the panel to find their way
• Video starts playing too early in the middle of the intro applause
• Video starts straight with a dialogue without slow intro, hard to follow for the audience that tries to understand what is all going on

As soon as the panelist have settled in and the content of the session starts, all is fine. That first hick up could have been easily prevented.

Photo by Headway on Unsplash

At a conference last week I had a few conversations with representatives of companies that were eager to sell their solutions to SlideMagic. For these sales people, these events are hard work: targeting and scheduling quick discussions with hundreds of attendees. Their progress is probably monitored by software that tells them their scores in each stage of the conversion funnel: approached: tick, responded: tick, scheduled: tick, etc.

The experience from someone who was on the receiving end of all of this:

• If someone responds to your message with "we are not ready yet for your product”, it is likely to be true. A quick visit to slidemagic.com, will show that I do not yet employee 50 people and need a solution to scale up operations.
• In most cases, initially it was not clear what people wanted (a cooperation, sell something, advice)
• A no-show with an apology 12 hours later, does not leave a good impression, now and in the future
• “So what does your company do”. I start explaining, but am greeted with a constant flow of “yes, yes, yes” and a blank stare. Nothing registers. If the detail about my company is not important for your pitch, you can simply move with “Great, a presentation design solution. Now, I have something that might really interest you”.

Someone advice for pitching products at a conference:

• Qualify your leads (it will save both you and your prospect time)
• Be upfront with what it is you.
• Keep your promises (show up, send material)
• Be human

I will be off the grid for a few days, so apologies for fewer blog posts. Part of the disconnected time in the air however, will be a big test of SlideMagic 2.0, and see how it serves me as the main tool to build a big presentation.

Photo by Pedro Lastra on Unsplash

At the moment, SlideMagic 2.0 is tested by “friends & family”. Soon, I would like the help of more beta testers for SlideMagic 2.0:

• Mac only for the moment: I am doing all the development on Mac with short cycles without having to build a Windows version every time (Windows will be available the moment the Mac version is stable)
• I would love to get the help of users who have invested time in getting to grips with V1.0, the web app, they understand the design concept and can focus on the improvements (hopefully) of V2.0.
• As an early beta tester, you will need some patience, as release version can still be unpredictable. If you would like to find out in general what the app is like, I would suggest waiting a bit until things become more stable.

Let me know at jan at slidemagic dot com if you are interested.

Photo by Louis Reed on Unsplash

You get so called “white noise” when you mix a large number of random frequencies together. High volumes of white noise eliminate any singular frequency or melody that is out there, it all gets absorbed.

That’s pretty much what happens in creativity-killing workspaces. The constant flow of small distractions prevents you from doing things that really matter.

Most people think that only loud distractions matter (‘Hey, do you want to join our meeting [x or y]?”). This is the equivalent of a siren that pierces white noise. But I think it is the constant flow of small distractions, worries, thoughts, that is the real problem.

In a similar way that’s why people get good ideas while exercising, taking showers, meditating, having a drink, dancing the night away, it turns down the white noise and makes room for that thought that was always there but never came out.

Modern presentation software today is much more than a slide design tool:

Presentation files are the main documents for decision making, most PowerPoint presentations were never intended as background visuals for stand up presentations to large audiences.

Most of the time, it is not about finished, final slides, but jotting down rough ideas, organising work and splitting it up amongst the members of a team, defining what the work is what needs to be done and what sort of analysis is required.

It is not all about slides, analysis is equally important:: manipulating data, graphs, and complex diagrams, to extract insights, understand systems, and sort of planning and sequencing of activities.

Office software plays a key role in converting and fitting the same document to different screens, devices, and file formats.

Today’s presentation is important, but presentation software is probably the main filing system used in corporate world at the moment, often linked to the email inbox (“what was that version I sent 2 weeks ago?”)

You can edit and design slides yourself, but you also need to manage collaboration with others: the technical issues of getting and integrating comments, and the management of the decision making process of what goes in, and what does not.

Presentation design software can be used to jot down bullet points like a word processor, or play the role of the platform to stage sophisticated designs and animations that professional designers use.

It is impossible to create a piece of software that can be excellent in all these areas. Some of them require specialised software development skills and understanding of user needs. Some of them contradict.

Rabobank CEO Wiebe Draijer replied in an interview in NRC Handelsblad to comments made in an article by a columnist targeting the use of corporate jargon in Dutch companies.

The journalist view:

• Jargon creates a distance between senior management and the rest of the organisation
• Jargon creates a distance between the bank and its customers

The CEO view:

• Frequent meetings in English at a Dutch company creates a “language soup” that can come across a bit strange to outsiders
• Certain words have become efficient and convenient shortcuts for a big project, initiative, philosophy, strategy and summarise months of work and discussions in 4 letters.

I think both have a point: efficient meetings full of shortcuts are better long and slow discussions where everyone is looking for the right words. Still, you should watch out when external audiences are involved: especially large gatherings of people and written material that can end up on anyone’s desk (including presentations).

Because of all the social media noise, I think that most of the frequent readers of this blog do so via email updates. When updating my website (the new user license for a desktop app that I am developing), I discovered that subscribe links under each post were pointing to the template store subscription page: “If you like this blog post, please pay me right now”, which does not makes sense. Apologies. I fixed things below. I am still running RSS feeds and email subscriptions on Feedburner, since 2008…

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

As a kid (I must have been 13-14 years old), I actually saw one of my friends getting hit by his own boomerang from behind while he was searching the sky (ahead of him, ignoring 180 degrees of his surroundings) where it had gone. In addition, he ignored our warnings…

Almost all the time delays in coding are the result of some short cut that I took before and did not bother to fix.

I learned the same the hard way in my early days at McKinsey as an analyst, when I was building spreadsheet models. Just before the presentation, your manager would come and require a quick change in the numbers to reflect a new insight (or complication). In the end, the numbers that count are the ones on the PowerPoint slide, not in your model, so the changes were easily made.

But after the presentation, the adrenaline levels dropped and there was no immediate need to mop up that spreadsheet. Mistake, because by the time the next presentation came along you had no way to get everything consistent again.

So, quick fixes are fine, just clean things up quickly afterwards to be ready for future changes. As an analyst, you control the numbers with your model. If people don’t agree with the outcome, and/or feel it does not makes sense (unfortunately senior people have a good nose for this), something inside the model has to change, to reflect that insight. Simply overriding the output cells will work for one presentation only.

A few years ago when I started thinking about about the SlideMagic project I though it was all about the design. Just find a way for people to make beautiful charts and it will be a big hit.

I am close to completing version 2.0 of the SlideMagic app, and am now in a position I have never been in before: I can design the actual user experience of someone creating slides click by click, being free fom common software design platforms, standards, and practices. And here is the real magic. I make dozens of user interface decisions a day, what colours get copied, what things get highlighted, how font sizes are set, what box is selected after you did an action. Hundreds of small decisions add up to a big experience. You cannot pinpoint why it works, but it does somehow. It is all a matter of incredible attention to detail.

The pitch of SlideMagic is changing. It will all be about the speed at which you can design a pretty decent looking slide.

(Don’t tell this secret to anyone).

Photo by toine Garnier on Unsplash