SlideMagic Blog

The reviews of the new iPad Pro are coming in: ten years after introduction this tablet device has caught up in performance with the average laptop. Most reviewers come to a similar conclusion: yes, the device is powerful, but it does not let me do the things I want it to do to replace a laptop completely. The enthusiasm for mobile devices as work tools seems to dampen a bit. I must admit that I am going through a similar process, re-adjusting priorities for where I want to take the SlideMagic app next after V1.0, the web app.

I have not solved the problem yet, nobody has, but here are some observations that I am taking into account and thinking about:

• There are different user segments, consumers, professionals, and even within professionals there are differences: a blogger or tech reviewer has different computing needs then an investment analyst or a web designer.
• A single user segment has different uses for a device that can overlap between segments. Presenting for a big audience, making quick edits in the taxi, walking through a few pages over a coffee, focussed slide design, crazy/creative concept development, brainstorming.
• User experience is incredibly important, and even the smallest glitches, delays, or inefficiencies can become annoyances quickly. (Web user interfaces still cannot match those of a properly designed native app).
• Some things can be done better with touch, but the good old mouse pointer has its value too. Fingers can be clumsy.
• It is very hard for people to get used to new interface concepts, part of the reason why the basics of PowerPoint are pretty much the same as they were 20 years ago. This is also true for touch interfaces, personally I did not bother to learn all the 3 finger swipes and other gestures on my phone, tablet, or laptop track pad. In the same I way I never learned the keyboard short cuts on a desktop beyond CTRL-C and CTRL-V.
• Cloud-based collaboration is still messy and confusing,. Multiple people editing the same master document is often not helpful. It is often not clear what you shared with whom, what access permissions, is the file, is it the folder, etc.

Most quotes in business presentations are cheesy cliches uttered by people you never heard of. What can you do to avoid falling in this trap?

• Decide whether your story actually needs a quote at all. In many cases the answer might be “not really”. That workplan deck for a major cost cutting project does not get any more cheerful with a happy “let’s do this together” quote at the end.
• If you want to give it it a try, make the quote very specific to your situation. Googling “inspirational business quote” will definitely not get you a specific phrase. Generic inspirational quotes have been used so much that they might actually have the opposite effect of firing up people to do something passionately. Quotes with a touch of humor or self-mockery could work much better.
• To weed out the business book best seller authors, search for quotes by specific people, either because they are in a relevant field or maybe because you admire them. Oscar Wilde produced many for example.
• Make sure you get the exact, correct, original version of the quote by doing a bit more research than the first Google result
• Place the quote on a nicely designed slide.

These 2 maps by the NYT times are another great example of the use of waffle charts. Both of them are unfortunately very hard to replicate in PowerPoint.

Cover image by Lindsay Moe on Unsplash

I asked a teacher in high school once how he actually grades exams. I think it was the history teacher, or a teacher of another subject that invites verbose and unstructured answers from students.

Students were trying to cram in as much material as possible in the answers (the shot of hail approach) to maximize the probability that they got something down on paper that could deliver them points. Students also tended to pepper their writing with buzzwords, or complicated language to show off their mastery of the subject.

The teacher on the other hand simply had a list of a handful of short bullet points and you got subpoints for whether it was included in your answer or not. No bonus points for elaborations, or verbal padding.

That teacher is a bit like a potential customer or investor evaluating your pitch.

I have pretty much stopped taking on custom presentation design work at the moment, as I discovered that it is not possible to build a new software product as a side project. There is the physical aspect of the limited number of hours there are in a day, but more importantly it is the distraction and unpredictable bursts of work that break the concentration when you are trying to create something new. I apologize for disappointing a few existing and potentially new clients, and hope that this won’t hurt their fundraising efforts. Hopefully all of you get an amazing tool in return.

Cover image by Javier Graterol on Unsplash

I never have been a big fan of waffle charts:

• I find it harder to read them then straightforward bar or column charts (in a similar way, pie charts are less readable)
• They are a pain to maintain in PowerPoint/Keynote (counting boxes)

But, what people do to show the results of the US elections is clever. by adding the semi-saturated colours in, you get a nice sense of how things are developing:

Here are some more observations from my refresh course in programming 30 years after graduating in IT:

• My engineering degree came in handy to understand the basic concepts of programming language, but that was actually just a start, it makes sure your not intimidated and give up at the first glance of code
• What is useful though, is the years of experience of finding bugs in code (including my high school years), it requires a certain skill to put in the right checks and breakpoints
• My design experience is super important, it is so easy to create ugly user interfaces with stupid menu structures
• 50% of the effort of learning how to code is understanding the tools that help you write code. Wow, these things have moved on since the 1990s, eliminating a first layer of potential bugs by at least getting typos and syntax errors out the moment you write the code
• I might be approaching 50, but the majority of people doing what I do is in their late teens or early 20s, and many are in emerging markets all over the world, which makes it legitimate to ask basic beginner questions online and have them answered by experts who want to help bring up the next generation. Thank you!
• Google and Stack Overflow bring a whole new dimension to learning. For each issue there are dozens of posts that address a similar issue you have, never exactly the same, and sometimes the answer is way down the bottom with very little votes as another contributor perfected the #1 answer years after it was posted.
• Legacy technology and backward compatibility adds an incredible layer of complexity to development. Something that I should be able to use to my advantage as the writer of a version 1.0.

Analysts at the bottom of the hierarchy get sometimes mocked for being “too detailed”, the senior partner can make a point at a super high level of abstraction, and this big picture view gets equaled to, well, being senior and successful. Making your way up = losing that obsession with detail?

Well, not really. There is a role for everyone in the team:

• Sometimes you have to go through massive amount of detailed analysis to support a basic outcome (option B is cheaper than option A) that can be communicated beautifully on just 1 bar chart.
• That senior partner at some time was a junior analyst as well and all those years of crunching detailed analysis has given her the background to lift things to a big picture perspective.
• Someone with a more senior role on a project has insight what all the different bits of a project are doing, making it easier to put things in perspective

So, if you as an analyst drop all sensitivity to detail to prove that you are ready to move up, things will go wrong.

Cover image by Andrea Sonda on Unsplash

16:9 monitors are the norm now. And while this aspect ratio definitely works great for movies, I find wide layouts work less for presentation slides. Titles tend to get very loooong, and it becomes harder to make nice diagrams that usually call out for a 1:1 shape.

You might not realise it, but the slide headline on top of a traditional 4:3 slide actually created a slide canvas that is pretty much 16:9 below it.

Here is one way to deal with this screen aspect ratio: place the slide title to the left of the slide and use the full vertical space for the slide content next to it. What do you think?

Cover image by Michael D Beckwith on Unsplash

A series of tweets that got me thinking, as someone who is still arguing about Windows versus Mac in 2018

I am definitely in the 10% category, and I think my target audience is as well. Professionals making stuff on PCs is a pretty old/stable market. Many other presentation apps are aiming for the 900m and many of them branch out to other types of content than just business presentations. But 100m is still a big number. I am working hard on making those pro apps a bit less “pro”.

Cover image by Vincent Botta on Unsplash