tellingpeople

Radio 1 is currently on in our house (teenage daughters, don’t ask!) and Scot Mills is running a bit of a feature about describing David Beckham. The core of the idea is to guess how many people could do that in only three words…

…and spectacularly few could!

Why? Because almost everyone used three phrases, conflating them in their head so that what were technically phrases were thought of as words by the speaker – presumably because they are being used in a mentally-hyphenated-sort-of-way as they describe one concept.

For example:

• good looking
• filty rich

That’s four words even before the third idea started!

It’s not that people are stupid – far from it – but that concepts are the important thing to people, not details. Think about that as you design your presentation!

I’ve just uploaded two presentations documents onto http://www.docstoc.com for download. (Do a search on my name). It’s the first time I’ve tried using docstoc, so it’s a bit of an experiment. Ones about things you daren’t get wrong in your presentations and one is a bit more chatty – my top ten tips on a wet Monday afternoon!

Some of the stuff I’ve seen there has been great (and some of it hasn’t!) but if you’re looking for default templates and so on you could do worse than look at some of the ones available there. A note of caution though – some of them are shockingly bad and you shouldn’t assume that just because it’s there, it’s useful!

(A bit like life and this blog, really!)

I recently took part in a biggish group blog about what we – a group of us interested in making presentations – were looking/hoping for in presentations in 2009. As part of that conversation, Olivia Mitchell hosted a debate on whether design mattered in slides (or in presentations generally, for that matter). At the time, I’d not really had time to get my act together but I suggested that there was a law of diminishing returns in slide design…..

For me, it’s axiomatic that presentations are about making an impact on your audience. How you measure success in presentations I’m still not sure about, but however it’s done, I’m sure it has to include what the audience gets out of it. So… obviously then, whatever improves the audience’s experience is a good thing. Does design help, then?

I tried and experiment this week to see if I was close to the mark when I suggested that presentation design is useful up to a point…. so instead of “just” designing my presentation I really, really went to town: believe me, these slides weren’t just slides, they were works of art.

They ticked all the boxes for beautiful design and useful content. I was so proud of them I found myself running them through on a big, sexy, 50+ inch TV screen in the office just for fun. Pictures from the NASA site, the most beautiful transitions my Mac has to offer, hours spent agonising over the position of the couple of words on a screen….. oh! So wonderufl!

Was the impact any better on the audience for all this extra effort?

Not that I noticed.

Okay, one trial isn’t a scientific experiment but on the basis of this one run, slides need to be good enough to work but there’s not much point in making them ‘breathtaking’. Of course I’ve no way of recalling the long-term impact and recal as the presentation was only a week ago and there might be an issue about the particular audience. There may be (I hope there is!) an issue with the fact that my normal slide quality is already very high so any improvements can only be marginal… There may be any number of things…. but……

One of the things I’m most often asked to help with in our presentation skills training is how to deal with questions. There are lots of useful things you can do – but some very interesting research reported here suggests a number of interesting things.

For example, people apparently think more highly of an interviewee who answers a question well, even if it’s not the question that was asked, compared to someone who tries to answer the ‘right’ question but does so badly….

Lessons to be learned for all of us improvising there!