Ian@work

Distill...

The more you try to do in a demo or presentation, the greater the probability that something will go wrong.

As an observer of numerous presentations I've noticed that often the biggest glitches often seem connected to content or demonstrations that are tangential to The Big Idea the presenter is trying to communicate. A little more rigor in the editing process might have saved the presenter embarrassment.

It's easy to fall in love with our ideas -- after all, they're our children, right? -- and let them slip into presentations when they're not essential to the main message. It's much harder to remain critical, particularly when a deadline looms, and ask whether a particular slide, demonstration, media clip or comment matters in the context of the overall presentation. Almost always, the right answer is to be critical, stay on point, distill the presentation to its essence, and not give yourself opportunities to obscure your message, or worse, overshadow it with a screw up.

More from Presentation Zen.

 
Technorati Tags: presentation, demo

Personal Presentations

I've sat through a lot of terrible presentations, and walked out of a few.* So I appreciate ideas that lead to better, more relevant presentations. Ideas like this.

* Terrible, eh? Here are five common sins of presenters:

1. Reading slide bullets.
   
2. Verbose waterfalls of bullets, subbullets, and sub-subbullets.
   
3. Using standard PowerPoint backgrounds. Particularly those that look "high tech."
4. Double digit slide counts.
5. For each slide, double digit word counts.

Technorati Tags: presentation, bulletpoints

Mucking Around with Design

Two perspectives on design, made all the more interesting by their juxtaposition.


Technorati Tags: design, ze+frank, seth+godin

Email Newsletter Usability

Universally, marketers who discuss email with me form their judgments almost solely from personal experience. That's a good starting point, but it doesn't tell the whole story.

A recent article from Jakob Nielsen takes a more analytical approach to email and provides useful insights into how people read and manage email. Some key findings:

• The usability of the subscription process directly affects subscriber numbers. Great efficiency equals greater numbers.
• Email recipients don't read. They scan. 35% of the time they only scan a small part of the newsletter.
• Interest is transient. Good newsletters are replaced by better newsletters.
• Multiple, prioritized email accounts help people manage their email. The more relevant the newsletter, the more likely it will go to a high priority account.

Nielsen also addresses RSS: "The first, and strongest, guideline about news feeds is to stop calling them RSS."

More.

Technorati Tags: email+newsletter, usability, jakob+nielsen

Keynote

I frequently give presentations to different kinds of groups. In the past I've used Powerpoint as a backdrop. I'm a pretty restrained Powerpoint user. Few slides, few words, no animations or other distractions. Those are my rules.

This week I finally got around to trying Keynote. I'm hooked. It's more intuitive than Powerpoint and allows me to quickly create the kind of simple, elegant slides that I like. A presentation that would have taken me a couple of hours to design and tweak in Powerpoint came together in a few minutes. One simple but major difference: Templates look like they were created by a designer. They're simple, plain, elegant. When you build a presentation you don't feel like the content is competing with a graphics-laden background.

Why didn't I try this earlier?


Technorati Tags: keynote, presentation

Creative Control

What if Microsoft designed packaging for the iPod? This might be the result.

Content syndication, the wrong way

A lot of marketing people subscribe to the reveries RSS feed. I do. And I'll share something with you about their content syndication: It truly irritates me.

The quality of information is outstanding. Excerpted content is descriptive and engaging. Beyond that, the experience often breaks down.

Click through from a newsreader. You arrive at a reveries landing page that provides the same description as the newsreader excerpt. You're prompted to click again.

You land on yet another page that tells you to - yes - click again to download a PDF version of the full story. Grrr. It doesn't happen every time, but enough to influence my opinion of them.

Folks, don't make it a challenge to get from newsreader to content. One click is all it should take.

Through site visitors' eyes

The Eyetrack III study findings have been floating around for some time. Periodically, Eyetrack comes up in conversations with clients and colleagues. If you haven't read the report (PDF) I suggest that you do.

The study isn't exhaustive and its sponsors properly note the need to combine their findings with other Web metrics. However, it contains valuable insights into site visitors' scanning patterns, and excellent general observations about content organization, design, copywriting and image selection that any site owner should understand.

It isn't Powerpoint's Fault

Powerpoint (and it's Mac-centric cousin, Keynote) get a bad rap. Powerpoint presentations are sleep-inducing, many say. They're right. But that's not the software's fault.

Powerpoint's a tool, and like any tool it's effectiveness depends on the user. That's why anyone who gives presentations will want to look at Cliff Atkinson's Beyond Bullets blog, and probably read his book.