Joe’s Tips: How to Give a Presentation
There’s an exellent post over on Joe Clark’s site today entitled Advice for presentations: It happens! In this lengthy piece (well, this is Joe!), Joe imparts some of his knowledge on what makes for a good presentation and how to deal with things when they go a little (or quite badly) wrong.
I’m pleased to report that I can tick most of the boxes where preparation is concerned, but I wanted to elaborate on one point that Joe makes regarding setting up browsers in advance for anything that you want to demonstrate. My advice – don’t.
In my experience, most of the conferences that offer wireless connectivity suffer almost from the word go, such that good connections – or any connection at all – cannot be guaranteed. Thankfully, it’s never happened while I’ve been presenting, but I cannot say how many times I’ve seen people presenting visibly flapping because their idea of showing off a feature of site A or site B has to be cancelled becaue they can’t connect. And even when there is a connection, the mere fact that you may have 800 eyeballs staring at you means that when you are trying to do something like fill out a form, you will make stupid mistakes, you will fumble, you will find it uncomfortable as there is silence while you wait for the browser to do something.
So, I’d like to add to Joe’s already excellent list of tips with one of my own: pre-record anything that you want to demonstrate.
In many presentations that I’ve given of late, I’ve used screencasts embedded in my slides. I can do however many takes I have the time and patience for at home, keep that video file for the presentation and re-use later. In that screencast, I make sure to allow for live explanation of what’s happening – usually accompanied with a circular motion of the mouse around the section I might want to refer to – and when presenting it, the cursor is in itself a prompt for me to describe that feature. Another advantage of this approach is that you *know* how long the demo portions will take, which makes timing as a wholemuch easier.
There’s no problem with lack of internet connection, although you have to be aware that if you rely heavily on the visuals, a hard drive failure or other similar disaster means that you will not be able to wing it using notes alone (but, again, you can prepare by having backups of slides on a key drive, and even a backup ‘pooter).
So, that’s my way of doing things, and it really makes presenting so much more stress-free :-)
Posted: June 14th, 2007 under Stuff.
Comments
Comment from Lloydi
Time June 14, 2007 at 3:51 pm
@Joe – I use Snapz Pro X. It does a great job, and it works so well with Keynote (which loves .mov). Seems to be a killer combo. Powerpoint makes a real hash of imported .mov files, though.
@Paul – I agree that if you can do a live demo it’s persuasive. I tend to prefix the presentation with the fact that I’m using some pre-recorded material simply because experience shows that you cannot rely on the connection, but if there’s time I’m happy to demonstrate other parts after/during Q&A.
I still find that using pre-recorded is better than a live demo (for me) because:
1) You don’t have to alt/command-tab to another app, revealing your desktop, or any other running apps etc. Embedded movies in presentation slides makes it seem slicker
2) That whole ‘what if you fumble/mistype’ conundrum
Finally, you could, potentially, have smaller versions of the screencasts already uploaded on YouTube/whatever that you can then share with audience immediately after the presentation (probably an index page on the site that links to the demos). Although screencasts can get a bit mangled when reduced in size and compressed, but it may do the job.
Comment from Paul Hammond
Time June 14, 2007 at 11:15 am
Good advice – I’ve seen several presentations recently by Simon Willison where he’s used prerecorded screencasts to great effect.
That said, in some cases there’s nothing like a live demo to make the point. You can take suggestions from the audience, and it makes the product seem more real because it’s being used live in front of you.
Something I’ve seen work well in these situations is to try to demo live, but have a backup video. If anything at all goes wrong (and 9 times out of 10 it’s the net connection) then you can switch to the video. If it works out, nobody will ever know.