Building a Presentation that Works
There are lots of things I take for granted knowing how to do and do reasonably effectively. However, as I’ve progressed in my career I’ve learned that some of these things: coding, writing, presenting, others find more challenging. People often come up and ask me how I do what I do. At technology conferences this question usually gets asked about coding. I’ve posted about my process for this before. However, I also often have gotten asked about writing and presenting. So I thought perhaps it would be useful if I shared a bit about my process for both of these types of endeavors. I want to start out talking about how I go about putting together a “good” presentation and focus this post on that. I’ll put up a post about my writing process a little later.
Before I start building any presentation I always ask myself some basic questions
- How long do I have to talk?
- What is the audience?
- What’s the story I want to tell?
These three questions are critical when putting together a presentation because they change the nature of the talk greatly. Giving a lightning talk at code4lib is nothing like giving a 20 minute presentation there or giving a 50 minute presentation there. Length of talk seriously matters because it not only governs how much material you can cover but also the length of your story arc. My personal rule of thumb is no more than 1 slide per minute because you just can’t cover more material than this. So for a 20 minutes talk that means 15 slides with 5 minutes for questions. Like all rules though this one isn’t immutable though because if you’re stepping through examples with slides then you’re probably going to go faster than a slide per minute. The key is to run through you stuff and make sure the content is going to fit in the time. Nothing is worse than having to hurry through or skip over the “AH-HA” piece of your presentation.
Audience is also a critical factor when building presentations. Currently I spend a good chunk of my time interacting with a pretty technical audience. So many of my presentation make assumptions about people’s level of technical expertise. When I’m dealing with a non-technical audience, I have to set all these assumptions aside and make sure I lay a strong foundation in my presentation. Otherwise folks get lost along the way and once again you don’t have a successful “AH-HA” moment. When I’m working on a presentation to an audience that isn’t my typical focus, I also run it my others to make sure the story arc of the presentation works. This is because I sometimes can’t get enough distance from my ingrained knowledge to know sometimes if I might have lost people.
What story you’re telling in your presentation is incredibly important. Make sure you re-read the abstract for your presentation in the conference program. This is the story you said you were going to tell. Your audience is going to feel weird and upset if you tell a different story. Second, if you were asked to give a talk run, your story back by the people who invited you. Particularly if they gave you something fairly open-ended as a topic to start. You want to make sure that expectations are met.
Once I’m rock solid on the story I’m telling in my presentation, I almost always begin my process by creating a presentation with the number of slides I need and then blocking out very roughly my story arc across the slides. I’m really minimalist about what I put on the slides at this point because I’m just trying to represent the gist of where I’m starting and where I need to end up. I go back and start flushing out the presentation slide by slide. When I’m working on a slide I try to focus on what it is I need to get across and what I think is the best way to accomplish this. Photos, graphics, and charts are all useful tools for this. When I’m working this way I’m always checking to make sure the flow works. It isn’t uncommon for me to reorder things or sometimes completely pitch a slide if it doesn’t fit in the arc.
If I get stuck on a particular slide or I’m hung up on the fact that the arc isn’t quite the way I like, I take a break. This is ultimately why I usually carve out a week for this type of work. I need to shape out my work over time so that I have time to decompress and reflect when I’m putting things together. So if a 50 minute presentation is going to take 6 hours of prep I spread those hours across a week period. When I’m done I often share my final product with others so they can perform a sanity check and provide feedback. I’ve found this invaluable on a number of occasion for catching little mistakes that make you as a presenter look unprofessional. Like anything, this is all about experience and practice.