Focus on the decision

Most business meetings are about getting to some sort of decision or agreement on next steps. So why not focus your presentation completely on that?

Take out or put in the appendix:

• Long-winded sections with historical backgrounds
• A detailed description of the process your team took
• All the dead ends you hit and excluded from the analysis
• Vast analysis that proofs a point that everyone already agrees on
• Market analysis for the sake of market analysis, without supporting a point you want to make
• Explanations of management theory and frameworks you used, extensive parallels with other industries
• Elaborate competitor profiles

Instead:

• Frame the options that you see
• Provide a summary why you think you need option C
• Quickly mention the evidence that everyone agrees on
• Boil things down to the decision about the more controversial parts of your argument
• Provide your logic, and provide deep fact-based analysis that support the points you are making.

A business school professor would not agree to this violation of providing an academic argument, but you ensured that your meeting will be as short and to the point as possible.

Unexpected perspective

Everyone will agree that this image by Christian Xavier is beautiful and grabs the attention. Why? It is because the implied position of the photographer is impossible, it should be in the middle of the air. We are not used to seeing pictures of the Chrysler building from this perspective. Most pictures of the skyline of New York are taken from the same viewpoint (the roof of the Rockefeller Center for example).



How was this image created? He took a regular New York skyline picture with a good camera and zoomed in, cropping out areas of the picture he does not need.

Two lessons here. The theoretical one of using unexpected perspectives. And two, you can actually use this zoom/crop technique with high resolution stock images to make them more interesting.

Imagine your audience - literally

Yeah, yeah, we know that our audience matters and we should take it into account, but in practice, most of us dive straight into designing the slides.

Thinking of your audience is especially important for sales presentations. I have had a few clients situations where I was asked to help design decks that are used by a sales force that targets small business owners.

In those cases I actually imagine the actual/real owner of a restaurant or pharmacy who I have seen recently and wonder what it would take to convince her.

New Keynote - first impressions

Together with a whole range of other product updates, Apple released a new version of iWorks (including Keynote) last night. I installed the Mac OS X Mavericks (warning, this will take your computer down for an hour) and played around with the new software. Observations in random order.

All iWorks apps are now free for people buying new Macs. iWorks was already a lot cheaper than Microsoft Office, but now the economic argument against enterprise adoption has been removed completely. Still, the huge installed base of both Windows hardware and PowerPoint with its familiar user interface will make it hard for Apple to make an inroad here.

What could help them is the cross platform compatibility. As of today, there is one file format both for desktop and mobile versions of keynote. I still do not fully understand iCloud, where my files are, where things get saved or not, but the duplication of a file when opening it on your mobile phone is gone. A step in the right direction, but not all the confusion has been removed.

Apple has also launched their suite of iWorks web apps. You can now edit and present Keynote presentations right from your browser. You can simply share a link to the presentation with your co-workers, rather than sharing heavy email attachments. More than one person can edit the live presentation. Many other services offer this feature, but personally I find it a bit scary when I loose control of how makes what edits (including deletions) in the master document. Anyway, that the feature is available does not mean that you have to use it.

Still, there is inconsistency in the user interfaces on iOS, Desktop, and web. For someone like me who makes presentations for a living, it was easy to figure out. For the other 99% of presentation designers, it might be a learning curve. The iOS app is completely different, the web and desktop interfaces are similar.

On to Keynote itself. As with all software updates, Apple boasts about the large number of new features that are included. I would actually prefer that they remove some. We have more animations, slide transitions, and now interactive data charts. The latter means that you can break up a graph and show different scenarios on mouse click. I doubt whether the average presentation designer really needs them.

The user interface now looks similar to that of iOS7. The textures, linen, etc. are gone and replaced by clean surfaces. A big improvement. The tiny inspector window that always gets lost on a busy desktop screen is now integrated in the application windows as a solid panel on the right of the screen.

So, the new version of Keynote is a natural, gradual evolution from the previous version. I will for sure use it intensively for my client work and will update you later in the future with 10,000km feedback.

Market research lingo

Questions in market research surveys are long and wordy, partly because you need to make it unambiguously clear to your participants what you want them to answer, and partly because marketeers want to put their own language into the mouth of consumers (see a previous post).

When presenting the results of market research I often chop down these sentences to the bare essential. It makes them easier to digest. A small footnote sends people to an appendix where they can read the full prose.

Bottom up versus top down

If your corporation consists of business units, than your corporate presentation is likely to end up as a series of chapters, each talking about a different business unit. If the corporate centre is organised, then each chapter might have the same repetitive template/structure. Each business unit gets airtime based on how important it is (usually in terms of sales). The order of the chapters is probably in line with the seniority of the business unit leader. It all makes sense in the political structure of the company.

Your real story might be different though. A small business unit might have all the growth potential that your investors are curious about. A more junior manager might be a captivating speaker. The same presentation template might not fit the specific story of each business unit. Seeing exactly the same template 10 times is boring. And how do all the business unit stories link together to a bigger picture?

Sometimes it is better going top down than bottom up.

"Do something like this"

I get this request sometimes, with an attached presentation of another company. Most of the time, the example presentation is actually not that good.

My theory of why it still appeals to a client? It is written in the same corporate language that she uses. As a company insider in a similar industry, she can instantly decode the language and it all makes perfect sense. Two CEOs communicate to each other in highly efficient compressed CEO speak.

The problem is a competitor CEO is unlikely to be the audience of your presentation...

Powerpoint vs Keynote - redux

It is a question that comes back all the time: PowerPoint or Keynote. I have given my opinion in the past.

After I got my first Mac, I was really excited to be able to design in Keynote. Now, a few years later, I must say that both products are more or less the same to me. Keynote is cleaner, auto-aligns and distributes objects when you drag them, and does not have the problem of drawing guides that you move by accident, and has a tight integration with the iPad. PowerPoint has a more convenient photo cropping UI and a much better data chart engine (Excel).

But workflow is a very important consideration as well. If the people in your organisation find it difficult to get up the learning curve with Keynote, why torture them? This is especially true if people need to do a lot of copying back and forth between Excel and PowerPoint. Probably 90% of presentations are quick and dirty documents to discuss business data, and in those cases tight integration between the 2 programs is a big time saver.

In the end both applications can deliver exactly the same look and feel of presentations. When I tell clients that Keynote presentations do not automatically look better than PowerPoint ones, they are surprised.

So in short, it actually does not matter what software you use, it is your design that matters.

Technology lecture vs value pitch

Two approaches to pitching your product. I prefer #2

1. Engineering approach: explain the layered product architecture and the solution process, and after this theory lecture you can make a perfect logical case about why your product delivers this great value to your customer.
2. Customer-focussed approach: highlight the big issues the customer has (to get that nodding head), go through the benefits that your solution offers and only hint at the technical magic that allows you to deliver them. If the customer is interested, you can do pitch #1 in a second meeting.

Project time wasters

I have submitted price proposals to hundreds of projects and won/completed the majority of them, so I have gotten a pretty good sense of what presentation design activities cost time, and which ones do not. Use them to your advantage when negotiating a project with a freelancer.

Project time wasters:

1. The most important one: unclear story that needs sorting out
2. Lots of physical meetings
3. No clear decision maker on the client side, i.e. freelancer needs to collect and synthesise feedback into one voice
4. Requirement to run 2 parallel versions of the same presentation (different language, different audience)
5. Start and stop, pick up the project after a hiatus that was long enough for everyone to forget what it was all about
6. Inconsistent PowerPoint masters, i.e., client provides feedback pasted in the default PowerPoint template so all colours, fonts, and slide formats are messed up
7. Requirement for a text 1-pager that summarises all, with lots of iterations on the exact wording of the text
8. Related: communicating micro edits over the phone to the designer, rather than quickly doing them yourself in PowerPoint (text edits, slide order changes, etc.)

You that slide count does not appear in the list. Adding a few slides with a few new concepts to an existing presentation deck. Once you have understood the story/company, the marginal time required to add things to a presentation is low. Of course a 100 page deck takes more time to complete than a 10 page presentation, but still.

Clicking links in slides

It might seem cool to have an interactive slide full of clickable links in your presentation. In yes, in a 1-on-1 meeting you could permit yourself the luxury of clicking back and forth through slides as you tell your story.

For a big audience, a linear story is much better. And when you need to click on a link in a slide, it is likely to be the exact same link/box/object every time. Why struggle with mouse pointers and try to hit that exact box when you can just click through the next slide that starts playing your video? The audience will not notice the difference.

Simple can be difficult

This is a text editor that only allows you to use the 1,000 most common words in English (“thousand” is not one of them, hence they called it “ten hundred”). Try writing something, it is pretty hard.

Here is a blog where scientists use the tool to describe their research projects.

Icons that try too hard

Icons can work really well if they can be kept very simple, and refer to very simple things like a cog wheel for settings and a 1980s floppy disk for save.

When you try to summarise very complicated concepts into very complicated icons, things get lost. In those cases, a box with a few words will do a better job explaining what you mean.

Stock image maps

Maps in stock photo sites are not designed for use in presentations. I hope designers are reading below to find out what is wrong with them:

• Crops are focussed on the target country. But why crop so many of the surrounding areas out? Israel for example has a vertical shape. I would prefer to put in a map of the entire Middle East, and put text boxes over those part of the map I do not need. It will look much better than a narrowly cropped map
• People use blunt colours and/or gradients. As a designer, I want to set the colour tone of the presentation myself. Much better options are muted greys, or better, vector files I can recolour myself.
• Map designers add city names hardwired in ugly typography. Also, they add roads and other useless geographical information. I will not be using these maps to find my way, if I need to add cities, I would like to do it myself, in the font of the presentation deck.

So how do I pick maps in stock photo sites? Usually, I go for vector images for a far wider area than I need. I zoom in and strip out all the information I do not need.

** Footnote

In tables, I prefer to right-align numbers with the same amount of decimals after the dot. A footnote reference can break that line. Two ways to solve it: One: add the ** as a separate text box on top of the table. Two: if you have to use many footnotes use numbers [i.e. 7) instead of ******] to keep your footnote references short.

So, in short?

This is a great question to ask yourself after you finished designing the presentation.

“Well, what I really want is raising a bit of extra equity to de-leverage the company (slide 12, yellow bars). I think it is a really good deal for investors, since it looks like the stock is undervalued (slide 24, bottom right). Management has delivered on all its promises over the past 5 years (slide 15) and no one in the industry has a scale that is even closely to ours (slide 37 on the left), so it looks like our advantage will hold out for the foreseeable future.”

 Your presentation can be shorter: focussed slides upfront, with extra info in the appendix.

White on white

White letters on a white background enable you to make a nice slow-reveal slide. I used it for a client in BI (business intelligence) that creates insight by overlapping multiple analyses.

Custom fonts - redux

Custom fonts (fonts that are not installed as standard on most computers) give your presentation a nice distinctive look from the rest of the world that uses Calibri and Arial. It comes at a price: viewers who do not have your font installed on their machines get a poor experience.

For these practical reasons, I leaned towards sticking with standard fonts in business presentations. Things are changing though:

• PDF is now my preferred format for sending presentations to people: it can easily be viewed on mobile devices and has a nicer, more permanent feel to it than an editable file. Once a PDF is created, fonts will display correctly on any device
• There are more and more free fonts available that make it technically easy to download and install a font quickly, without having to count the number of seats that use the font in order to get in trouble with the license I paid for.

So, when do I consider using a custom font?

1. Smaller organisations that are relatively tech-savvy. The big traditional Fortune 500 company is still locked into Calibri for the time being I am afraid.
2. When I can use an open source font, not so much to save money, but to save the hassle of having to deal with license seat counts

Project pictures

Many business presentations contain pages with images of projects: real estate, solar farms, factory installations. Usually, they are small, low resolution, many on a page, and backed up by a dense paragraph of explanation.

To make your presentation look better: do the opposite. Stretch them across the full page, use high res images, use 1 image per page, and set a brief explanation text over the image.

The audience will not notice that you clicked through 7 slides when discussing your project portfolio. For them, it is just one slide.

Another way to show off your portfolio is to use the images throughout the presentation on separator and title pages that mark the beginning of a new section in your story. So, you have 1 image on your portfolio slide with the explanation that is 1 of 35 buildings. The audience gets a sense of the other 34 throughout the presentation without talking directly about them.

Using Prezi sensibly

For people bored with PowerPoint, Prezi can be an alternative presentation design platform. It is web-based, has powerful zoom effects and enables non-linear presentations. I would suggest to keep the following in mind when using Prezi for a business presentation:

1. Stick to a linear story line, especially for larger audiences. If you have 20 minutes in front of 500 people, it has hard to get your message across using a random and unpredictable flow.
2. Use the Prezi zooming and moving effects where you really need it, and not just for spectacular slide transitions. The audience will get motion sickness, or worse, will start giggling when you discuss your very serious business topic.
3. Try to bring the look and feel of your Prezi in line with your regular PowerPoint colours. You will not have time to design Prezis for every presentation you do.