The Groupon IPO roadshow

The investor presentation (both slides and video) of the upcoming Groupon IPO are online (link). Robin Wouters of TechCrunch has made a few screen shots of some of the slides. Usually these presentations are held in private meetings with potential investors, and I think it is great that they are now available for everyone to see.

Overall this is not a bad presentation, the presenters rehearsed, the slides are organized. There is still room for improvement though.

Slide design. The slides look like a beautification of a standard business presentation. The beautification is done professionally: sophisticated graphics and custom-made illustrations. Some of them look great (I love the slide with all the competitor logos). Still, Groupon could have gone further by designing the slides from scratch, making them simpler. For example, the slide right after the competitors on Wouter's page is not clear. Also, the template could have done without all the trackers that are repeated on every page page.

Examples. Groupon is a business that happens all the way down in the street, at a small merchant. Like retailing, detail is what matters. The case examples could have been featured more prominently. Bigger images of the restaurant, more specifics of the deal. When the VP Product goes through a long list of the detailed information that Groupon has available, it sounds abstract. Why not take one very specific example and show how shoppers for flowers have different habits in 2 streets of San Francisco. The specifics of the detail make the big point.

Elephants in the room. There has been lot of cynical press around the Groupon IPO. Questions about declining growth rates: there was the chart that should make every Groupon investor scared.  Questions about margins. Questions about customer loyalty. These are the big issues of the company, and somehow the company should have made more effort to counter them. It is actually towards the end of the presentation by the VP Product, when he starts getting into all the new technologies Groupon has in the pipeline that could have really addressed this question. (The explanation of the technologies was a bit hard to follow though and needed more slide transitions.

Delivery. This was a staged presentation and although delivered well, you could still see that it sometimes was somewhat unnatural, especially when the CFO started to run through a large number of financial figures that were not presented on slides. It is passion though that is so important to get across, you could see the difference when the CEO talked about Groupon being the first company that has the scale to make local commerce a reality.

What do you think?

MacBook with 2 external screens

The new Apple 27" Thunderbolt display enables you to connect 2 giant external displays to a laptop, something that has not been possible until now without additional hardware.

Large screen real estate has its advantages. It is easier to design presentation slides when you have a large workspace in front of you. Extra space also enables you to open multiple windows, for example a PDF file with comments on the previous version of your presentation, or an Excel file with the data that need to go into your pie chart.

Now, 27" is a lot of space (2550x1440 pixels) and for most ordinary people, one screen will do. A presentation designer might actually need two (putting her in the same category as financial traders, air traffic controllers and social media addicts). I like to design on a clean and calm canvas. All the small windows with bits of information distract me. So I use that second screen as my messy desktop, literally pushing bits, pieces, and windows aside when I do not need them, preserving my pristine and uncluttered design environment in front of me.



Now some technical details. An Apple Thunderbolt screen can only be connected to a recent MacBook laptop that actually has a Thunderbolt port. But more importantly, the dual screen configuration only works on the most recent 15" and 17" MacBook pros, not on the 13" MacBook Pro, and not on the MacBook Air. (This might actually be an argument for getting a MacBook Pro over a MacBook Air) at the time of writing, October 2011).

You need to install a software update for your MacBook Pro, and a firmware update for your screen. Do one screen at a time: connect a screen, run software update, disconnect, connect the other, run software update.

Once everything is updated, I found that the hardware works almost perfectly. You connect one screen (with a combined Thunderbolt and charging cable, the laptop gets charged via your screen) to the laptop, and connect the second screen to the first screen. Via system preferences you need juggle to assign which screen is right, which is left, and which one of the two is the main screen.

The Thunderbolt screen multiplexes in a number of USB ports, Firewire ports, and LAN connectors on the back of the screen to which you can connect other hardware (nice for a MacBook Air with limited connectivity). The screen also contains an HD camera and speakers, so the screen is not just a screen, it is a big hardware extension for your laptop.

I said almost perfectly. There are some glitches. Each time you connect the laptop after you return from a meeting, your Mac seems to forget the configuration (left, right, main screen). Also, when the computer is asleep for a long time, I find that the hardware connected on the screen ports (keyboard in my case) is no longer recognized, and my Internet connection is killed. The only solution I have discovered so far is to disconnect the screens, wait everything to return to normal (i.e., Internet), then reconnect, and then reconfigure left, right, and main screen. Hopefully this bug gets fixed soon.

But all in all, worth an upgrade.

Clearing your mind

I am traveling back to Tel Aviv today, so no major presentation design insight today. Just a reminder though, that traveling can just clear your mind. Breaking away from routines is a great boost for creativity. Have a good weekend and speak to you next week.

First sketches with the Wacom Inkling

The Wacom Inkling Digital Sketch Pen (affiliate link) is a tool that lets you draw with a regular pen after which a sketch can be transferred to Photoshop or Illustrator for further editing. No, it does more than a regular scanner. First of all, it allows you to draw in layers and preserve them in the editing software. Secondly, the hardware is so small that you can take it any where you want.



My box arrived yesterday in the mail and the experience confirms what I have seen so far in the promotion video (my sketching skills have some way to go though). The product comes in a box the size of a regular pencil case. The pen and the receiver fit in nicely. Clip the receiver at the top of the page, and start sketching. It is as simple as that. One button opens a new file/page, another button adds another layer. The software is easy to install and works great.



The only drawback for me is that sketching has to happen with a ball point. I prefer a soft tip pen, or best of all a thick pencil to draw. There might be technical reasons why Wacom stuck to a ballpoint for sketching, but hopefully they will release a pencil-based scanner in the near future.

5% presentation, 95% Q&A

These are often the best meetings. The audience has prepared, read the material, and is ready for a discussion. What presentation slides can help you run a meeting that is mostly free discussion?

Bring your entire deck, but select from it those slides that create a mental framework around the things you want to discuss. Often, they are very simple slides, but relatively dense with content. Examples:

• A 2x2 matrix with all the competitors listed
• A matrix of market segments (growth, and size on the axes)
• A simple ranking of sales and profits by brand
• A product development timeline
• Two market share pies: last year and this year
• A software architecture diagram

All these can be projected onto a whiteboard (use a white slide brackground), on top of which participants in the meeting can scribble. After the meeting is over, snap a picture of the remaining group art. 

Changes are that if you look at that picture 3 weeks later, you can pretty much replicate the entire discussion. Not because the scribbles are so clear, but because your mind has allocated a physical space on the white board to store the entire debate in your memory. Similar to stories, a physical location makes it much easier for people to remember things.

Content inertia

You are a junior executive preparing a presentation for a senior manager. The problem is that when the senior manager is not fully emerged in the latest content that you want to include, she is likely to edit down the new bits. She will not present what she is not aware off, and your presentation is likely to look pretty much the same as the one she used last year at the same conference. The solution: stop the presentation design process, and take her in a meeting through the raw content and new insights you have gained. Speak without slides. Now that you are both aligned, PowerPoint can be opened again.

My friend the silhouette man

I love the simple elegance of the silhouette man. The figure can easily be constructed in PowerPoint by combining circles and rectangles and gives a lot of freedom to draw simple actions. Simple to draw, but the result does not look simplistic. If you find drawing them still to be a challenge, stock photo sites are full of ready-made files that you can use in your slides.

I recently designed a 150-page deck where he was used again and again in different situations. Here is an adaptation of one of the charts.

Better webinar software?

I now did a few online webinars and I found it a great way to connect live with an audience without the need to travel, and without the requirement to get a large group of people together in one physical location.

Having said that, the experience from the presenter point of view is far from optimal. You are talking into a microphone, staring at your screen without any feedback. Here are some suggestions to make better webinar software and make the webinar experience a bit closer to that of a live presentation.

1. Avatars. Encourage people to upload avatars when joining a webinar as an audience member, and more importantly, have these avatars show up on the presenter’s computer. In that way you get a sense of a real audience in front of you. I am sure as technology progresses it would be possible to create a virtual audience shot of live video avatars
2. Kill presenter distractions. Applications that I use show statistics of people online, people leaving, people joining, people that are active, versus people that are checking their email in another browser window. Some applications require the presenter to let people into the session during the presentation. This information is useful, but there should be a way to switch it off, enabling the presenter to focus on her story. In real life, the presenter on stage does not need to open the back door to let someone back in to the room.
3. Find a better way to moderate questions. At the moment, questions get punched into a small chart window. There is a constant flow of information, and chart windows are too small to be able to read the text. In a real live presentation setting, people do not shout their questions at the presenter all at the same time. There should be a 2-stage process: 1 audience members need to indicate that they want to ask a question, then the presenter need to give them the floor, and only then can the question be asked. Either through a live voice, or through a text box that has big fonts and can easily be read by everyone.

I hope these points get picked up by software developers, the one who incorporates them definitely has an opportunity to stand out from the competition.

Should you lie with statistics?

No. I really hate lying with statistics, for example cutting the axis of a chart to make a growth trend stronger. That is cheating. Sometimes, you are giving yourself a hard time though.

Stretching out a column chart too wide on a slide, especially when you are designing for a 16:9 wide screen format. Your impressive growth all of a sudden looks rather dull. It is fine to squeeze it back a bit, even if the graphic ends up not covering the entire screen.

Using powerful graphs to emphasize a negative trend. If you had a bad financial year, and profits turned into a loss, showing that in a line graph will look like the company is on a path to disaster. The eye extends the path downward, while the financial loss could have been a one-off event. In these cases, I go back to visualizing the data in a standard text table. Data visualization can sometimes be too powerful

Skimming through Board Speak

The memo that the Yahoo! Board sent to all employees after the former CEO Carol Bartz was fired is a good example of Board Speak. Big sentences, grand words, but it is unclear whether a cynical audience believes them with their heart:

In addition, the ELC will support a comprehensive strategic review that the Board has initiated to position the Company for future growth.  We are confident that we have talented teams in place and see enormous opportunities on which Yahoo! can capitalize, and right now we are focused on leveraging the Company’s leadership and current business assets and platforms to execute against these.  We fully intend to return the Company to a path of robust growth and industry-leading innovation.  We are committed to exploring and evaluating possibilities and opportunities that will put Yahoo! on a trajectory for growth.

The likely scenario is that people skim over all the text that contains the usual buzzwords, and extracts from the memo the pieces of information that are relevant: the names of new executives and their roles. When designing corporate communication, put yourself in the shoes of the audience.

The full text of the leaked Yahoo! memo is here on Business Insider. 

One headline will do

Many PowerPoint slides have multiple headlines that say the same thing. One at the top, one in a bubble on the right of the chart, and maybe another arrow to make sure that we do not miss the point. One title should be enough though: a clear message an screen real estate is saved.

Multiple headlines are often the result of poor corporate PowerPoint templates. The top of the page features a heavy colored graphic, and people have gotten used to the visual distraction and are actually filtering it out. They do not read it anymore. I had several instances with clients where I reminded them that the message was already written on the page, they did not notice.

So: one headline and a good PowerPoint template.

Lessons from Vidal Sassoon

I am continuing my quest through the long tail of Netflix design movies and stumbled on this one: Vidal Sassoon the Movie (affiliate link) about the famous hairdresser. In itself, his story is very interesting, growing up poor in an orphanage, and becoming a global celebrity.

For me, there were two things that I found especially interesting.

1. It took him 9 years to find his signature style that would change the way women looked (and thought of themselves) in the 60s. Design is hard work, even for the best and most talented among us.
2. He says that it is easy to see when something is wrong, but very hard to come up with something that is right.

This is exactly the case in slide design as well (at least for me). Learning to design is going through lots of your own failures, eliminating stuff that is not right, leaving you with the things that do. One way to accelerate the process is to plough through design books and absorb anything design around you. It increases the odds that you will bump into something that works.