2-step scientific charts

Especially for my pharmaceutical clients I often need to produce scientific presentation slides. I tend to take a different approach to the industry standard when I need to present to a non-scientific audience: split the chart in 2.

1. Chart 1 focusses just on the message and is highly simplified (“Survival rates went up 35%”)
2. Chart 2 provides all the details about the study (number of patients, patient profile, confidence interval)

Springing the full combined chart with all the detail will just overwhelm the laymen audience. Medical professionals have trained decades to extract chart 1 from the combined chart in a nano second. The average investor lacks this experience. 

That does not make sense

We try to fit any new idea that comes our way into our mental model that we have built up since we were born. Every aspect that fits the model is absorbed easily but also easily forgotten, it does not stand out. It becomes interesting when things are counter intuitive, when it does not seem to make sense. Two implications for presentation design:

1. Use this to build your story line. Here is how things are done, here are the limitations, but we can solve things by coming at it from the a completely different angle. 
2. Use this to predict the type of questions the audience will have. It is better to answer the big obvious question in your presentation, rather than rely on Q&A to bring out the key point of your presentation.

Practical typography book

Here is a nice about typography: Practical Typography by Matthew Butterick. As the title says: very practical (Typography in 10 minutes, Summary of key rules), and in a nice format: simple HTML pages that look great on any device.

Back to normal

I enjoyed a fantastic holiday in NYC and the Canadian Rockies and will resume my normal posting schedule. Apologies for the hiatus!

Sloppiness

When you have done your sales pitch hundreds of times, sloppiness can sneak into your meeting preparation.

You forget your business cards, you forget to remove that food stain your small son made on your laptop, you forget to check out the prospect’s web site and LinkedIn profile, you forget that the person in front of you hears your story for the first time and you should deliver it as if you gave it for the first time.

Every meeting requires concentration, even sales pitch number 723.

A new business language?

Most PowerPoint decks are not designed for standup presentations to large audiences, rather they are documents that are used to get a smaller group of people to agree business decisions (the implementation plan, next quarter’s budget, etc.). The language used in these documents has changed over the years.

First, there was the memorandum that was dictated and written on a type writer, later replaced by a word processor. It was full of fluffy and formal language and people quickly learned how to skip most of it by jumping straight to the “Executive Summary” on the first page. All of these documents looked sort of the same.

In the 1930s, the management consulting profession was invented. Engineering mixed with business resulted in scientific charts full of frameworks with fancy names and buzzwords. Like the executive summary, managers had to acquire a method to skim through the content quickly, ignoring padding and business school speak to cut through what the document really wanted to say. All of these documents looked sort of the same.

I think it is time to create a new business language that injects good design into the management consulting-style charts and I am trying to write my upcoming presentation app around it. Yes, all of the documents it produces will look sort of the same, but it will make business decision making easier and more beautiful on the eye.

Is this our strategy?

Young companies often have an ambiguous strategy. Nobody is really clear, and everybody has a different interpretation. The moment you need to write a press release or an external presentation it all has to be clear. That is why it can take a long time to agree on 1 single page of text.

PowerPoint toolbar buttons

As I am rebuilding my work machine, I googled my own blog to remind me what are the absolute essential toolbar buttons you should have available in PowerPoint and came across this old post. These are absolute time savers!

One captain please

Committees are not good at designing effective presentations. You need one captain on the ship, while all others provide input rather than picking up the pen themselves.

Each person has a slightly different preference for structure and story lines. When there are multiple authors, nobody really understands what is already in the deck and what is not, resulting in duplication of people’s hobby horses on every slide. Each person has a slightly different style of writing.

That is why I am not a big believer in online collaboration systems where hundreds of people can edit a presentation Wiki-style (call me old fashioned). What we do need though is a sophisticated slide-by-slide commenting system to manage input.

Customers do not want a lecture

Market positioning can be difficult for a product manager. Your product has so many features, you know the detailed spec comparisons versus all your competitors. Everything is not simple or black and white. But marketing is about making choices: who to target, with which benefits and turn that into a really simple story. And that means making decisions about what to cut out.

Designing a presentation is similar. Your story might have many angles, many background stories, an interesting history of how you got where you are, interesting perspectives on how your competitors are positioned in the market. A clear presentation has eliminated these distractions.

Remember, a marketing presentation is not a lecture about your industry, your company, or yourself but about solving your customer’s problem.

Cramped museums = bullet points

We have all been in them: museums full of densely packed displays of artefacts with tiny description signs that provide factual information rather than the story behind the objects. Crowds of people pass by without anyone paying attention.

Good museum design involves empty walls with just a few pieces to focus on. The explanation and background text are prominent, it could even be bigger than the object itself. People take a moment to absorb the piece, get interested in the story, read it, ponder the artwork a bit more, maybe take a picture.

Think about these 2 different approaches in the context of presentation design.

A hard drive crash in 2013

I had to swap my hard drive a few days ago and the experience was quite a different one from similar accidents that happened to me in the 1990s. What is different?

First of all, the total lack of panic. After I diagnosed the problem, I did not have to think long about hitting the delete hard drive button. All my data is in Dropbox.

A hard drive crash would have been an excuse to splurge on a new machine a decade ago. Then, there were dramatic performance degradations in just a few years as PC software become more powerful, especially because of the improved graphics. No such thing in 2013, software does not get more complicated, often the opposite is true as PC software is replaced by web applications.

I decided to rebuild my computer from scratch rather than recreating it from a Time Capsule backup. The machine got a little slow and cluttered full of applications that I tried once but never used again afterwards.

One decision: I did decide not to re-install my virtual Windows machine that I put on my machine the first day I bought my Mac to calm down my fears that the whole transition just might not work. PowerPoint 2013 for Windows is better than PowerPoint 2011 for Mac, but not enough to justify breaking my Mac file system workflow and colour picker, and to sacrifice disk and CPU performance to a huge virtual machine (Parallels).

Some things to remember with Dropbox. Move the default photo directory of your Mac inside Dropbox so you have your personal pictures backed up. (But then again, 99% of my personal pictures are actually sitting on my cell phone now, and the reason that it is very important to back up your phone, personal photos on your phone are more important than PowerPoint files on your PC). And secondly, move your Mac download folder into your Dropbox. Some software that you bought online do not allow for re-downloading the installation file (stupid).

I am now moving my software licenses for Adobe and Microsoft to a subscription model, making it easier to manage software installations across multiple machines, although I fear that we users might end up paying more for our software once the developers have forced us all to move to the new pricing model (probably in a few years from now). Adobe upgrade offers end on August 31.

The Mac app store is great to get an overview of what software you bought and quickly reinstall it on your new hard drive.

One final thing to get right, store your passwords and logins in a central place. I use 1password to sync this data across all my computers, phones, and tablets. Essential software.