Problem - solution

Most presentation design projects can be split up in components, you can even have different people work on the individual bits. Two components go hand in hand though: convincing/reminding the audience of the problem, and presenting your solution. The way you portray the problem should guide the way you show the solution. In fact, the best way to show the solution is the highlight the problem.

Do you have it all?

Business presentation design requirers a combination of skills:

1. Content story: the strategy consultant. Somehow all the raw material, content need to be in place. All in a logical order, no holes, no overlaps, all the items of check list need to be ticked off: need/problem, solution, market, competitors, business model, financials, etc. etc.
2. Slide layout: the designer. Colours, fonts, look and feel, white space, layout, image cropping/scaling/positioning, diagramming. 
3. Data visualisation: the strategy consultant. Challenge one: pick the right message you want to emphasise from the thousands of options that a data set gives you. Challenge two: actually emphasise it with the right chart, the right colours, the right rounding.
4. Pitch story: the movie director. Now take all the structured, analytical, and boring base material, and turn it into an exciting, emotional, convincing 20 minute pitch. (Note the difference between content story and pitch story)
5. Outside reality check: seasoned business executive. What are the weaknesses in the story, what are the difficult (and/or obvious) questions the audience will ask, what elements of the story are totally obvious?

I was trained in 1 and 3, got 5 through the years, taught myself 2 (clean, good enough, but not at the level of a master illustrator), and trying my best at 4.

Many professional designers in the market will lack 1, 3, and 5: but they will still do fabulous work on presentations that have less hard core business content.

Many corporate executives lack 2, 3, and 4. They also will have trouble with number 5: being able to look at their story from a true outside perspective.

Management consultants lack 2 and 4.

I cannot read the footnote!

It is in tiny font, it has a light grey font, nobody can read it!

Perfect.

If the legal department insists on using footnotes, then they should be designed in such a way that someone who stands with her nose against the screen can read them. If you want to read them, you can, if you do not want to, you do not have to.

Quick starter guide

Most appliances comes with a user manual and a quick starter guide. The manual resembles most business presentations today, the quick starter guide is what you should aim to design.

Manual:

• Long
• Lots of words, long paragraphs, clumsy translations into multiple languages
• Regulatory disclaimers
• Logical structure

Quick starter guide:

• Short
• Visuals only (no need for languages)
• Only info that matters (regulatory statements are out)
• Story structure (the order of what needs to happen when you take the thing out of the box)

Speeching vs presenting

Many bullet point heavy presentations are in fact speeches. You read and correct every paragraph over and over again and after hours and hours of work you see that you got it exactly right this is what you want to say!

Congratulations, you have arrived at the starting point of your presentation design project, not its end.

Sending with a fresh head

Whenever I need to send out a version of a presentation, I tend to do it in the morning after I had a chance to glance over things one more time, making small corrections here and there. Sending a deck straight after a big design push leaves errors that can easily be fixed by a well-rested mind. Story flow design in particular gets a bit hazy when you are in the trenches to turn out one slide after another.

Interpreting feedback: Q&A

Continuing my post from yesterday about interpreting feedback and deciding who to ignore, and who to believe.

In very short presentations (15 minutes) you can get away with a small glitch in your story flow. Your audience will get the whole picture fairly quickly, even if there was a slide bump in the way you told the story. You like to tell the story this way, the test audience liked it the other way, so be it.

A big red flag though will come from the sort of (content, substance) questions people ask.

• Do you find yourself answering a question by giving a completely new mini presentation on a white board to explain something fundamental to your idea? Time to incorporate this into the main presentation.
• Does the test audience ask questions that are totally trivial to you? Example: the reasons why current solutions do not work. Maybe you are going to fast in the opening of your presentation. Time to back up and take it slower at the beginning.
• Do people try to compare you to specific other players, competitors? It is rarely a good idea to overly emphasise your competitors in a presentation, but if an issue comes up all the time in Q&A, it is better to take it head on in your main story.

Questions are important indicators of whether the audience got your message, or not.

Interpreting feedback

Feedback can come from many different audiences, what to use, what to ignore? Some pointers.

• Is the person credible?
• Is the person honest?
• Is the person the right target audience?

Your mother will be really honest, but she loves everything you do, and is (likely) to be not credible when it comes to evaluating pitches, and probably also not the right target audience (if you are not raising from very close friends and family)

Busy venture capitalists are credible, and the right target audience, but not always honest (especially if they just turned you down). A vague compliment, your presentation is great, it is just not the right fit for us, could still mean that the presentation was a disaster. Small generic comments such as suggestions to cut the amount of slides, make better visuals, focus more time on the pain point, can create a lot of work for you completely uproot your approach to the presentation, while not necessarily true.

A geeky engineer can be honest, credible, but not the right target audience. When she thinks everything is absolutely clear, the other 99% of people might not be able to understand it at all.

In short, it is OK to ignore feedback from people. On the other hand, look out for genuine useful feedback from people who are credible, honest, and fit right into your target audience.

PPT Roomba

SlideProof is a neat PowerPoint plug in that cleans your presentation of common small mistakes - automatically. Misaligned boxes, titles, wrong page numbers, you name it.  A bit like the Roomba vacuum clean robot, a spell checker on steroids. You have complete control over the changes though, so nothing unexpected will happen to your slides, which is crucial since my guess is that most of the vacuum cleaning of presentations will happen just before the live presentation.



Fixing small mistakes might not be crucial to get your message across, but it does make a huge difference in the overall impression you leave behind. A bit like polishing your shoes.

SlideProof only runs Windows so I did not have a chance to test drive it myself (I work on the Mac platform). Please share your experiences in the comments if you managed to check it out.

Visualising sentences

Many people write bullet point slides because they find it hard to come up with a visual composition of what they want to say. The trick: look at the basic action in your sentence:

• We are the biggest: bar chart with ranking
• We are going from [a] to [b], to boxes with an arrow in between
• We are the best of both, Venn diagram
• We are different, box on the left, box on the right
• We are growing, line or column chart
• We need to do a, b, c; gantt chart
• We have the best looking product: pictures
• Etc.

Data backups

A good presentation uses very simple data charts. Often, in the last minute, changes are made to the data: it is easy to change a number in PowerPoint here and there.

In most cases the first versions of these simple data charts were extracted from very complicated Excel sheets. And here is where the trouble starts. After a few PowerPoint iterations, the presentation and the backup model is no longer consistent. This is fine if the presentation was a one-off event, but most of the time, the Excel model will live on for future iterations.

The solution is to include a worksheet in your Excel model that pulls the data exactly as it goes in your charts. Put in the correct rounding, everything. Anyone who wants to change the numbers, need to make changes in the Excel model to get the numbers to change.

And yes, sometimes that might involve a goal seek.

If these charts frequently change, you might even consider designing a presentation in Excel. Excel has the same chart and shape design tools as PowerPoint, and you can create direct links between charts and work sheets without having to copy things across. See a previous post (2009) on this technique.

Automated journalism

The Associated Press will start using a bot to generate verbatim on company earnings reports. The system takes as input the financial data, and then recycles that into human stories: earnings went up 3%, which is 0.5% higher than the financial services average and leads to an expected gross margin of 46% in Q3.

I never understood the point of journalists spelling out information in sentences that is much better communicated in graphs. Proof is that this translation is easily automated. The only use I can see is in translating data to audio for people who cannot take their eyes of the traffic and still want to digest data.

Instead of using the bot, AP should invest in better data visualisation.

Tactics later

Some draft investor pitches I receive dive straight into the nuts and bolts of running the company, business model options, and roll out strategies.

But maybe it is better to first take the time to explain what your idea actually is. It may sound boring and obvious to you, but someone who has not spent the last 2 years working alongside you, these 10 minutes of explanation are a good investment.

Issues that are hugely important to you such as conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, go-to-market analysis can wait until you have managed to communicate what you are doing, what problem you are solving.

Data overload

In a recent project, I had to visualise the 5 year IT spend plan of a very large company: different business processes, different applications, different responsibilities, different timing, some were build, some were buy, different budgets.

Rather than pages of bullet point slides, I went for a simple table that showed the applications by business division, around 60 boxes. Then this - relatively complex - structure was repeated over and over again, each time with a different set of highlights and colour codings. After the first few repeats, the audience will slowly start to recognise the position of the applications on the grid, and i can introduce more complexity.

Here are some techniques to deal with complex tables and lots of different data set:

• Colour: use similar colours to highlight similar items. Pick how you use colour: colour an entire box, add a coloured dot to a box, colour the line around a box. Use muted, calm colours for larger surfaces, use very bright, highly contrasting colours for small accent objects.
• Semi-transparent white to cover parts of the table you do not need for a slide. Use shape booleans to cut out pieces of the cover.
• Elimination: take the audience through a process where you throw out items bit by bit: here are the applications that we are not responsible for (out), here are the applications that we will not work on (out).
• Re-order: Flip rows and columns until you get a layout where similar items are grouped together.
• Shapes: squares, triangles, circles can make nice small objects to highlight different aspects.

In the meeting, try projecting the tables on a whiteboard, which allows you to make live markings on your slides.

Home screen clutter

The longer I use my iPhone, the fewer the apps change that I frequently use. So while these apps have been sitting for a long time on my phone home screen, I still make frequent mistakes in tapping the right one. Some lessons here that are also applicable to presentation design.

• Colour is the first differentiating factor I look for (and the reason I make most mistakes: Apple Music and Strava, Twitter and Skype)
• Cacophonies of colours do not work, newsstand, photos, are all recognised as colourful clutter
• Complicated graphics, or trying to fit in typography does not work. Very simple shapes stand out. And surprisingly, shadows of human postures (Amazon Kindle, the local taxi hail app), the brains is somehow trained to recognise these.

The easy or the hard way

Maybe not very original, but this concept worked nicely in a client presentation (something related to lowering customer acquisition cost).

Speaking in Alaska

I am in the process of arranging a presentation in Anchorage, Alaska this August. Tentative schedule: Thursday August 14, 17:30. More details to be confirmed later. If you are from that part of the world, it would be great to meet in person.

License plate design

There is a parallel between the decline in license plate design as discussed in this article by William Morgan on Slate, and presentation slide design. Digital printing technology allows the addition of (background) graphics and unlimited use of colour. The result is a license plate that is unreadable and an ugly blob of graphical clutter on your car.

The future of office software

The announcement that online file storage and sharing platform Box is adding a note taking app is another indication how the world of office software is changing (and that includes presentation design).

• Work and communication styles are becoming more informal. Overloaded with information, we want to get to the point, quickly, with buzzwords or formal verbal padding.
• Documents need to be readable (and editable) on mobile devices. Even more important, people need to find a document quickly on every mobile device that happens to be closest in reach.
• People work on documents asynchronously, in different locations, and in different time zones, without the need for a time consuming meeting to discuss small changes.
• More and more senior executives will make direct edits into documents, cutting out the traditional feedback editing loops involving secretaries, junior analysts,  (who used to be the in-depth experts in Office software), and print-outs/faxes.
• Ad-hoc presentations in small groups with random/frequent interruptions grow at the expense of orchestrated, big, planned presentations where we let the speaker finish before asking a polite question.

Software needs to follow culture.

Broken contact form

The contact form on my company website was broken for some reason, which might be the reason I did not get back to your message. Instead of forms, you can use the email contact_at_ideatransplant_dot_com to get in touch with me.