Crucial Presentation Components that Reduce Crappiness
I had a realization last year that I had never once given a good presentation in my life.
It’s easy to be critical of bad presentations. I’ve had countless lectures where a professor just reads what’s on the slide word-for-word or goes off on unrelated tangents that serve no purpose to the students. I’ve watched speakers crash and burn because of relying on bad Powerpoints or, even worse, because they simply did not understand the material they were tasked with speaking about.
It’s not always so easy to admit that your own skills could use some work. With a presentation, though, there are so many aspects that need to go well for the overall experience to be “good”—keep everyone’s attention, have enough content to be impactful but not so much that you lose people, create slides that support the content without driving people crazy, etc.—that maybe it isn’t so hard to realize we all have some work to do.
10 Components of Good Presentations
These are some of the things that have come up in my own recent presentations (and in others’ who I’ve watched) as good things:
1) Tell a Story.
Especially a personal story. This is something you’ll see in almost every TED Talk, and it’s something that always seems to keep my attention.
2) Tie All the Ideas Together.
Presentations that tell you lots of things without “wrapping a bow around it all” by the end leave you feeling kind of lost.
3) Effectively Communicate the Right Amount of Information
This is hard. You want enough content for the presentation to be meaningful, but I always also want to cut away anything that isn’t essential.
“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
4) Visuals Often Should Play a Supporting Role
This goes back to the whole “reading off the slides” condition. Rather than be a crutch, the best presentations have just the right amount of visual info/reading + really engaging and interesting spoken content.
5) Use Video When Possible
Last week, I used this viral video of a rabid Eagles fan running into a column by the subway to help make a point and get people interested. A month or two ago, GIF-like videos brought life to an otherwise static group slideshow. I’m a big believer on using video—as long as you do it tactfully.
6) Information + Entertainment = 👏
You could have the most amazing content ever, but a little bit of showmanship, humor, or even free food can make the difference between a good talk and an awesome one.
7) Communicate Depth
This is a must when it comes to UX research presentations. You have to strike that balance where you show that you’ve done a lot of work without walking your audience through every unimportant detail. (One technique that worked well for me recently was showing a bunch of interview quotes, and then highlighting the ones that actually mattered.)
8) Don’t Forget Basic Design Principles
A big one is visual hierarchy. If you have lots of info on one slide that’s all the same size with no visual contrast or obvious importance scale, you’ll get a lot of these from your audience: 😕 🤤 😐
9) Wrap it Up
I made this mistake recently. Unless you actually give your talk some kind of verbal punctuation at the end, it gets awkward because people aren’t sure if you’re done or not. Uh… Do we clap now? A simple “Thank you” will suffice.
10) Focus!
What’s the main idea or the big take-away you want people to have? Figure this out and tailor the entire presentation around it. When in doubt, use the ole “Tell them what you’re gonna say, then tell them, then tell them what you told ‘em” routine.
… Thank you.
