Technical information to a non-technical audience.
Knowing your audience above all else
When presenting information and works to various audiences, it is important to understand who the people are that will be receiving content from you. I have seen amazing content being wasted on audiences that truly didn’t understand what was being shared. This ultimately led to a lot of rework and missed deadlines in the end. When we work in a cross functional corporate environment it is paramount that the information shared is well received by the audience it is tailored for.
This article will go over your audience along with great tips and tricks that will help you in your preparation for presentations sharing technical information to a non technical audience.
Research the people who are going to be partaking of your work. Know the background and capture information about each person that you can in knowledge if the audience in small enough. People are more likely to appreciate your research of them and their knowledge when you are sharing with them. This helps build trust and attentiveness from your audience and ensure more of their time even after you are finished sharing.
Principles to know while preparing for the non technical audience.
Let’s make things simple. I know, i know it isn’t an easy thing to simplify your knowledge to various audiences. Think about it like this…. If you are learning something new, do you enjoy hearing acronyms and random statement that forces you to ask questions by yourself? Exactly!
Here is how we stop this pitfall from hitting your audience. Knowing the conversation and goal matters just as much as the people that you are presenting to matter. Working with a clear framework is essential to knowing your audience.
- How much overall does your audience know about the topic?
- With those in the room, how does this information impact them?
- Does this impact the company in some way at large?
- Lastly and maybe most importantly what do you want them to take away from this presentation?
With these four key areas to learn and know about before you present will derail you if this is ignored fundamentally. Reception will be internalized when this is not prepared properly and I wouldn’t want that to happen to you if the reception feels bad.
Avoid technical jargon
As mentioned earlier avoid using acronyms and words that will need to run through a knowledge base to understand. Presenting to a non technical audience can cause challenge around what info makes it to their ears and eyes. An easy way to determine this, is to better understand what about what it is you know that you had to take time to learn? This will help you better frame presenting to this audience. Reason being is that you are not there to teach them how to code, or be a UX practitioner, you are there to share what you have learned from your practice and reflect an elementary reflection.
We watch cinematic depictions of historic events in film to dilute the sobriety of the moment in real life. This can relfected in both time and potency in showing how a traumatic event can be simiplified to learn and understand more than we did when we heard about or read it. This is the skill of great story telling that gets shouldered as great filmmaking.
Tell the story
In UX story telling is the central most important skill to grow in this as a practitioner aside from soft skills. Seeing great story telling unfold accounts for technical information as well as simply knowing who the audience you intent to affect is. There are so many approaches that can be taken when it comes to great story telling but this diagram shows the base of information across any story tellers canvas.
If you ever want to see a presentation fall apart, I will show you a presentation that didn’t carefully consider story telling approaches. A key line or a breaker phrase tied to a fascinating statistic will make up for a long a arguous process of presentation building. When it comes to your presentation however there are also rules to that road that might be essential. First tell me, have you ever experienced opening a power point presentation of 50 slides that are made of spreadsheets and data points? Yeah me too. They’re no fun and limiting of perspective on what the key insights mean because numbers tie to humans to tell stories ultimately. I am not sure what a story teller can do if they are just showing you numbers across a slide in an infographic form without communicating the story within it.
Presentations have been buffered to take on the 10/20/30 rule. It means 10 slide at maximum to reflect the limited time to tell a story and to keep your audience within it. 20 is the minutes you should take to tell that story. Don’t take a 30 minute meeting window without questions and comments and don’t take an hour talking over that time. You lose people and that is keeping honest and fair. It is essential that you understand the ingredients that go into the 20 minutes without losing sight of who you are communicating to within the presentation itself. Lastly the 30 steps in for your presentation font size. Nobody likes a busy slide, including you. Remember? We went over that when I asked about the 50 slide presentation. Keep the 10/20/30 rule in mind when preparing your approach to share with your audience.
Conclusion
Knowing your audience is key. Don’t sell it too far to share technical jargon and over all other things tell the dang story. These things will guide your path to learning how to properly speak to your audience. Research is a core motivator to helpful success metrics if you are evaluating the audience you are presenting to. Happy hunting on presenting technical information to a non technical audience.
