Mom’s spaghetti

Why you should speak at a conference

“According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right?
This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”
Jerry Seinfeld

I’m a talker. People who know me, know I could talk to the wall and have a great conversation. That being said, public speaking scares me as much as the next guy. What started as a simple call out for designers to speak more publicly, became something much more, in the course of a few short months.

This is the journey of one designer from abstract to stage. Read on to find out why and how you should get involved in public speaking.

The abstract

Every journey starts with a first step, and in the case of a conference talk it is the abstract. This is the description of your talk, the outline. It’s the sizzle before the steak. The abstract is what you submit to the conference of your choice (in my case, UX Australia) for peer judgement. No need to create your whole talk yet, just the jist.

My initial abstract was created in a workshop run by the sage Jay Rogers. I then massaged them over a number of sparring sessions to get to something we were happy with (something that would become a theme).

I then submitted the abstract and crossed my fingers.

Congratulations…?

The votes were in and I had been accepted for a 20 minute slot. My abstract looked at the art of sparring and feedback with Atlassian.

My outline had gotten us this far but now it was time to put up or shut up. I began with a skeleton slide deck, each slide hitting on a key point of the talk. Over the course of a month or two I met weekly with a fellow designer and speaker, Alastair Simpson, to present and refine these bare-bone outlines into something worth turning up for. Scheduling in time to get together regularly early on was a key reason our talks were so well received.

Key aspects to our talk outlines included:

Interactivity
Looking to differentiate our talk from the crowd and to increase audience engagement, we pushed each other to include some aspect of interactivity in the talk. For me, that involved using a feedback tool we had developed, while for Alastair it involved live polling in the room.

Single takeaway
Your talk can go for 2 minutes or 2 hours but it needs a focus. A takeaway that your audience will leave with even if the rest doesn’t resonate. This also rolls into the final aspect…

Simplify
It might sound obvious, but once you’re in the weeds with a talk it can quickly bloat. We spent a lot of time challenging every slide, every point, every unnecessary transition.

On tour

Once we had the bones of something we were proud of, it was time to take it on the road, internally.

Our weekly sparring sessions became more inclusive. We invited people across the design team and beyond to drop in and give us candid feedback and added that much needed shine.

This was also valuable practice for talking to a larger group and testing the overall ideas of the talks with people not familiar with the subject matter.

I even presented to my family for a sense check. I was relieved to find it (mostly) made sense and was able to use their feedback to sharpen that single takeaway further.

Palms are sweaty…

By this time we were both feeling rather confident and could do our talks in our sleep.

All that was left was to hop on a plane to Brisbane and prepare to ‘do it live’. We were both scheduled for the second day of the conference so the suspense was stretched to its limit when we finally took the stage.

Alastair went first, talking to a packed room at the 10:30am slot. The rooms held around 200–300 people and there was standing room only, a much better feeling than speaking to half empty seats. The talk flowed, it was great to get all 300 people standing and interacting with audience members at a few key points during the presentation. A few laughs as well, with plenty of questions from the audience and great mentions on Twitter. Job done.

I was on directly before lunch at 12:40pm. I’d made sure to talk to the host prior and also pop up on stage and get a sense of the space. They introduced me and I forced myself up to the podium. Then, the strangest thing happened, all my fear and anxiety melted away. It was replaced by confidence and focus. Before I knew it the 20 minutes were over. Something they rarely tell you is about the lights. At most venues the lights are there to illuminate you, not the audience and therefore they tend to shine directly in your eyes. It might sound like a trivial thing, but it does a world of good in allowing you to focus not on individuals but on the group as a whole.

Over to you…

It’s one of those great feelings, having nailed a talk. Relief and adrenaline all mixed together. Now I’ve got a taste for it, I’m already signed up for more. By way of a very last minute invitation, Alastair and I will be talking at Web Directions Sydney in October about the physical design of our office space. Both of us are also doing extended versions of our talks at Atlassian Summit in November.

I hope this blog has been inspiring to those thinking about getting up and sharing their knowledge with their peers in the tech and design communities. We hope to see you on the stage soon.