Work hard (but have fun) with your Keynote presentation so that your audience has it easy at show time - why most Powerpoint stacks fail to impress

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Work hard (but have fun) with your Keynote presentation so that your audience has it easy at show time - why most Powerpoint stacks fail to impress

Date Created: 22 May, 2006, 12:32 AM

I'm preparing a workshop organised by the CEO of an allied health profession with whom I share a position on a number of committees. By accident, she discovered that as well as practising as a psychologist, I also teach about technology, including presentation skills utilising slideshows.

After discussing our shared dislike for the 99% of presentations each of us attend which utilise Powerpoint (and its monotonous Wizard-embraced "styles"), she agreed to me doing a workshop for her staff about an alternative way of presenting, much like I have discussed elsewhere in this blog.

I could do this presentation using my slides in Keynote from other presentations, but I don't like merely repeating them for the next presentation. That kind of laziness can lead to jadedness and lack of passion when presenting - for me, a real no-no.

Moreover, after each presentation, I go through my slides and cull those that didn't work previously, either dropping them completely, altering the concept I was trying to convey, locating a better graphic, changing a transition or build, or even adding new slides based on the questions I was asked during the presentation.

If this sounds like hard work, you'd be right! Which leads to the point of this blog entry, that presenters should work hard behind the scenes in order to make their presentation look "easy", reflecting in the audience have the least amount of work to do.

That doesn't mean the audience does nothing except watch. No, the audience is active, but the interactivity is fun and entertaining - it doesn't feel to them they are working!

Audiences get bored or switch off or suffer Death by Powerpoint when the presenter, by his or her choice of slide presentation, causes their audience to work hard against their will in favour of their being human.

Huh?

Let me explain, because it follows the "less is more" philosophy I have been expounding in this blog, trying to explain the difference between Apple (less) and Microsoft (more). It's about understanding how we humans function, as part of our genetic and evolutionary inheritance, where logic meets emotion meets physiology. It flies in the face of how most people present nowadays, which is in such conflict with the research on how adults learn, retain information and make sense of novel data such that it coalesces into some kind of knowledge base.

By way of recent example: I attended a training afternoon with a major Government insurer of psychological services last weekend. Having attended one of their workshops a year ago, I knew what to expect: several different speakers, all using Powerpoint, and all using text-filled slides with occasional complete tables and charts. No transitions to speak of, and no builds either. Every slide and its content was smack in your face.

The person sitting next to me who knew about my slideshow philosophies told me she amused herself through the tedium of slides by watching me kvetch during the sessions as I worked passed the content and focussed on how I would better present the data.

The speakers all stood behind a miked podium, with the slideshow projected (high quality, white slides, black text, the insurer's branded logo on every slide) about 10 feet to their right.

None ever stepped away from the podium, one or two used a red laser pointer to disconcertingly and with considerable wobbles draw circles around certain numbers and figures on charts, and they all shared the one laptop which was home to all the Powerpoint stacks.

This meant as each took over the podium, they would drop out from the previous show, open their's in Powerpoint (one used Acrobat instead) so that we got a preview of all the slides to come (big mistake I've always thought). One or two struggled to locate the icon which goes from the layout view to the slideshow proper, because it's so tiny and poorly placed.

If you look at the screenshot (below) you'll see the icon in question which is the furthest to the right of the five in the lower left corner. It's tiny, yet it's the most important icon you're likely to use in front of your audience when it comes time to present. After that, you'll control the show invisibly, either using a remote control, or the keyboard, away from the audience's view.

To be frank, I have no idea what that icon represents, unless it's an icon for a screen.

Compare that to the "start" control in Keynote, which is located top left of Keynote and resembles a large "Play" button (Keynote even calls is Play), similar to what you'll see in many other devices, including iPods. That's called "transfer of training" which is why most "on" or "off" buttons on modern appliances look the same: a circle with a vertical line at the 12 o'clock position.

Once underway, the speakers last weekend made me work hard.

Not just because their slides were filled with text and not much else (with all the text per slide appearing as one - no builds at all) but they did the usual Powerpoint folly of either reading each slide to us, or using bullet points of a few words which they expanded on, while the audience was already working its way down the list of points so that there was no congruence between what we were reading and what we were hearing.

So, being human, our eyes kept moving between the speaker and the slide. Over several hours, that's hard work, no matter how interesting the content. (It was clinical material, so had its elements of intellectual dryness).

Two days later, I saw a new client for the first time, someone who wanted some assistance with overcoming their anxiety about presenting their research to conference audiences, with two important conferences approaching. She was to be one of a group presenting in a symposium for one of the conferences.

It turned out the work would likely be dual-purpose:

1. Dealing with the cognitive/behavioural/physiological/affective aspect of presenting to peers, the sort of skill much needed nowadays for which groups like Toastmasters have been very helpful;

2.... and the second part, which was to help her build confidence that her presentation could condense two years of research into 20 minutes with a few minutes for questions.

So I looked with her through her thesis and then together we located some of the Powerpoint shows on the web relevant to her field, as well as some by those she'd referenced in her research.

When she saw the standard Powerpoint fare, with all the text-laden slides, she felt relieved.

Why?

Because then the audience's attention would be off her, and onto the slides. She intuitively knew what I had written about, above: that the audience would give up looking at her, and just focus on the slides' text.

For someone uncomfortable with being centre-stage - a source of her presentation anxiety - Powerpoint presented as a perfect solution. She even stated how she looked forward to hiding behind the slides. I had heard this before, but more in the context of lecturers not knowing their stuff and stifling audience interactivity in the service of their staying in control of the information flow (one-way).

For my client, she knew her stuff since it was original research, but the hiding component was her hiding from the audience's attention, and their likely (to her mind) noticing of her anxiety and likely mistake-making. I called this over-spectatoring, where one becomes very aware of each little slip up, tripped-over word, mispronunciation and so on. Actually, as I explained, the audience is usually not bothered by these very human foibles but anxious speakers overly dwell on them, with each "trip" becoming cumulative.

It's like a tennis player focussing on a bad call and letting it interfere for the next points, even though what's done is done. Same goes for a golfer who misses an easy putt and continues to self-castigate, eventually building up sufficient muscle tension so that the rest of his game suffers.

In explaining these kind of ideas to my client, she was aggravated by, but understanding of the theory as to why I would not help her hide behind her slides.

Instead, I expressed my professional opinion that what I ought to be doing is helping her get front and centre, while using the slides as a visual aid to her expressed ideas - quite the reverse of how she saw herself presenting. She had based her presentation style, such that it was, on seeing how others presented, inclduding her peers and lecturers.

I've previously expressed here in this blog my rather low opinion of how psychologists present using slides, and so we downloaded some Powerpoint stacks using Google and some keywords.

And true to form, almost all were slideshows filled with text, boring black on white, and destined to send an audience to sleep. They weren't bad as aides de memoire, but why use bullet pointed slides for that - just write out a summary sheet, with links to wherever and whoever, and be done with it.

But in my client's case, she truly wanted to both get her research findings across to her audience in a live public setting, and make something of a splash as to how she did it.

A great presentation could lead to job opportunities, or at least be appreciated by those in the audience who knew someone who knew someone who'd like to employ a dynamic passionate speaker and researcher. Made sense to me.

One of the slideshows we downloaded made some effort to build a complex diagrammatic schema with connecting arrows, which we discussed as a useful tool. Indeed one of her main diagrams was a Path Analysis model, a statistical relationship framework if you like, which visualised the relationships between the variables she was researching. Moreover, embedded in the diagram were numbers giving measure to those relationships, which were also summarised in tabular format in her thesis. Such diagrams are often used in field of statistics known as Multiple Regression.

If any in her forthcoming audiences knew Path Analysis, they would quickly see the relationships without any verbal explanations; but if they didn't (and I was banking that my client needed to cater for a lower common denominater given her field of interest also attracted clinicians not necessarily au fait with advanced statistical analysis) she would need to explicate in her own words what it all meant.

In essence this diagram could have been her entire presentation. She could start with backgrounding her interest in the field (usually describing the nature of prior research and who did what with whom), and setting about generating the hypotheses she tested.

These involved certain human attributes and how they inter-related. High on one, low on another, means a third variable will measure... what? And then explore the other permutations and combinations, before trying to bring it back to some real-world meaningful context.

Not easy to do when you've been working on it for two years and you now have 20 minutes to do it, live in a front of a potentially critical (and more knowledgeable audience).

Is it not surprising that any reasonably intelligent and ambitious student will be anxious about her presentation? And is it not also a worry that so many are not offered training in the skills needed to get these ideas across, and expected to "Powerpoint it" when this may not be the best tool at all?

It is this kind of unthinking "follow the herd" mentality that I rail against in this blog, because I find it harmful. I keep going into Powerpoint sites, often those by Microsoft MVPs, and waiting to see presentations that will "rock my socks" as some are wont to say. I haven't found any, except some of those by Cliff Atkinson.

All I ever see otherwise are tips about how to use the secret hidden parts of Powerpoint, as if to become a Power Ranger. Sorry, but the conveying of knowledge is too important to be left to those who hide behind Powerpoint's skirts. The same could be said about Apple's Keynote too, but as I have written elsewhere, Keynote's ineffable qualities seem to elicit greater creativity and more nakedness, e.g.., standing in front of your audience with just a picture or single word behind you on the screen.

At one point, my client rolled her eyes and said it looks very hard (speaking of the slide creation aspects, given her lack of experience presenting with Powerpoint).

And it occurred to me that it is.

We, the presenter, must work hard to make our presentations look easy. I labour over my slides, with builds and transitions carefully selected. Fortunately, Keynote chooses the fonts, colours and backgrounds for its variety of themes in ways that please me, so there's less work to be done there. In Powerpoint's world, there is a huge after-market cottage industry of add-ons you must purchase to achieve half the effects Keynote can, or simply to avoid using the same backgrounds everyone else is, such is Powerpoint's ubiquity.

Now, some people will say that they thought Keynote is supposed to make life easier, since it's an Apple product. (Insert chuckle).

But just because I'm working hard doesn't mean:

1. The application is faulty (although it does have its shortcomings).

2. or that hard work means it's not fun. Tha's not be true. I don't mind working hard to find ways to do things differently, to uncover special effects I didn't know could be achieved, or learning from others with a different knowledge base. It's no different than a film editor labouring with 20 hours of footage to get a terrific ten minute fight or chase sequence down, knowing how rivetted will be the audience.

And through the hard work, there is usually something new to be discovered. For instance, some on the Yahoo Keynote discussion group shared how OS X's System Preference panel, Universal Access, can come in handy.

Now, you probably know that in both Keynote and Powerpoint, you can make your projected screen go either black or white in the middle of a presentation by simply hitting one of the keyboard keys (B or W). Very useful if you want to get centre stage without people looking at the slide you have already moved on from. Yes, you could add a blank slide a priori, but then you'd have to guess when. This way, the option is always your's at your fingertips, giving you greater interactivity with your audience.

But what if you discover that the room for your talk has too much or little light, and the projected image is either washed out or has poor contrast such that any text loses legibility (another reason to minimise text or at least make each word huge)?

Universal Access allows a keyboard combination such that you can reverse slides on the fly (rather than change Master slide backgrounds which may change more than you bargained for). Use Control-option-command-8 to see what happens.

I might use this effect once in a blue moon but it's nice to know it's there.

Why work so hard, you might ask, when it comes to setting up your slides?

Because it makes the actual presentation easier is the simple answer. Actually, I still have to work hard during the presentation, remembering what's coming next as well as what I want to say (nowadays, I never use notes and rarely use the notes-area Keynote or Powerpoint allows. Should I be giving a course however, and want people to later read what each slide represents then that is a good use for this area of the slide, and both Keynote and Powerpoint allow for their printing).

But the hope is that I make it all look easy, such that the audience believes I know my stuff. Moreover, I want them to think it's easy going. Meaning they aren't being asked to work hard simply to follow the flow of information.

If you do a Powerpointwhack on any subject you like, you'll download slideshows that I guarantee make audiences work hard. I'm talking beyond the overuse of bulleted tiny text in poor contrast colours, careening in with sound effects. Although you'll still find stacks of examples of those from politicians, through professors and on downwards. (Don't these people have advisors?)

But I'm also talking of complex, in-your-face diagrams which lay out the whole story in one hit, which the speaker then takes you through, highlighting each part with a wobbling laser light, in the vain hope that his or her words will provide the glue that keeps the story together.

That's hard work for an audience. You, the speaker, know what you're talking about and what you want to get across. But there's a trap here. Complex diagrams placed in front of a naive audience can be overwhelming. Your "explanations" only add to the cognitive mix, and while it all makes sense to you, it's just another chunk - albeit using a different input channel (auditory versus visual) - that the audience needs to absorb to get your message.

Try building your diagram bit by bit, discussing each bit as it appears on the screen and how it relates to the previous bit, like you're telling a story. Even the driest of subjects can be made exciting when it's told like a story because it resonates with the playful child we all were once (or at least you had a chance of being once).

All around us are stories being told, whether they are billboards (see below) or 30 second advertisements.

Indeed, here in Australia, many of our best film making exports had their beginnings in the hard-nosed world of TV advertising where a story needed to be told in order to sell a product, all within 30 seconds.

It's the same for each of your slides. I took a leaf out of Kathy Sierra's book over on her Creating Passionate Users blog, where she speaks of putting every slide in your stack on trial, getting it to plead why it should be included in your talk.

I actually made a little animation, taking a typically awful Powerpoint slide I'd downloaded and making it fly into an Australian Court room where it perched on the witness stand while I "cross-examined" it, finding it not a credible witness. It went down well, and no text appeared at all since my words and the illustration got the point across.

When my client returned for her second session, she had downloaded a Powerpoint show which she used to model what she wanted to do, and also what she wanted to avoid doing. She had learnt some good lessons from session one and was showing some discretion in choosing how to represent her data. She could see now the folly of slide after slide of text, accompanied with lame chintzy clip art which would make the audience work hard once more, whereas a high quality photograph would do a much better job.

She also got my point of leaving off her academic institution's logo from every slide, unlike examples we found. Show the institute's logo and picture once, and be done with it. Does it really need to appear on every slide and take up a valuable chunk of cognitive real estate?

We agreed she would have a second slide showing her institute, publicly thank her academic department (all of which would take about 5 seconds) then move on to the body of her talk.

What was interesting is that she didn't want to venture too far from her fellow speakers' presentation style (you know, the usual Powerpoint) so as not to stand out and embarass her colleagues. I took this as a good sign, one that said she could see how to do an outstanding presentation, but one that would disrupt the cohesion between her and her team of fellow presenters. So be it.

It remains to be seen whether knowing she has a good presentation which clearly lays out her research within the confines of the conference rules, then gets sufficient practice, will go some or a lot of the way to reducing her presention anxiety. It may be a necessary but insufficient condition.

Indeed, she may have been better off remaining blissfully ignorant of how presentations can be made better and consistent with the knowledge base of adult learning, and just follow the pack.

But, I would have felt I acted unethically if I didn't at least let her know that a better alternative exists, and it can be integrated with a therapeutic approach to anxiety management of public speaking, with or without slides.

Above: One of my included slides on how to present differently...