The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method

Diagramvalasztasi javaslatok (Chart chooser in Hungarian)

Here is the Hungarian version of the original Chart Chooser, translation courtesy of Zoltan Till. Download a pdf. 

Aide à la sélection de graphiques - Chart Chooser in French

Bernard Lebelle of Impact Visuel has translated the Chart Chooser into French.  Download the pdf here. Merci bien, Bernard!

Presentation style

One of the more popular topics on this blog has always been the importance of choosing the right presentation style for a given situation.  The essential difference between the two main presentation styles (ballroom style and conference room style) is the size of your audience and what you are trying to achieve with them.  Ballroom style presentations are suitable for informing or entertaining large audiences (e.g. participants at an annual sales meeting).  Conference room style presentations are best for persuading smaller audiences (e.g. a sales pitch to a client team; a funding pitch to a venture capital firm; or a proposal to senior management or the board). 

But what if you want to persuade a large audience?  This is actually very hard.  In my ChangeThis manifesto, I wrote about how research shows that persuasion requires three things: details, interaction, and absence of distraction, and how conference room style presentations are ideal for delivering all three. 

In a recent comment on this blog, Jeff Hurt wrote:

While I concur that ballroom presentations are usually to entertain, inform, impress, inspire or motivate an audience, I've seen some very skilled presenters take those ballroom presentations and turn them on their head. I've watched them use the same concepts they would use in a conference room session of 50 people and engage an audience in small group conversations, exercises and activities. Their goal is still to educate, engage and persuade an audience from awareness to action. With the advancement of mobile tools and Web 2.0 interface, I've also watched experienced and talented presenters with very large ballroom crowds engage with the audience through SMS, Twitter and other features.

Jeff is right: it can be done.  But it is very hard, and it takes exceptional skill to persuade a large audience (that’s why good politicians are so rare).  One approach that I have often recommended is to introduce your topic with a brief ballroom style presentation and then follow up with a conference room style one.  Another is to use some of the new technologies, as Jeff mentions.

One particular new technology that can be helpful here is the online presentation design program Prezi.  Prezi allows you, while following a specific storyline, to dive deep into details along the way.  Here’s a good example of a Prezi presentation; this one was designed by Nick Matarese, a fifth-year Industrial & Interaction Design major at Syracuse University, who was interning at a client of mine.  It’s nicely done.

I would be happy to hear about other examples of approaches to persuading large audiences.

Smile and Move

Here's another good example of a ballroom style video presentation.

The Onion on Presentation Design

Nothing is sacred to the folks at the Onion.  Not even Death by PowerPoint...

CHARLOTTE, NC—Sources at Cobalt Media confirmed Tuesday that the wow factor—an intangible set of viscerally pleasing features that instill onlookers with a feeling of exhilaration and intense interest—was successfully added to this Thursday's upcoming PowerPoint presentation, entitled "New Ideas For Integrating Social Media Into Product Marketing."

According to those who will deliver the presentation to executives from Sketchers, the 1:34 a.m. addition of an animated bar graph depicting the market-share percentages increasing as colored bars extend slowly upward provided the final wow-factor-inducing element.

Read the rest here.

The Mehrabian Myth

About three years ago I blogged about the terrible abuse of Prof. Mehrabian's infamous formula (7% words, 38% tone of voice, 55% body language), and have been hammering it in my workshops ever since.  Last month, Olivia Mitchell started a campaign to bust this Mehrabian myth.  

Now Martin Shovel, of CreativityWorks, in another excellent example of a video Ballroom style presentation, provides a humorous send up of the whole thing:

Ballroom style presentations as video: Xplane on Leadership

I have long suspected that with the growth of online video as a communication medium, that ballroom style presentations will start to evolve into documentary style videos.  It doesn't take much; create a ballroom style presentation, add voice or music, click File/Save as Movie, and upload to YouTube.  

Of course, the greater your skill, the more professional-looking you can make it.  Xplane, the company founded by Dave Gray, has always been at the forefront of visual thinking.  Yesterday they released a video on leadership, in conjunction with the Leadership Initiative at the Harvard Business School.  It's a fine example of a Ballroom style video presentation.

Presenting to the Pope?

Not exactly, but I did get to meet him in person.  Last week I attended the best conference of my life.  It was held in Rome, at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and the theme was "Values and Rules for a New Model of Development.

Highlights were, on Thursday evening, a private tour of the Sistine Chapel, and then an audience with the Pope on Saturday morning, during which the conference speakers, including myself, got to meet him personally.  I had only met him once before, twenty-three years ago as an undergraduate when he gave a lecture at my university (he didn't remember me...).

More details on the conference, including a brief video of the audience with the Pope, and a video of my own presentation, are posted on my other blog, on Catholic Business ethics.

Extreme Presentation blog - top 10 posts

Earlier this year, the Extreme Presentation blog reached its fourth birthday. To celebrate, I would like to offer a “best of” listing.  I took the ten most popular posts as measured by past six months' traffic, and with some minor modification, here they are; they provide a pretty good cross section of the work I've done on this blog in the past four years. 

#1: Chart Chooser 

This was overwhelmingly the most popular post I have ever made (in large part thanks to it being picked up by Lifehacker, via Digital Inspiration, via Chris Lyons).The post features a one-page diagram that helps you identify which chart to choose given what you are trying to show with your data.  Volunteers from around the world have since translated it into Italian, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, German, Russian, Spanish, Chinese (which alone would have ranked among my top ten posts), Japanese, and Portuguese. See them all here.  

#2: 36 Slide Layouts that Pass the Squint Test 

If you want your slides to be understood quickly, then make sure that each one passes the squint test (see #4 below).  Here I posted 36 examples of layouts that pass the squint test, in downloadable PowerPoint form.  Layouts that pass the squint test are particularly important for Conference Room style presentations (see #5 below). 

I later added a version for PowerPoint 2007, which uses the SmartArt feature; these are available here.    

#3: The P&G One-Page Memo

Not strictly about presentations per se, but still on the broader topic of communication, I blogged some time ago about how to use the Procter & Gamble one-page memo discipline, which is something I learned over 20 years ago when I started my career at P&G, and which I still find very useful.  

 #4: The Squint Test: Creating Simplicity of Design and Complexity of Data

Among the many interesting things that Edward Tufte has written about in his four treatises on information display, none is more powerful, to my mind, than his two key elements of graphical design. Tufte writes: "What makes for such graphical elegance? ... Good design has two key elements: Graphical elegance is often found in simplicity of design and complexity of data."

Simplicity of design and complexity of data. These two elements, it seems to me, are at the heart of everything that Tufte teaches. And I think that the second one - complexity of data - explains much of his dislike for PowerPoint. PowerPoint, used in the usual way, does not encourage complexity of data.  The challenge, of course, is how do you combine simplicity of design with complexity of data? One answer, I think, lies in what designers call the "squint test": when you squint at your page, so that you cannot read any of the text, do you still 'get' something about the page?

#5: Ballroom vs. Conference Room style presentations

Each presentation situation calls for a particular presentation idiom—a form of expression and a set of design principles. Contrary to the popular complaint, the problem with PowerPoint™ is not that it forces you to design a presentation in a particular way. On the contrary, it doesn’t. And that's the problem: PowerPoint allows you to mix design elements from different idioms, which, I believe, accounts for much of the ugliness and ineffectiveness of most presentations.

There are two fundamental presentation idioms, which I call Ballroom style and Conference Room style. The Ballroom style presentation is what most typical PowerPoint presentations are trying to be: colorful, vibrant, attention-grabbing, and (sometimes) noisy. They typically take place in a large, dark room such as a hotel ballroom.

The Conference Room style presentation is much more understated: less use of color, more details on each page, printed rather than projected, and more suited to your average corporate meeting or conference room.

My latest take on this topic is posted on Presenting to Physicians, Scientists, Engineers… and Marketers. 

#6: Seven Deadly Mistakes Presenters Make, and How to Avoid Them  

The seven deadly mistakes are:

1. Setting presentation objectives in terms of what the presenter intends to do, rather than how the audience should change their minds and actions as a result of the presentation.
2. Focusing on what you want from your audience, rather than on how your presentation will help them solve a pressing problem of theirs.
3. Only including evidence that supports your recommendation, instead of providing an objective evaluation of all the evidence, for and against.
4. [more]   

#7: How Do I Make Boring Data Interesting?  

It's easy to be passionate when your material is inherently fascinating. What do you do when you're dealing with boring data?

#8: Visualization Taxonomies  

With the explosion of interest in information visualization, I find taxonomies of visualization approaches to be very useful in organizing knowledge and facilitating use of different visualization approaches.

This post identifies three useful taxonomies. 

Dan Roam's Visual Thinking Codex (left), from his delightful book The Back of the Napkin, strikes an excellent balance between simplicity and comprehensiveness.  The Codex can be found on p. 141 of Dan's book.  With his permission, I have reproduced it in my blog post (although I highly recommend that you get a copy of the book).

Also included in this post are the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods, hosted by the impressive Swiss Visual Literacy project, and of course my own Chart Chooser (#1 above). 

#9: Slide Design in 2009  

What would I like to see in slide design in 2009? I would like to see presenters realize that there is a place for simplicity and a place for lots of detail--and the main thing is to know when to use each.

[more]

#10: Handling Transitions

How should the presenter handle the transition between slides within the handout? 

One way to solve this is to vary your language.  Some times you'll say "turn to the next page"; other times "on page 3 we will see how... etc." Keep in mind that with conference room style presentations, you end up with far fewer slides than with  ballroom style:  typically between 3 and 6, and occasionally even 2 or just 1 outstanding slide.  So your audience won't be turning the page very often.

An even better approach is to design your presentation storyline using the S.Co.R.E. approach (Situation, Complication, Resolution, Example), in which case your transition is actually part of the story. [more]

***

Thanks for following this blog--I hope you are finding it valuable.  If you have any thoughts about anything you'd like to see here, please feel free to comment on this post.

Maytag

May 8, 2009 update: I received a call from a supervisor at Maytag, who had read this blog post. They have now agreed to refund the full amount of the parts.   I still wish that this whole thing never happened, but I am satisfied with this outcome.

The original post:   

I've never done this before, and I probably won't again, because branding, product quality, and customer service don't have much to do with presentation design. 

But I am just so annoyed that I had to vent.  Less than two years after we bought our house, which had all new appliances, including a high-end Maytag dishwasher, the dishwasher broke.  I called Maytag, and they told me that although this expensive machine was already out of its warranty.  Fine, so we would have to pay for the repairs.  The Maytag repairman came, and charged me $90 to tell me that the thing needed a new control board. Maytag said that the control board was nationally out of stock and I would have to wait four to six weeks (does this give you a hint that this type of dishwasher breaks down a lot?!).  Well, we are a large family and would rather not be without a dishwasher for six weeks, especially since we had a new baby at the time and were busy enough as it was.  So I told them to forget it and that I would throw out their dishwasher and buy another one, which I did (from Sears).

Several weeks later, the part arrives, and my credit card is billed.  Today I spent about two hours on the phone working my way through customer service and the parts department, but unfortunately (for me) they don't accept returns of electronic parts--even though they should never have sent it in the first place.  They did agree to send me a $75 check for my trouble, which is less than half the cost of the parts.  

Why am I annoyed?  Because a $1000 dishwasher broke after less than 2 years of use, and because they were out of stock on the part, and because, after I told them I was going to throw their dishwasher out, they still sent me the part and charged me for it, and now won't take it back.

On their website I found the following: 

Maytag continues its relentless pursuit to build the highest-quality and most dependable machines for you, our customer  

They may be pursuing that goal, but there sure as heck are not reaching it, or even coming close.

It turns out I am not alone in my disappointment.  In case any of you are ever inclined to make the big mistake of buying a Maytag or Whirlpool brand appliance, check out the following:

http://web.mac.com/roslynholcomb/iWeb/Site/Blog/172E339A-3AEB-11DC-A956-0003937BDE2C.html

http://www.my3cents.com/showReview.cgi?id=7999

http://kordless.blogspot.com/2004/10/maytag-sucks.html

http://www1.epinions.com/review/Maytag_Jetclean_II_Undercounter_Dishwasher_MDB8600AWB_Dishwashers/content_211005181572

http://www.dfwstangs.net/forums/showthread.php?t=290855

http://www.planetfeedback.com/maytag+corporation/customer+service/maytag+sucks/251544

http://www.topix.com/forum/city/newton-ia/TJLHTT1KJ24EMRVEM

http://fromhuskiestohusbands.blogspot.com/2009/04/maytag-sucks.html

http://lindarella.wordpress.com/2006/11/02/breaking-up-with-the-maytag-repairman/

http://themommyrollercoaster.com/index.php?s=handcuf

If you want more, search for "Maytag sucks" or "I hate Maytag."  Or for more brands from the same fine company, search for "Whirlpool sucks" or "I hate Whirlpool."

Venting over.  Back to presentation design.