Giving Presentations
It should be a prerequisite for anyone whose job involves public speaking to be strapped to a chair and forced to watch at least fifteen straight hours of Steve Jobs keynotes.

Apart from coming out the other side saying "boom" all the time and mispronouncing "Jagwyre", the recipient of such training would hopefully understand the effectiveness of utter minimalism in designing a PowerPoint presentation.

I was chatting to atl about what would constitute a "Top 10 Tips for Speakers" and it went like:

1. Use Keynote
   
2. Use Keynote
   
3. Use Keynote
   
4. Use Keynote
   
5. Use Keynote
   
6. Use Keynote
   
7. Use Keynote
   
8. Use Keynote
   
9. Use Keynote
   
10. Use Keynote
    

Ahem. But, seriously, folks. I have seen more PowerPoint presentations than I can shake a Dell laptop at, and here are some suggestions:

1. Get the relationship between your laptop and projector tested and sorted well in advance
   I was at a technical conference once where, at the conference banquet, the convenor of the following year's conference got up to give a big trailer to persuade everyone to turn up the next year in Ottawa. On connecting the projector and opening the machine, his Windows NT laptop threw up a Blue Screen of Death.
   
   The entire conference sat through an agonising twenty minutes of ad-lib promotion whilst someone did some troubleshooting. That was just awful. Don't let it happen to you.
   



2. Use Keynote
   All joking aside, using Keynote is probably the best thing you can do to make your presentation stand out. It's to be expected that most people at your conference/meeting/whatever will be using PowerPoint. Even if you have to use a corporate template, the quality of Keynote's text, transitions and builds will set your presentation apart.
   



3. Practice your talk
   When I was young and foolish, I thought I was smart enough to talk off the cuff. I wasn't, and the chances are that you're not either. Practising your talk is also a great way of debugging stupidity in your slides.



4. Time your talk
   It's very, very hard to guess how long your talk will take just by counting the slides and multiplying by some constant. Some slides take longer to go over, some slides don't. Your intro slide certainly doesn't.
   
   
5. Stick to your time limit
   I was at a conference recently where we had planned a meeting after the last session of the day. The only speaker I remember from that entire week was the person who spoke last in that last session. The session overran by 40 minutes and I didn't get my dinner until 7.30pm that day. Guess whose talks I'll not be looking forward to next time? People will hate you for overrunning and will love you for under-running. If you're a mid-session speaker, the next speaker will downright want to kill you for over-running.
   
   
6. Take questions, but douse flame-fests quickly
   Good questions can add value to the session but, if you have big egos in the room, it's your job to stop flame-fests before they start. As the person with the microphone, you do have the power to do this. The rest of your audience will not thank you for turning over the discussion to one or two vocal audience members for 15 of your 30 minutes.
   
   It's generally better to keep long questions to a Q&A time if you have one. Also, if you do get unavoidable lengthy questions, you should compensate for that by skipping slides or glossing over minor points.
   



7. "I have a lot of slides, but I'll talk quickly" never works
   Although I said before that ($number_of_slides * C) is a poor metric for talk length, it's a safe bet that ($number_of_slides/$talk_length > 3) is a recipe for disaster. If you're talking like a morning radio DJ just to get through your slides as it is, one question will utterly destroy any vague attempt you've made to keep to time.
   
   The fateful opening of "I have a lot of slides, but I'll talk quickly" says one of two or three things to the audience:
   
   
   
   • I'm repeating a talk I originally wrote for a much bigger time slot and I haven't bothered to revise it
     
   • I'm incapable of extracting the most important points in this material
     
   • I don't care about doing a good job of this talk
     
   
   



8. Plug in your laptop, set it to "highest performance" and turn off your screensaver
   
   Few things are more annoying than the energy saving features of a speaker's laptop turning off the screen every 2 minutes, or the screensaver constantly activating. If the battery meter is visible, I'm always sitting wondering how long the speaker's machine can last before it dies.
   
   
9. If you're presenting from someone else's laptop, make sure you have the right fonts, images, etc.
   
   It's not uncommon at academic conferences to load all the presentations onto a single machine and run them from there. It saves the embarrassment and the 15 minute downtime of someone's laptop throwing up a BSOD when they plug in the projector. If this is what's to happen, it's super, super important to test your presentation first to make sure nothing broke in the transfer of your presentation to the new machine.
   
   
10. Have fallback positions in case something unexpected happens
    Even if you practice, it's inevitable that your talk won't run perfectly smoothly. You might go too fast or get derailed by questions that mean you're running out of time. It's a good idea to plan on some "glue time" at the end of your talk. By this I mean a period of 5-10 minutes, depending on the length of your slot, the content of which can expand or contract if needed. Two ways of doing this are to hold a short Q&A or do a demo. The most important thing here is still to keep within your time slot, so don't talk for the full 30 minutes and then do a 10 minute demo!
    



11. Know your audience, anticipate their questions
    
    This is easiest to do at academic conferences, where attendee lists are usually published in advance, and academic conferences are also where it's most necessary. It seems that nothing makes an academic happier than seeing someone else squirm on stage :-)
    
    I was completely floored by a question at one conference. I had been talking for about 40 minutes on how bad the safety culture was in the UK railways and someone knocked me out with a simple question: "Well, what would you do differently?". Don't let that happen to you. Anticipate questions, prepare an answer, anticipate a retort to your answer and have something in hand to deal with that retort - even if it's just an "OK, that's a fair point" or a "Let's discuss this further off-line".
    



12. On your slides, less is way more than more
    
    This is tricky. In some circles, people use their PowerPoint presentations as a form of documentation. It's a good idea to fight this trend, because it guarantees both poor presentations and poor documentation. I much prefer to treat my electronic presentation as a presentation and documentation as documentation. In any case, you can't actually put enough words on a PowerPoint slide to constitute useful documentation, so you might as well make the presentation good.
    
    If you watch a presentation by Steve Jobs, you'll see that he uses very few items per slide. He usually uses a graphic as the focal point and brings different discussion points in and out as he talks through them.
    

I spent a fair bit of time thinking about how Steve Jobs uses his slides in a keynote. It's very different to your typical Bullet Point Jockey's effort. Like Jobs or loathe him, there's little doubt that he's an utterly compelling public speaker so it's worthwhile studying his technique. I watched a few parts of the recent MacWorld keynote over again and tried to pick out some principles from what he does.

Iconic Slides



It's typical of Jobs to use a big icon and simply the name of a product when talking about it. I guess it focuses attention on both the product and what he's saying about it, rather than on the content of the slide.

Also, these kinds of slides are often used to book-end the section of the keynote that relates to this product: "Now I'd like to talk about [shows icon slide] Garage Band" or "and that's [icon slide again] the new Garage Band".

You don't always need text



One of the mild failings of presentation apps is that they always seem to default to the "Title and Bullets" slide master. This example shows that you can use a slide which is nothing but a photograph to make a point. Here, Steve was saying "You know we have the iPod, and the iPod mini" as he was about to introduce the iPod shuffle.

A subtitle can be the only point you want to make



Instead of writing a slide which looks like:

iWork

• A new productivity package
  
• Keynote 2
  
• Pages
  
• Tageted at consumer and light office work
  
• This is just the start...
  

The simple subtitle "Building the successor to AppleWorks" tells you absolutely everything about the iWork product. At least, it tells you everything that Steve wants to tell you right now. It tells you what kind of applications you might expect inside iWork. It tells you the market towards which Apple is targeting iWork. It gives you a hint at the price point, and the use of "Building the successor", rather than "The successor to" faintly suggests that what you see today might not be all that iWorks will ever become.

Dimmed Bullets



Again, I suppose this is a technique that is intended to focus attention. When using bullets, the previously-discussed bullets are dimmed down to grey, whilst the current topic of discussion is bright white. If you want to go through five or six points without saying much about each of them, this is a nice trick. It's less disconcerting than shooting a line of text onto the screen and then off again before your audience has assimilated it.

Breaking out of Bullet Points

It's not always necessary to line up your five points in a strict bullet-point hierarchy. A nice Steve-trick is to use five icons, or cluster points around a graphical element:





What's clear, however, is that Steve Jobs' use of very minimalist and iconic slides goes hand-in-hand with his exceptional verbal communication skills and his first-class graphic design department! If you don't have the charisma, confidence and speaking experience of a Steve Jobs, it would be a very good idea to rehearse like crazy before trying to do something as visually sparse. Similarly, if you're depending on the graphical look of your slides and you can't draw or assemble images well, it might be better to stick with one of the built-in themes in Keynote :-)

(See also: Mark Jason Dominus' talk Conference Presentation Judo (or the movie version))

I didn't really mean for this to become such a detailed study of presentation techniques, but I guess I see so many of them that I'm quite sensitive to the issues. Now, if any of my colleagues read this, I had better make my next talk perfect!