Presentation Mistakes Everyone Makes | Hacker News Reader

Presentation Mistakes Everyone Makes

blogs.hbr.org

16 pointsd99kris10 comments

Isn't a lot of this based heavily on the audience?

If someone was giving me a presentation on a product using these five 'goals', I'd personally be very reluctant to consider that product.

Take the cloud issue she brings up, and she is giving a presentation on some new cloud data storage. She recommends focusing on "help remote colleagues coordinate disaster relief efforts and save lives". Feels a bit far-fetched that cloud data storage is going to help with that, and I'd dismiss that line of reasoning out of hand and be much less likely to purchase than if she just stuck to the facts.

Same for partnership - 'Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' ?? I'd spend the rest of the presentation trying to work out why someone would choose something so vague when they can use an obvious handshake image.

Same for jargon - if you're selling a cloud data system and you're speaking without any essential jargon such as 'uptime' or 'automatic failover', I'd probably dismiss your presentation outright.

I can give you one presentation mistake that she seems to get wrong: "Know your audience, and pitch your presentation to what they need to hear".

How about including "drawing people's eyes to the presentation for random visual reasons, instead of getting them to focus on you" as a mistake, instead of saying "use better pictures" like #3 does.

It's one thing to include good visuals for graphs/things you want people to focus on while you explain the slide.

It's another to have visuals for things like "partnerships" or "security". That would be the part where you are supposed to be talking, and want people focusing on you.

It's funny that this comes right after the point about asking too much of your slides.

If you include visuals in your slides, you should do so sparingly. The whole purpose of a slide is to support your presentation, not to be the presentation. The focus should always be on you, only briefly on the slides and then almost immediately back to you again.

The only exception to this is if you're describing some deeply technical process, and even then you should be in front of your slide, explaining things, et cetera.

I disagree, in that I think that use of rich visuals can be really captivating; but your way can work too.

One thing that can be really effective is to use blank, black slides when you want the audience back. It's amazing how completely that switches everyone's attention back to the speaker.

I don't disagree, of course, though again, there are times when people need to see what you are talking about, and that needs to be either visuals or handouts.

"handshake icons" is not one of those times :)

If you really want to improve your presentations, just get "Presenting to win"[0]. It's a very good book, provides decent advice on how to craft your presentation, to captivate the audience and to think about what exactly it is that you want to convey and how best to do that.

[0]: http://www.amazon.com/Presenting-Win-Telling-Updated-Expande...

Didn't quite find anything noteworthy in that article. I am in fact surprised that such an article can feature in HBR.

Serious question:

Does anyone know of research on this?

Not opinions. Research. Decent research on retention, comprehension etc.

Don't be silly, there's no need for research, after all "Her team at Duarte, Inc., has created more than a quarter of a million presentations for its clients and teaches public and corporate workshops on presenting. "

Honestly though, there is surprisingly little real research i can find on presentations, but it could be all the general + journal search engines i'm using are having issues trying to understand the query.

I'd also be interested in research on graphs or charts, if you've seen any in your travels.

It just strikes me that so much of this stuff is straight-up opinion. And we know from other fields (eg: advertising) that what we prefer may not be the same as what works.

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