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Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

Their mention of Prezi (https://prezi.com/) just reminded me of it and of when I tried to convince a bunch of people at a "creative digital media agency" to at least give it a thought, instead of using powerpoint or slides crafted in photoshop and stitched in a pdf.

I was amazed to find out that they knew about it but they were like "what?! that thing is totally WRONG" or "it's to unstructured to send any clear message" or "is the epitome of BAD DESIGN" etc. And later heard similar thoughts from business people that tried it, like "yeah, that's even worse than keynote" or "couldn't get anything done with that".

So I still wonder: why do lots of business/"creative-business" people find Prezi such a bad idea and some even call it "worse than powerpoint"?! (...to me it seemed like a really big step forward in the presentation world)

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What does Prezi offer that would make it an advantage, and how are you supposed to use Prezi in such a manner that it's adding to your message rather than making it fluff?

I've never seen a Prezi presentation where the Prezi stuff wasn't a bunch of whiz-bang that distracted from the message, rather than adding clarity.

In some of them, the presenter baked all these weird Prezi transitions into their presentation and would actually pause speaking while things were spinning and zooming around on the screen, so we could all admire this stuff Prezi was doing.

I'm curious to know why you think it's a really step forward in the presentation world. All I can think of is that stuff moves around the screen all around.

Yeah, most people use it badly, and the default templates are awful, but its zooming-in-out style is excellent for mind/knowledge-map based presentation.

You can start with a mind-map and then use it to actually tell a story, and have a glimpse at the mind map as an outline every time you "walk" the map. With links between "map regions" you can also more-easily have a non-linear flow that the speaker can improvise "on the spot" instead of having to follow a linear structure.

Yeah, the speaker needs to be a good story teller, not to just go from slide to slide like a mindless robot, but all good story tellers have "maps" in their heads, not "slides", so you have a tool that is much closer to the mental model of the speaker. The "visual detail" of how Prezi can move from slide to slide means a lot to visual thinkers.

...now I guess my answer is that most people doing business presentations just don't think very visually at all, they are mostly "words persons", and instead of a map in their heads, they have a list of bullet points that they need to sell in their heads :(

Prezi, to me is a well marketed, well-hyped product with a snappy name that has received good press coverage, but is a sub-part product in real life.

What other tool can be used to build the types of mind-walking-and-zooming-in-out easily presentations? I tried once forcing powerpoint to do it and just give up, I'd rather code something myself that try more, or just use very high rez pic and manually pan/zoom.

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