I stopped reading after "sent out slides before my talk." As if my presentation is ever ready to be sent out before I start presenting :-)
More seriously, the author makes their point, but it read like they were impeaching skeumorphic as "bad". The counter argument is that "slides" (what ever you want to call them) are a visual summary of the conversation at the current moment. This lets you get both your eyes and your ears into the talk, and for visual topics can be a real help for the mentally visually challenged[1].
The challenge with having the listener manage their own visual aids is that now you have part of their brain working on "what window was that in? What slide/page? up arrow or down arrow? ..." and that can make it hard to listen thoughtfully while they are thinking about how to operate the visual display tool.
[1] Amazing as it seems to me sometimes I have known people who cannot construct and then "see" a 2D or 3D representation of what you are describing in their head while you are talking. These illustrations are critical for them to follow along, and even for folks who have this skill it avoids a mismatch of what you think you have described versus what they have heard you describe.
I personally prefer when slides show what is being talked about, instead of just summarizing the speaker's points. My problem is, I can't read the text on the slides and listen to the speaker talking at the same time.
The way I try to do it is to use slides for code examples or charts, and then discuss them as they're shown, highlighting the relevant areas. I try to include pauses there, so that people have time to focus on the image without me talking. When audience size is small enough and isn't transient (e.g. a small lecture, not a conference), I give out handouts with the code & charts from slides printed on real paper - paper is much higher resolution than the screen, and it helps the people further out in the room to stay engaged.
Any time I build a high-stakes presentation that uses slides only for visuals, higher-ups coach me into putting the text back in. They frame this feedback in two ways:
a) The listener may zone out and lose track of what you're saying. The slides should be there to pull them back in. Otherwise you risk losing them completely.
b) The slide deck as a standalone artifact is expected to communicate the substance of the talk. No one is going to watch the video. But my skip lead, your promotion committee reviewers, etc. will probably flip through the slides. If it's a mystery what they're looking at, that's not good.
> The slide deck as a standalone artifact is expected to communicate the substance of the talk.
Curiously, this is the exact opposite of most advice for delivering public speeches (then again, most of that advice is for sales talks, not informative talks, so one has to filter it anyway). Slides aren't suited for effectively communicating a message outside of the context of a talk; at that point, it's better to just write a document. But I imagine the "principle of least effort" is what leads to slides being used the way you described in b).
Public speeches are about making listeners feel good about your speech so you get hired to speak again. They are not meant to convince or teach and no part of it matters for the future.
I would think people become less susceptible to such parasites over time. I mean, I've outgrown listening to TED talks years ago. At some point you have to realize that the speaker only making you feel good is just wasting your time.
Off-topic HN rant: I think this is an unfortunate definition of skeuomorphism: "an incidental feature of an object that persists even in a new medium where the incidental feature no longer makes sense".
It is good to understand the origins of features, but it's not a good idea to apply a value judgement to it based on their origin.
The "official" (i.e. trivially googlable) definition doesn't have this value judgement: "an object or feature which imitates the design of a similar artifact made from another material" and "an element of a graphical user interface which mimics a physical object".
I would encourage people to more clearly separate the idea of porting ideas from other mediums and the concept of a "vestigial property" of some feature.
That said, I think these are valid usability concerns for presentations, but depending on the context of a presentation, you may want to more tightly control the flow.
I've worked with executives who insisted the slides get sent out before the presentation, which IMHO is an antipattern because it takes away your tools for clearly presenting the information and encourages bikeshedding. (The other antipattern is making slide decks for executives.)
It might be cool to have presentation software that isn't "slide" based exactly, but still lets you go BACK but not FORWARD, and also adjust the text size and other aspects of the presentation. Ideally also you'd limit the "creativity" available in the presentation format to make it so people cannot make terrible slide decks.
> slides get sent out before the presentation, which IMHO is an antipattern because it takes away your tools for clearly presenting the information
I sort of disagree with this. I'd argue that having complete control over information transfer is desirable only if you're trying to manipulate someone, not when you're trying to inform them. I.e. when you're a salesman, not a scholar. Having slides available beforehand lets one prepare, keeping a cache of points of interest their head. Having slides available for random access lets one focus better and catch up in case the speaker went too fast past a slide. Having slides available after the talk is essential to not forgetting everything 5 minutes after the talk ends.
I understand your point, but I don't think it changes the manipulability – you could just manipulate the messaging on the slides. But the problem is that the slides aren't necessarily perfectly formatted so as to be consumable on their own.
For example, perhaps important context was forgotten about a chart, but someone reading it ahead of time without the author present will get the wrong idea and focus the whole meeting on that. Or you increase the workload of preparing the deck because now you're trying to make it suit two purposes.
So I think the author should present the information the way they intended, have follow-up in realtime or shortly after, and make the slides available during or afterward for reference.
> It didn't take me long to get in the habit of saying “Next slide, #18” or whatever as I moved through the talk. If you try this, be sure to put numbers on the slides!
Slide numbers are an atrocious skeumorphism. I've given several presentations where I click several times to advance the state of a conceptual "slide," before it eventually moves to the next conceptual slide.
Some examples:
1. First show a misconception, discuss it, click strike out the misconception and show the truth.
2. Freeze-frames in an animation: each click advances to the next portion. Sometimes you'll want to breeze through on the first pass, and then jump around to highlight different features.
3. Slides with complex information. Gray out the whole thing but for one piece. each click grays out the previous focus and brings the next section into focus. Finally, show the entire slide in its full glory.
4. This one's big. Sometimes I share my screen, not some dinky slides, to show off an interactive interface.
The author suggests that humans should communicate through external channels, reduplicating the effort of transmitting presentation materials. Furthermore, this wastes valuable speaker time and effort on communicating slide numbers, and similarly, distracts audience members as they fidget with their interface to stay in sync. To what end?
> The audience can see the speaker.
Yeah, okay. That's legit. But, for example, Zoom allows the audience to change their view. If they dislike the disembodied voice, they can arrange their views to make the speaker's face visible in addition to the shared screen. If they want to be immersed in your slides, they can do that, too. Other tools allow for a picture-in-picture mode (which might require you to tweak your presentation; annoying IMO).
A few counter points...
Screen-sharing the slides facilitates recording. For my team's presentations, we typically have as many people watching the recording after the fact as attending live. Yes, I could record just the voice and make them download the slide deck separately, but I'm not sure that's any easier - my goal is to get information about our work out to our consultants, support staff, and sales team quickly (respecting their time).
Zoom displays the speaker and shared content at the same time, so no disembodied voice. I do agree that I like to see the speaker - I'm not a fan of people who disable their webcams. But, I also know people who are the opposite - they don't care about seeing the speaker at all.
The author is correct about point #1 - if each attendee controls their own copy, screen resolution is not longer a problem. That said, I don't run into that as a problem very often. Sometimes, early in a meeting, somebody will ask the presenter to zoom a bit, which they do, and we move on.
If you're presenting slides, you want your audience to see which slide you are on - you don't want to hope that they manage to navigate to the right place in their copy of your slides.
Secondly, skeumorphism isn't a dirty word. Sure, the flat-ui crowd have tried to make it dirty, but it has value. Even though it is by design an artificial representation of a real world thing, that doesn't mean there is no value in helping the viewer auto-associate it with the real world thing. Although it is out of style, I daresay it is more effective than the current UI situation we are in these days.
Minimalist (and but not necessarily flat) UIs often give the viewer almost nothing to go on. The skeumorphic designs of the 2000s at least helped the user have a clue what the thing was about.
Thanks. I had been calling these technological anachronisms “horseheads” (after the fake horse heads that were sometimes affixed to the hoods of early motor vehicles) but I didn't want to use my own word when there was a pre-existing one. I will go back to "horseheads" then.
> If you're presenting slides, you want your audience to see which slide you are on - you don't want to hope that they manage to navigate to the right place in their copy of your slides.
Isn't this addressed by the following?
> Some co-workers suggested the drawback that it might be annoying to try to stay synchronized with the speaker. It didn't take me long to get in the habit of saying “Next slide, #18” or whatever as I moved through the talk. If you try this, be sure to put numbers on the slides! (This is a good practice anyway, I have found.) I don't know if my audience found it annoying.
It may depend somewhat on the speaker as well as the audience, but in my experience audience members zone in and out during meetings.
The mostly-passive attendee may have little interest, but if the slides are changing automatically (by your action), then it's possible a new slide my grab their attention.
If you leave it up to them, some of them will never flip past the first slide on their own.
I understand the author's preference, but as a seasoned presenter and veteran audience member I must say I do not share his opinion.
Sharing slides before a talk can be useful, but only if the slides are mostly bullet points and diagrams. If otoh you use a more empathic/media journey style of presentation materials, there is little point in doing this or even negative value.
The most boring form of video presentation I can imagine is a talking head. Trust me, you are not that pretty, nor do you have the facial gymnastic entertainment level that I want to look at you for half an hour in closeup while you command me to turn pages. Show me something interesting on the screen, maybe cutting to you for 10-30 seconds when you want to emphasise something.
Get a greenscreen and OBS if you want to go a bit further. Overlay yourself on the presentation if you want.
If you are presenting, you are not just 'relaying information', just write up a briefing/memo/paper or email if that is your goal.
In a presentation you have to capture your audience, entertain, and yes, inform.
> If you're giving a talk over videoconference,
> consider trying this technique.
but want others to follow course.
As I read through I thought, as an audience member, I would not like this approach and other tools (e.g. Zoom) allow feeds of both the presenter and their slides/screen. I frequently flip back and forth depending on the context. I often like a printed slide deck to write notes on during a talk, but for virtual talks, screenshots allow me to capture a slide I might want to come back to.
> other tools (e.g. Zoom) allow feeds of both the presenter and their slides/screen
So does Jitsi, which the author used for this particular talk.
It just sounds like he has a personal preference for how he prefers to attend video conferences and decided to use his own experience to push others into following it, even though, as you correctly pointed out, he has no idea whether the audience actually prefers it.
Are there JavaScript libraries that can keep the presentation in sync with the presenter? (or show some indication of the current slide)
At a high level, if we assume a majority of people are following along and you chose a font size that works for them, having to turn the pages seems like a net negative, a return to printed presentations before video projectors were common in conference rooms.
That will keep the presentation in sync. I have used this before with a presentation with heavy video content, that would look horrible with screen sharing
Hey, that's a great idea! I could write a Javascript device that puts a number in the corner of the viewer's slide, with some indication of whether they were on the same page as the presenter, and which they could click to jump to wherever the presenter is currently.
It could also turn the pages automatically, for people who want that.
I teach public speaking and I agree with him to a degree. I think there is room for a slide presentation platform that is responsive like a web site so that each slide would take advantage of the user's screen. I also think there is room for something less linear and more interactive than powerpoint. Prezi pitched itself as something like that but it ended up being all about swooping in and out. I haven't tried Prezi in years but it was also time consuming to make all that swooping in and out happen.
However, I disagree with handing the slides out ahead of time because that means that it is easier for the audience to ignore the speaker and just flip through the slides at their own pace. Now, that isn't inherently a bad thing but that isn't a speech.
He wrote:
>With the screenshare, everyone is stuck with whatever I have chosen. If my font is too small for one person to read, they are out of luck.
If your font is too small for someone to read then your font is too small. Except in rare situations you should make your fonts as large as possible.
>The audience can see the speaker.
That is a disadvantage but there can be things like picture-in-picture.
>Haven't you had the experience of having the presenter skip ahead to the next slide before you had finished reading the one you were looking at?
If you have too much for your audience to read before you go on to the next slide you have too much text on your slide. Less text is better.
Microsoft and Google both offer a feature where the audience can follow along on their device. I've only used the Microsoft version personally... you can watch the slides on your screen, get a translation into the language of your choice, and go backwards in the presentation if you missed something (but not ahead of where the speaker is). If you go backwards and want to get back to where the speaker is, there's a button for that.
Seems like the author just needs to RTFM.
I feel as though screensharing the slides keeps everything in one neat location. If I have to load your presentation slides separately, I have to look back and forth between the slides and your video. Additionally, if I don't have a second monitor I now can't see either very well. Finally, despite his argument to the contrary, the synchronization is annoying. Having to say "next slide, #18" after each slide just breaks the flow.
It seems like it would be ideal to synchronize with tech. Have an official "slide we're on" that the presenter advances, but also allowing people to navigate independently of that when they care to.
"Could you go back three slides?" also breaks the flow.
If slides are on a website, the site site can advance slides automatically for everyone based on a signal from the server (e.g. via server-sent events).
I find that a lecture given on a blackboard, where the speaker writes symbols and draws pictures while telling a story, is often a better way of explaining maths and physics. There is something about the visual and audio being "in-sync" that really helps listener to understand.
I once worked at a company where the bulb in the projector burnt out. For some reason that bulb became a weird symbol of thrift so the bulb was never replaced.
The company would do a summary of the financials for the year for the employees. Since there was no projector the president rounded up all the whiteboards, uncapped a marker and just started writing. Since he was intimately familiar with the numbers he could talk as he wrote about what what they meant with respect to what was happening both inside the company and in the external business environment the company existed in. It was the best presentation of that type I had ever experienced.
Good presenters weave speech, gestures, emotions, and--last but not least--visual props into a cohesive experience. If the slides are fundamental to your talk you need to control the flow to avoid disruption.
If they aren't, why do you have slides in the first place?
If you have enough text on your slides that your audience needs to adjust the text size... they aren’t listening to you and you’re writing a textbook not giving a presentation
John Madden was the best screensharing presenter of all time.
He did it in real time, and every week during football season. He was incredibly good at explaining why a play worked or did not work.
In my view, more people should present like that instead of having tons of words on their slides. It has nothing to do with having control of the slide deck.
I mean, imagine if Steve Jobs sent his presentation out before his WWDC events. Not. A. Chance.
I prefer slides-only to watching a talk, but the spoken content often supplements and extends what is on screen with detail and examples. People who like the spoken content will gain “new features” by having it skeuomorphicized (i.e, “made more familiar”).
Bottom of first paragraph: "That is a skeuomorph: it's an incidental feature of an object that persists even in a new medium where the incidental feature no longer makes sense."
More seriously, the author makes their point, but it read like they were impeaching skeumorphic as "bad". The counter argument is that "slides" (what ever you want to call them) are a visual summary of the conversation at the current moment. This lets you get both your eyes and your ears into the talk, and for visual topics can be a real help for the mentally visually challenged[1].
The challenge with having the listener manage their own visual aids is that now you have part of their brain working on "what window was that in? What slide/page? up arrow or down arrow? ..." and that can make it hard to listen thoughtfully while they are thinking about how to operate the visual display tool.
[1] Amazing as it seems to me sometimes I have known people who cannot construct and then "see" a 2D or 3D representation of what you are describing in their head while you are talking. These illustrations are critical for them to follow along, and even for folks who have this skill it avoids a mismatch of what you think you have described versus what they have heard you describe.