Artifacts of a Presentation

Alice Toth, Friday, June 29, 2007 @ 11:55 am

We had an company brown-bag lunch the other day, presenting a case study of one of our Agile projects where UXD and Development are integrated into one, big happy family. It was a great talk, explaining how UXD fits in with the Agile process and highlighting the bumps, expectations and jargon differences all members had to overcome in order to meld as a team. Discussion was generated throughout the lunch, and we all agreed that we’d like to continue the talk at another brown-bag. Good feelings all around.

A pity that the dynamic of the talk wasn't captured on the slides. As we’ve all seen on a million other presentations, the slides displayed a bulleted list of talking points. Very high level and maybe effective during the presentation but loses all effectiveness after the fact. Unless you were an attendee, reading the bullet points afterwards will only give you the vaguest idea of the topic and probably won’t even hold your interest long enough to finish viewing all the slides.

And yet, think about it -- this file is the artifact that lives on as a representation of the talk. It should be strong enough to be used as a marketing piece; or a blog posting; or the foundation of future talks. Which means it should be able to stand on its own and be meaningful to readers who never attended the original presentation.

I recently came across a slide presentation that goes beyond the
bulleted list and stands on its own as a memorable artifact. Andrew
Hinton, an IA with the User Experience group at Vanguard, recently
posted a presentation he originally made at the IA Summit in Vegas.

I never saw his presentation at the Summit (and yet after viewing this presentation, really wish I had!). However, from viewing the slides
and reading the notes, I came away with a good understanding of the topic under discussion. The notes supported the visuals; the visuals
supported the notes. Additionally, because the notes were written as if he were speaking, i.e., in a less formal way, his personality came through and that further engaged my interest.

Such a simple solution to include the notes on the final output and yet
because of that, the slide show can stand
on its own and become a great artifact of his talk.

user experience design

Comments: 1 so far

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1. 

   Hey, thanks for the praise!
   I have to say, though, I spent many many hours on that crazy thing. I’ve done my fair share of “I need some bullet points to keep me on track in my talk and to put on screen” presentations — but with kudos like this, I may never go back to the old way

   Comment by andrewhinton, Monday, July 9, 2007 @ 12:56 pm

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