In the past I’ve been asked by readers of my blog not to just write about the information I have gathered at functions, but instead to write down my experience of the event.

This has been a good tip, as it has helped me to gain further insight into my experiences and contextualise my learnings so that other people can digest what they read from a completely different point of view to their own.

I’ve been raving here and on Twitter about Garr’s Presentation Zen workshop in Sydney - which was all about improving the way that you present.

So, here’s what I experienced:

What to present?

Nancy Duarte contributed to Garr’s book. Her company did Al Gore’s presentation that was turned into the Academy Award Winning movie, An Inconvenient Truth. They also do many of Steve Job’s presentations too!

Her tip for ‘digital natives’ was to use Mind Mapping to plan out your presentation. It was interesting to note that Garr didn’t propose this, he reckons you should use paper and pen.

I don’t consider myself a digital native! However, I do use mind maps to plan all of my presos. Because maps are essentially pictures it is easy to remember the presentation content and they also help with creativity, as I discuss in this post.

So I punched out the mind map in an hour, easy!

BUT

Then it took me 15 more hours (a weekend) to finish my first 70 slide presentation!

WTF!

Normally, it takes about another hour to whip up the preso. I’m thinking, ‘Jeez this stuff is slow going. Is it worth it?’

Side note - Mindmanager is even kind enough to export the mapped presentation to PowerPoint in a completely boring hierarchical fashion, just as PowerPoint and KeyNote were designed! Not that the Zen man, Garr, from Japan allows that!
B O R I N G

Finding piccies

Once I was happy with my mind map I procrastinated….

Then, when I got up the gumption, I searched for pictures representing ‘web2.0′ into iStockPhoto. It didn’t work!

then I clicked on ‘Did you mean: web’ and started looking tediously through iStockPhoto for images. As I found ones that looked pretty I stuck them in the lightbox thingy.

lightbox thingy

Then I tried to buy it a low res image and realised I had no credit.

$$

This stuff doesn’t come for free! I ended up spending a 100 bucks on ‘low res’ iStock images - they seemed good enough for a Keynote slide. Plus a few I took other very low res images off Google images too.

I soon got sick of this and asked my Twitter crew for any ideas. Some suggested using the search function, but that was not good enough.

I tried a few searches on the most popular piccies, and I found this…

That wasn’t very fruitful.

And then I realised that I needed a process!

The process

I went through each box of my mind map and got a pic for each thought. That allowed me to focus and use a repetitive task.

As meditators know, repetition, without distractions helps to get you into ‘the zone’.

Kinda Zen really!

Time faded away and I cranked through hundred of images and ‘lightboxed’ any that reflected an emotion related to each box on the mind map. Afterwards I quickly picked out the ones that worked.

When the word in a box wasn’t particularly interesting I just used text or a quote from some other smart person. Actually when I got sick of finding photos I did this!

A principle that I used through the whole presentation was to ensure that the slideshow could be read [on slideshare] by someone clicking through it in a couple of minutes. They had to be able to draw enough info out of it to leverage some understanding. By doing this I was able to present the slides to a client on Monday in 10 minutes. And at the conference, later that afternoon, I managed to string it out to 25 minutes.

This is a high level representation of how I looked at the map and picked out relevant images (slides)

‘Of course some nodes of the map are just words, you need to fill up the time you have!

So what happened next?

I had another presentation to prepare for the following day. It was along similar lines and it only took 30 minutes! This is because I reused 2/3 of the slides and I knew what to do and could quickly and easily predict how to find the images I needed for the slides.

This alerted me to how professional presenters do their preparation.
Garr uses the same iStockPhoto images in his slides and book and his slide deck is massive. During the preso he selected relevant slides to talk to. He even added some photos relevant to the day, which I’m sure he does each time he presents.

Then I had to do some presenting!

So I practiced it with:

• my wife
• a client, and
• in my mind.

All the time worrying that it might:

• take too long
• come out wrong
• run out of time
• be too short
• be boring

I went to the toilet 3 times before I delivered the presentation. You know, in the hour before I delivered it. Ok, half an hour

Then I couldn’t get Keynote to display the time and next slide on my Mac.

Then it worked.

So I presented.

And I never once had to look at a presentation plan like this:

Although I did check the time 3 times. I finished ready for questions within 30 seconds of my ‘glass tap’ from the chair.

My experience

When I was at Garr’s presentation, I asked him. ‘How do you know what is on the next slide?’ ‘I don’t know’, he said. ‘It just happens.’

Well funnily enough it did just happen. I was right in the zone and engaged with the audience. My hair stood on end and it just flowed.

This is the mind map:

and this is the preso:

User Centred Design For Web2.0 And Beyond

view presentation (tags: socialnetworks objective usableworld ux)

Try it for yourself.