The Mobile Presenter

I often test my presentations in front of a friendly audience. If you don't have anyone who would be interested in your talk, I can recommend attending a Barcamp. In fact, my "career" as a proponent of better presentations started with a short presentation at Barcamp Stuttgart in 2011. I barely had material for 10 minutes, but the positive feedback and constructive discussion afterwards confirmed that I was on to something.

So after I stressed the importance of using visuals in slides - how and why they work - in a session last year, I came back to Barcamp Stuttgart this year with the question if you can make use of the positive effects of visuals even if you're not using slides in your talk.

In other words: Can you present visually without slides?

Every time Apple introduces new products at one of their keynote events, there is this inevitable comparison with the late Steve Jobs. I've written about it before and really thought we'd be done with it. Everyone on the team at Apple has now found their role in these keynote presentations. Apple's keynotes are different now, but they're still recognisably Apple.

Last week's keynote was bigger than usual since, for the first time since Steve Jobs' death, Apple introduced an entirely new product category. And, inevitably, the "Steve would have done it differently" comments came up again. Sigh.

I recently spoke at an event where all of the talks had a moderator who introduced the speaker and then sat in the front row, equipped with signs, indicating to the speakers how long they had left: 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes - time's up!

They also had another helpful sign. It read: "Repeat the question."

Just a few quick thoughts about I problem that I was just struggling with while preparing the slides for a presentation:

As explained elsewhere, using visuals will help your audience remember the content of your presentation. Another thing that will help them remember is repetition. So you should repeat your main point or points at the end of the presentation. Consequentially, this summary of your presentation should also repeat the visuals.

But sometimes, the visuals that you used earlier in the presentation don't quite work when repeated in the summary. What can you do?

Inexperienced speakers are often afraid that they may be forgetting an important point of their talk or that they get stuck and can't remember how to continue. Which is one of the reasons why so many presentations have lots of text on their slides.

Cue cards would seem to provide a solution to this problem. They're handy when you get stuck and since you now have the text of your talk at hand (pun intended), you can use more visual slides and still make sure not to forget anything of importance.