The Mobile Presenter

When having to sit through a bad presentation, I usually try to entertain myself by making mental notes of all the mistakes the presenter makes (and take photos of the slides for my collection). But, to be honest, it's more frustrating than amusing; there are so many simple things that presenters could do to make their presentation at least a little better. The complete ignorance of all the available help (books, articles on the web, courses, even plain common sense) just baffles me.

Imagine this scenario: You are about to give a short presentation about your product or company. But you're not in a brightly-lit conference room. Instead, you're in a bar. It's loud, dark, and you can't use slides.

An unlikely scenario? Yet this is the environment that a couple of startups had to present in at a "founder's BBQ" that I attended recently.

So what can you do in such a situation?

I attended FOSDEM last weekend, Europe's biggest Open Source conference. Can you imagine a largely self-organising conference that manages to somehow come up with 500(!) talks for two days? That's FOSDEM.

With so many talks to choose from, I only managed to attend a total of 10 (not counting one spontaneously organised "Birds of a Feather" session). Interestingly, I noticed one common design element on the slides of 3 of these (pretty much randomly selected) talks: A progress bar.

... is something that you should avoid, obviously. Don't be that busy speaker who delivers a mediocre presentation because you didn't have the time to prepare properly. At least that's the advice for speaking at regular conferences and similar events. You should have had enough advance warning; not using that time is usually your own fault - be it due to bad time management or over-commitment.

In some circumstances, however, having to prepare a presentation on short notice is almost the norm; in business environments, for example.

When you give a presentation, you will usually be standing in front of your slides, facing the audience. This is the standard setup for lecture rooms and there's simply no other way for you to do it, given the layout of the room.

Things are different with your typical meeting room, especially small ones. They are often equipped with a table in the middle of the room, around which the audience is assembling. The slides are then projected against one of the walls and often there's not a lot of room between the table and the wall for the speaker to stand in. I've seen such setups in meeting rooms at companies but also for user group meet-ups.