The Mobile Presenter

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.

You may have seen Simon Sinek's TED talk, in which case you can probably complete this sentence:

People don't buy what you do; they buy ...

I recently saw a longer talk by Simon Sinek, in which he talks about leadership, what biology has to do with it, and a whole lot of other things. It's a very good talk, 45 minutes long, and chock-full of interesting thoughts and insights. But I found it really hard to summarise in a sentence or two.

When I suggest that a talk should always be prepared with a specific audience in mind, people often misunderstand this to mean that they should start over from scratch every time - and are, understandably, horrified by the seeming amount of extra work that this implies.

But that's not what I meant.