The Mobile Presenter

At Barcamp Stuttgart last weekend, I gave one of my now-traditional sessions about better presentations. This time, I concentrated on the human brain and how we need to take some of its limitations into consideration for our presentations. Specifically, I talked about the prefrontal cortex and the short-term memory (and visuals).

You've probably heard this before: The human short-term memory can only keep track of a certain amount of things at the same time. Seven is the number usually given. You also hear "Seven plus or minus two" sometimes.

In an article for The Next Web, author Boris has a list of 10 things you should never say during presentations. I agree with most of them, including (especially, actually) his bonus tip about not going over time.

And then there's the one that I initially wasn't so sure about:

The use of clipart in presentations is usually frowned upon, and rightly so. Clipart has a reputation of looking cheap, silly and pixelated. You've probably seen presentations that liberally sprinkeled stick figures and other clipart over the slides in an attempt to make them look less boring. In the end, this approach is yet another case of slides that are neither fish nor fowl.

There is not the one way to do a presentation. Instead, there's a pool of recommendations, best practices, approaches, and tools that you can pick from for the unique circumstances of your next presentation. What works and what doesn't will depend on factors such as the audience and the topic, but also your personality as a speaker.

To illustrate that, I often share links to posts with recommendations by other speakers about how they create their presentations. A few days ago, I almost shared yet another such link, since I agreed with the author's general approach: Getting away from the computer to think about the main message of your talk, for example, and building a story arc. But then the article came to the fateful point where the author wrote words to the effect of after that, it can take me anything between 4 and 40 hours to write the slides.

"Write" the slides?

I often find parallels between musicians and presenters. While they are both putting on a show (of sorts), they still need to come across as human to be able to connect with their audience. In that attempt, though, they sometimes share a bit too much.