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Briefing a team on interactive is a balance between reductive over-simplification and excessive detailing of requirements. Everyone knows this. It was part of what made planning an art, it’s why agencies struggle with things like channel-neutral briefs. One of the best examples of a project brief comes from the 1993 documentary The War Room. I’ve used it 100 times. Sometimes, it supports the need to go beyond the three word brief (which is important for complex, rich interactive experiences). Sometimes, it supports the idea that anything, no matter how complex, can be simplified.

Back to The War Room. The documentary is about the 1992 Clinton Presidential Campaign. The filmmakers joined up early in the campaign when Clinton was more than a longshot, so they kind of lucked out in that they wound up being on the winning and unconvential team. The War Room of the title is the campaign office in Little Rock where soon-to-be-legends George Stephanopoulus and James Carville were calling key strategic thoughts in the campaign. At the end of the film, Clinton can be heard giving his victory speech on the steps of the Governor’s Mansion. The camera crew is inside the now-empty War Room and lands on a whiteboard (!) at the front of the office:

This was the mantra, or the brief, of the campaign: Change vs more of the same, Health Care for Everyone, It’s the economy, stupid. (It had several versions and I went with the one that was more memorable for me. Interesting to note is that the press simplified this even further to include only “It’s the economy, stupid.”)

The mantra defined what was going to win for them, their true north, the campaign’s compass, the priorities, the decision-making criteria in strategy. Of course, the campaign was going to take on other issues, but these were the themes to which they would return again and again, this was the source of their voice, their media presence, and their style. God help me for the marketer-speak, but these were the things which, if they owned, would put them over the top.

A great use of this mantra is for any team that complains that they can’t possibly formulate a strategy or brief that’s less than 2 pages. Surely, if a presidential campaign can be distilled to this, something as simple as a website, or a game, or an MP3 player can be tamed as well? The alternate use is to combat the notion that anything beyond three words is superfluous, confusing, too hard to work with.

It pains me to read books about presentations, and the cute title “slide:ology” is a pretty high barrier to overcome, but raves prompted me to 1-click it, and, about 30 pages in, it’s already pretty good. Even the cute puns — the title (rhymes with ideology if you want, slideument, death suislide) — are starting to work for me.

Some nice points thus far:

- graphic design is completely under-represented among presentation professionals (7% according to one survey)

- recognition that powerpoint is a tool for presentations not documents and a reminder that there are word processing programs for documents

- slides should support communication, not be the communication

- the presentation ecosystem should be seen as message, visual story, and delivery

The most important piece, and the one that is least asked or addressed, is also painfully obvious. And for all its neglect, the most in need of repetition:

Before beginning a presentation, it’s important to ask yourself questions about your audience. Who are they? What are their needs and how can you address them? How can the information you have make their lives better? What do you want them to do after the presentation is over?

Either as a participant in presentations, or as a person frequently asked to help with a presentation visual, I have asked, I think hundreds of times, “what point are you trying to make?” I am usually able to ask it as a purely informational question — tell me your point here and I can make you a graphic, or tell me your point and I can tell you if the slide works — but it’s almost never that simple. The question makes people defensive, condescending, or worst of all, kicks them off into a stream of boilerplate.

Probably more important than the questions, which have been asked a hundred ways by various experts, is how do you get people to answer them well? Possibly more to the point, the question might be how do you get people to think clearly? Or the real problem, at least with people who are brighter than their slides, how do you get that person to have the confidence to just say what he thinks. It’s not always sloppy thinking that leads to sloppy communication, it can also be a failure of nerve.

PZ has a post about McCain’s background visuals that goes a little deeper than the general pile-on. The best bit is this:

MSNBC reported that when asked about the middle school image, McCain’s campaign replied that “it’s simply a generic photo, like others used and it had no specific meaning.” But here’s the rub: images always have meaning, though it may be different from what you intended. The term “generic photo” is just one step away from “clip art,” both of which should be avoided by serious presenters.

Images always have meaning. It’s amazing to me how often the same “picture is worth a thousand words” people just drop in pictures whose meaning or value they can’t explain.

I had no idea this was going on, a contest around the best presentations presented on Slideshare.  Haven’t watched them yet, but early glances look to be reinforcements of the narrative/Presentation Zen/big graphic/bold statement variety.  It also seems like there’s an interest in the craft of making social issues more accessible through understated narrative.
Found via Guy Kawasaki’s “How to change the world” blog.

Yesterday, I blogged about Al Gore’s trial run of the latest version of his climate crisis talk. Presentation Zen has an analysis, with additional links to Duarte Design.

In general, PZ found it warm and funny, but gave two pointers:

• never apologize for not being prepared — not sure if I buy this. While telling your audience that you “cobbled it together” the night before might not be the most flattering thing to say, there’s no point in pretending that an unpolished presentation is more than it is. In the age of conversation and blogging, where the sharing of an idea is more important than production value, this kind of transparency, phrased more elegantly, might be a necessity. In Gore’s case, his presentation is known for its impossibly high level of polish, such that he couldn’t escape people noticing the current version’s lack of polish. What he could have done is set it up as a sneak peek into a work-in-progress.
• never turn your back on an audience — this is interesting. I could swear that, in the movie, we frequently see Gore turning to look at the slide. I’m not sure if this should be characterized as turning your back on an audience or as joining your audience in looking at the slide. When pointing out particular sections of a slide (points on a map, inflection curves on a graph), it seems more engaging to face the slide with your audience and use hand gestures than to continue facing the audience and look down at a monitor as you move the cursor around. Also, the body language which communicates that the slide is the center of attention and not the speaker strikes me as management of the audience’s attention and is in keeping with Gore’s concerns about the state of our respect for science.

Small nits to pick. I love Presentation Zen and hope some day that someone returns one of the three copies of their book that I’ve bought and loaned out.

Al Gore’s most recent TED talk, a trial-run, or beta if you will, of Inconvenient Truth 2.0, is a great study in the creation of a presentation. It’s got some great moments, but it also has some clunkers, some timing that isn’t quite worked out yet, a few emotional peaks that don’t pay off, some low-intensity moments that turn out to be quite good. For people who follow presentations, there’s a lot to chew on.

I’m not knocking Gore. I’ve been a moderate to big fan of his since his days in the Senate where youngsters spoke in hushed tones about how he writes his own speeches, not his staff . . . can you imagine a Reaganaut doing that?. The first Inconvenient Truth was complex, well-crafted in terms of its visuals and theater and highly evolved in its rhetoric.

Version 2.0 beta is focused on moving the needle from individual action (changing light bulbs to CFLs, buying hybrids) to citizen action (forcing politicians to take the big steps). Version 2.0 also addresses the state of the science, debunks the detractors, comes up with new visualizations of global warming in action today (the polar ice cap). All of it building up to a call to be the generation that history will remember for reversing the tide.

Seeing what works and what doesn’t, and seeing the iterative nature of the talk is a nice look into the craft of the presentation.

Steven Johnson has a nice bit about presentations prompted by the Lacy-Zuckerberg flap at SxSW. He hardly talks about SxSW at all, which is one virtue.  But it’s a great post because it highlights something that rarely comes up in all the presentation tips out there: dealing with the difficulty of reading an audience, especially large ones.

I probably did more than fifty public appearances last year in front of crowds — speeches, conversations, interviews, panel discussions, etc. And every time I get up there, the primary thing I’m thinking about — more than the words themselves, most of which I’ve said before in roughly the same sequence — is the room tone. In the words of our commander in chief: is the audience with me or against me? Are they having fun? Are they confused? Am I talking at too technical a level? Am I being condescending and talking down?

This can be very hard to gauge, because the information channels that flow back from an audience to a speaker are very narrow ones. An audience enraptured by a fascinating story is, most of the time, indistinguishable from an audience slumbering at a ponderous lecture. You can’t read facial expressions in that environment, so all you have to go on is the sound, and the sound in both those cases is silence.

This is specific to large audiences, I think. You can usually gauge a room of up to 50 people — the lights are usually up, you’re close enough to make eye contact, you can see body language more clearly. But the idea of room tone is useful. Johnson says he uses jokes to gauge a room. The amount of laughter and the lag time help break the silence and give him enough signal to gauge how he’s doing. Still, he believes it’s hard to gauge a room except in the best and worst of circumstances and that things like twitter (which allows an ostensibly silent audience to talk to each other and build a consensus) can amplify the room tone.

Anyone who has spent time with Intel employees knows that Andy Grove’s influence on the culture there was deep and long-lasting. From conversations during my time with them as an agency person, I picked up two presentation edicts that traced back to Grove: 1) no laser pointers (apparently Grove can’t stand the sparkly diffusion when they hit a projector screen); and 2) ‘only show 4 “foils” per hour’ during presentations (”foils” refers to slides and the techniques for making them when the Grove culture was at its peak).

I love the 4 foils per hour rule. It’s Presentation Zen’s rule of “go broad or go deep” gone crazy wild Xtreme. It’s like turning it into go broad, go deep, or go metamega-deep. Imagine having a concept and/or graphic rich enough to warrant 15 minutes of conversation? What kind of mind-changing and engagement happens then? I realize that Intel is an engineering culture, so opportunities for these kinds of slides are more frequent there than in other environments. But consider Tim OReilly’s Web 2.0 slides from a few years ago:

They’re ugly and contestable to be sure. But these slides are deep and systemic and still useful. Whether you disagree or agree with some or all of it, you’re going to be smarter for wrestling with or, better yet, trying to improve them. Another slide from NextD describes different types of innovators:

Look at all the nifty things going on here: four types of people, who can be grouped in to two higher-level types, and who reach out into different areas in different proportions and who may or may not map to a company’s process. By arguing about the accuracy, relationship, edges and arrow directions for 15 minutes, you get much deeper into innovative cultures, management styles, and process than you might with a dozen slides. (Also, by discussing something for 15 minutes and digging into its richness, you have something more memorable, better internalized, more grokked by your audience. That is, of course, assuming you and your slide are able to command attention for that long.)

And you don’t necessarily have to do info-graphics, either. Take a look at a screenshot from Flickr this morning:

This is a sampling of Holga groups, people dedicated to photography with a cheap camera whose artistically flawed lens creates sometimes eerie, sometimes sentimental, always distinctive effects. From looking at this slide, you can talk about long tail, community, community-bulding and marketing, the redefinition of amateur and professional, co-creation of brands (Holga effects found their way into Photoshop filters), and help your audience go beyond the lame, puddle deep Business Week understanding of the photo-sharing, community, 2.0 phenomena within it.
So what would happen if we had a rule in design and marketing presentations: don’t show any slide that doesn’t warrant at least 5, 10, or 15(gasp!) minutes of explication and conversation. (Or, as a compromise or improvement: Don’t do a presentation that doesn’t contain at least one over-arching slide that warrants 10 minutes of explication and conversation.)

What it might do is force us to think deeply about our models, concepts or ideas and make sure that they are rich enough to warrant a conversation. It might move us beyond some of the label-making and phrase-coining that seems to drive so many presentations. By looking at a rich slide in detail and for an extended period of time, we’re forcing ourselves into systemic thinking which may, at the end of the day, be more persuasive.
That said, I also enjoy big pictures with three words in a brightly colored band as a way of grabbing attention and registering something emotionally. They’re appropriate for motivational and sales talks, talks in which you’re trying to reinvigorate principles or ideas which are familiar, telling a story, or for very short (especially funny) presentations.
Designers in the interactive space are caught in between two powerful forces when it comes to presentations. One the one hand, we adore Tufte, who in addition to teaching us to loathe chartjunk also teaches us appreciate and promote information density and richness of thought. On the other hand, we’re moving towards a narrative-driven, flip-book style of presentation that illustrates nearly every sentence with a visual. We need both, but might be forgetting how to do the richer, deeper slide.