Heat maps in presentations

Harvard Business Review is bombarding (spamming?) my Instagram feed with this ad almost every day (Google shows that the chart was first created somewhere in 2016):

It is a very busy chart, so not to be used in your next TED Talk, but for close-up reading these heat maps are actually pretty good. This is a pretty decent summary of what much have been a huge scoring spreadsheet.

• Only a few colours (suspiciously similar to the SlideMagic look…)

• Careful attention is paid to sorting and grouping rows and columns

Some more improvements are possible:

• There is too much text in the descriptions of the boxes: we know that we are talking about sectors, no need to remind us, and there is too much lingo in there (“digitally engaging”).

• Column headings can be shortened, especially that long word “digital” can be lost here and there

• I would move the “assets, usage, and labor” headings (nice short ones) to the top to make the link with the column headings clearer.

This boxy chart will be a good challenge for my code of SlideMagic 2.0, I am going to try it.

Photo by Guillaume Bolduc on Unsplash

Taking a step back

I just returned from a wonderful bar mitzvah trip with my son that took me to all kind of car-related venues throughout Germany and Italy. Upon return I did two things: open the code of SlideMagic 2.0 to remember where I left things, and recording some musical ideas. Both were surprisingly positive.

Taking a break does wonderful things for creativity.

• Your brain continues to think / process thins in the background without you realising it

• Often, you dig yourself in a hole of small problems that make you lose the ability to see the big picture

• Rest is always a good thing.

I use this all the time in presentation design. A few weeks before the presentation deadline, I force myself to think really hard about the presentation. Make rough sketches, write down story lines. Then I put things away before working on the presentation in earnest at a later time. This small investment of time pays off handsomely later. The key here is to make a real effort in the beginning, not just a quick though experiment.

Image via WikiPedia

PowerPoint templates - impossible to customise

The Internet is full with PowerPoint template packs. Some are plain ugly, but others are actually very pretty. These templates are usually created by designers who are good at design, but have little understanding of business. (When the template is called “business template” you should be warned).

These templates look great as a template, but as soon as a non-designer touches them, the magic disappears. This is partly the fault of the non-designer, PowerPoint itself, and the template.

The most common problem non-designers have is item counts: my problem has 4 issues, not 3, I want to add another dimension, how to put in the business units? Simple actions like adding or deleting a row in a carefully balanced graphical composition is tricky.

In addition, designers stick to a subtle consistent style, properly without realising it. Fonts are a certain size, white spaces, margins, composition. It all looks right. The non-designer does not have this natural eye. Charts look somehow different and inconsistent, even if you followed the “rules” of the template.

Most “business” slides are not 3D staircases or beautiful maps: your quarterly budget presentation needs tables, graphs, and boxes. But a template with just boxes does not look very attractive on the PowerPoint template market place.

In my own template store I tried to make an effort to do it right, it might look less spectacular at first sight, but the design will be 500x more useful. Still, things are not perfect, hence the work at upgrading the SlideMagic app to version 2.0.

(PS I am traveling at the moment so posts might be less frequent than usual)

Photo by Brina Blum on Unsplash

3 levels

A presentation slide has 3 levels:

1. The basic information: what it is that you want to say

2. Some sort of visual organisation of that information that makes it comprehensible

3. The design production quality

It is hard to get all 3 right. Most people are stuck at 1, a list of bullets of the speaker notes of what the slide should say. People realise this, and jump to 3. Either “spicing things up” themselves or hiring a professional designer to make that slide look great with awesome illustrations and spectacular animations.

They key is number 2: what do you show, what don’t you show, and how do you organise it on the page. Yes, you need some design knowledge to do this correctly, but only 20%. The other 80% is understanding of the substance.

• Most designers lack the understanding of the substance

• Most presenters lack the understanding of design.

And this lack of design understanding is about very basic things: how to layout something quickly with a few boxes that line up. Adding a dimension, removing an option.

The SlideMagic app is working on making you confident enough to take on level 2.

Photo by Blake Weyland on Unsplash

Tools and templates for entrepreneurs

TLV Partners is a venture capital firm in Tel Aviv, it has created a number of templates and tools to help entrepreneurs create board decks, cap tables, budgets, etc., you can find them here at the TLV Partners Funding Playbook

Although I have done presentation design work for both TLV Partners itself and a few of its portfolio companies in the past, I have not been involved in the creation of these specific templates.

You don't know what you want

Steve Jobs used to say that users don’t really know what hey want, because they are lacking the experience to judge something they have never tried before. My presentation app SlideMagic is a bit like that, taking a pretty bold and different approach to presentation design.

Having said that, there is an opportunity for me to listen to users now that the engine is out of the car and separated in its individual components before I put it together again for the development of SlideMagic 2.0. I spotted the obvious shortcomings of version 1.0, which are 99% related to the user interface and the way you interact with the program.

So, if there is other feedback you have about SlideMagic 1.0, now is the time to speak up. I will for sure listen, I might take them into account, or not (for design and/or practical reasons). Feel free to fire away at jan at slidemagic dot com.

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

Sweeping animations

A VC friend told me that she asked a startup to stop the pitch presentation because of nauseating animated slide transitions (true story). No, the pitch did not stop, it just continued without the slide show. I don’t think it cost the startup a lot of points, except maybe a small doubt about judgement when presenting to investors, strategic partners, or major customers.

Big sweeping animations for the sake of animations to “add a little sparkle” to your presentations have the opposite effect:

• It puts the audience in a non-serious “giggle” mode when you want them to be dead serious about your business

• They take time, especially in slide transitions, “oh, here it comes again”, just when you are about to make that killer statement that will win over the audience. Also, quickly going back to slide 3 with the team bios will be delayed by 5 flipping slide transitions.

So never use animations? It depends.

For very complicated diagrams it can be useful to build up a slide slowly, adding complexity step by step. In these cases, I rely on “animations”, but usually do not implement them as animations. Rather, I duplicate slides and add additional elements on each slide. The audience does not notice the difference, my deck can still be sent as a PDF, and the lazy VC who does not bother to engage the PowerPoint slide show model will still get the message.

And of course, if you are Steve Jobs. That iPad dropping in between an iPhone and a Mac using the “anvil” effect worked pretty well.

Photo by Roven Images on Unsplash

What has changed?

Technology has become very powerful over the past few decades, and we could use it for all kind of things presentations: AI-powered template engines, 3D-animated slide transitions, sophisticated online multi-team collaboration, multi-media story narrations, searchable image databases with millions of stock photos.

Still, the problems we have as presenters are pretty much the same as they were in 1992:

• Quickly jotting down an idea on a slide

• Finding a slide that you made last week

• Getting that projection screen to work

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Under the skin

For years and years I have used templates, libraries, plug-ins, and tools to try to make my web sites and apps work. But it always requires compromises. That PDF or PowerPoint conversion is a bit of, the blog looks good but I could have been better.

It is incredibly satisfying to write the things directly now. Dragging and dropping slides (from click, to drag, to drop), writing shapes into a PDF file one by one, cropping image bitmaps and being completely in control (and responsible) for image optimisation (file sizes, processing time).

Photo by roman raizen on Unsplash

A few screen shots

Below are two screens of SlideMagic 2.0, all work in progress (the careful viewer can spot the bugs). The new app will be how the first one should have been: slide design will be mostly the same, the UI will be a lot better to work with. (No, not April’s fool…)

Presenting: networking for introverts

This tweet resonated with me:

Exactly. Presenting is an introvert’s networking. https://t.co/UjWE2z2Oon

— Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) March 28, 2019

Many of the world’s best presenters are “high functioning introverts”. A presentation gives them the space to air their thoughts without interruption, the ability to carefully craft your story so that it comes out perfectly, taking into account all those possible nuances, contradictions, and considerations.

Photo by Paul Green on Unsplash

Actually doing it: knowledge versus skill

A thought triggered by my recent attempts at refreshing my 1992 coding skills, learning how to ski, and expanding my musical abilities from keys to the guitar.

Acquiring knowledge can be relatively easy: after you see an animation for 2 seconds you understand why the Moon is facing the earth with exactly the same face for the past few million years. See it, and snap, it has been added to your understanding of the world.

In the world of presenting and design, we can also acquire knowledge: white space, eye contact, one message per slide, “snap” and move on, right? Not so fast, presenting and design are skills, and the only way to master a skill is actually doing it.

Eye balling your slides in a cafe and imagining how you are going to present them is one thing (‘here I will make the point that the competition will never be able to catch up’). Doing it on stage with a crackling microphone while being distracted by a question is different.

Dreaming up a slide is easy, but how do you get these numbers to round in the Excel chart, and how on earth do I incorporate that comment of the CEO in this chart that is already pretty full?

You know that you are getting somewhere with learning a skill when your brain starts to resist, that means that you are getting into new territory as you push it to make new neural connections. Most people give up here, but those who don’t will be surprised when they pick up things again after a night of sleep.

Photo by Robert Baker on Unsplash

Back

I have returned from a wonderful ski holiday with the family and can pick up the blog again. Going forward this blog might change character a bit when compared to the past 11 years. I always have been writing pretty much about things that occurred me while doing my work, which was designing investor presentations. That is changing now as I am focusing on coding version 2.0 of SlideMagic. That does not mean that I plan to turn my blog into a Javascript tutorial though. It will be an interesting audit trail of my efforts to get this app on the rails.

Image via Wikipedia

Promises, async, await, in Javascript

Totally, totally, not on topic, I am giving you a flavour of the sort of things I am breaking my head about. Javascript powers websites with unreliable connections, and in 99% of the cases it is not a big deal whether all images are rendered exactly on time. For a presentation software that renders on screen slide shows for a few hundred people or needs to produce a pitch deck in crisp PPTX or PDF, it is crucial that the right image is rendered correctly and appears in the right order, you are happy to wait a few extra milliseconds if you have to (since there is no risk of a million bored people clicking away from you ads).

Web browsers basically run like headless chickens, if one bit of rendering encounters a problem or delay, they will quickly jump to the next one, try again later, try something else. There are a bunch of Javascript commands to try and keep track of this asynchronous chaos. The theory of these is easy to understand. A decent practical explanation though, is impossible to find anywhere online (believe me, I tried).

So, here is a cheat sheet for myself, that maybe gets picked up by Google and can help a lot of people. I left out all the theoretical explanations, just the raw example code.

function unpredictable(order) {
  return new Promise(function (resolve) {
    var resultValue = 'Result from call ' + String(order)
    setTimeout(() => resolve(resultValue), Math.random() * 1000)
  })
}

function ASAP() { // Random numbers, as values come out as soon as they are available
for (let i = 1; i <= 10; i++) {        
  unpredictable(i).then(resultValue => console.log(resultValue))    
}}

function allComplete() { // One big array comes out only after everything is done    
  var promisesArray = []    
  for (let i = 1; i <= 10; i++) {       
    promisesArray.push(unpredictable(i))    
  }    
  var allPromises = Promise.all(promisesArray)    
  allPromises.then(resultArray => console.log(resultArray))
}

async function inSequence() { // Each value is released in the order it was requested
  for (let i = 1; i <= 10; i++) {        
    var resultValue = await unpredictable(i)        
    console.log(resultValue)
  }
}

ASAP()
allComplete()
inSequence()

For those who made it to the bottom of the page, I will be taken a few days vacation with my family and post less frequently over the next week.

Photo by Cristina Munteanu on Unsplash

Rushing to the finish line

I watched a few performances of the annual play of my daughter’s class over the past few days. I noticed that the more performances the class has played, the better the kids know their lines, but, the faster they start to speak. Partly because they have to make less effort to remember the line, and probably partly because they are getting tired and feel like “let’s get this scene over with”.

Something to think about in our presentations as well: you know it inside out, you might get tired from explaining your own story again, but, the audience is sizing you up in a first impression.

Photo by Massimo Sartirana on Unsplash

Web design observations

“Do you do web design as well?” was probably one of the most-asked questions in discussions with new clients. I still don’t do it for a living, but finally finally, I caught up and have a pretty decent understanding about how it works. I must say, web designers have to endure a pretty big mess.

It takes an incredible amount of trial and error to get basic things sorted (try lining up things in a straight line for example). Unlike writing back end algorithms, which you can sort of read/follow, a page full of HTML tags is impossible for a human to understand. Pages are set up as long scrolling bits of text.

No one is to blame though, HTML needs to be backward compatible and fit a huge range of screens and devices.

For productivity application development, things are different. Screen dimensions are more or less the same, people usually work in (almost) full-screen mode, scrolling and resizing is less relevant… All you need is a decent x/y coordinate system and you are done (almost).

That is another business opportunity for someone to cover…

Photo by Pankaj Patel on Unsplash

A little something personal in you slides...

It can be fun to add little “easter eggs” in your slide design. If you need a location, a photo of a city, a street, a car, pick one that is familiar to you. If you have a choice, why go with something generic? To the CEO of the client of your consulting project, it will look like any other presentation and she won’t wonder why your visual comparisons have a car-related theme, or why that quote from the rock song appears on slide 4.

Photo by Thibaut Nagorny on Unsplash

Steve Jobs

I am starting to get really excited about SlideMagic 2.0. It will not be an app that instantly wows you with amazing and spectacular effects. Instead, it will all be in dozens and dozens tiny details, that you will start to appreciate as you use the app more. The design of the interface, the positioning of icons, what you can, and cannot do on a certain screen, what happens if you click. I can now fully understand the stories about Steve Jobs micro-managing the design team with seemingly ridiculous and detailed requests.

The lack of this instant ‘wow’ might give me a marketing challenge as I need to win over people bit by bit. Let’s hope that people catch on to the idea. Personally, I now start using my own tool (in pre-alpha stage) to quickly layout a chart export it to PowerPoint to integrate it with more conventional charts. And that is a good sign, since I already have a pretty design speed in PowerPoint and can still find ways to improve on it with the tool.

Working alone gives me a disadvantage of speed when it comes to number of hands and brains. On the other hand, I am free to experiment with features very quickly, including the ones that turn around common software practices completely.

To be continued.

Photo by Elevate on Unsplash

Next challenge: workflow

People spend too much time on creating slide decks. SlideMagic aims to change that. My minimalist designs really help I think: they are super simple, look good, and cover 95% of charts you need in a business presentation.

Now that I start test driving my 2.0 app at speed, I see the next challenge: workflow: finding the right template to start with, modifying it quickly, diving back in your slide archive for inspiration with intuitive controls. In PowerPoint this does not work very well, with 20+ years of professional experience I have learned to navigate the menus quickly but the average user is struggling. Apple Keynote looks prettier but is even less streamlined to use.

My efforts continue, it is all about optimising tiny details that make a surprising difference in the speed at which you can put slides together.

Photo by Arie Wubben on Unsplash

Sloppy with labels

People recognise an email address when they see one, or a street address, or a phone number. People understand that they are reading product benefits or seeing a price of a product or a competitive comparison. It is OK to let go of the labels and descriptive titles if you can.

Photo by Wes Hicks on Unsplash