Just like everyone else in the corporate world, I have to put up with a multitude of boring, ugly, un-motivating presentations. It’s amazing that the people that put together their presentations on their “official” corporate deck and pages full of bullet-points think that anyone is going to pay attention. I hate to have a presentation read to me and I hate staring at bullets for any more than two minutes. I’ve actually grown allergic to bullet points.
The ultimate value of the presentation is much more than the deck that is being presented, but I have noticed that the interestingness of the presentation and the simplicity/story/thought that goes into the deck usually seem to be in alignment. If I walk into a presentation and I see the standard corporate title slide, I almost immediately know that I’m getting ready to plunge into a an hour or so of straight bullets. The standard title slide isn’t 100% as a leading indicator, but it’s pretty high.
There are so many better ways to present and to use a slide deck to help with messaging. If you’re interested or intrigued by giving great presentation and being a better communicator - I highly recommend Presentation Zen. This is the best site out there for tips on communicating, presenting, and giving effective presentations. If you are new to presenting or if you just want to spare your co-workers or audience of sitting through another mediocre presentation, check out the site. The book recommendations are always top-notch as well.
I have partial color-blindness and it’s a huge pain in the ass.
I don’t really mind not being able to see or differentiate every color and shade out there; but it does really bother me that I have no idea what is going on when I’m looking at color-coded visualizations. Most of the models or visualizations that I view on a daily basis require more than a glance to figure out what is really going on.
The only notable exceptions are a select group of interactive visualizations. Newsmap is a great example because I can see the contrast of the colors and I can also filter results by category (see the screenshot below).
This has really started to piss me off over the past couple of weeks. I’ve been taking some time to learn about how to do surf forecasting as part of my quest to finally learn how to surf. Although a lot of sites exist to do swell prediction, nothing beats looking at the models and understand the information behind the predictions. The problem is that the models that can help predict swell information are simply useless for me. Take the example below…
With this WAM model, I can see the contrast in the colors on the map. The problem is that I have no idea which colors match the colors in the key. Is that a 5, 7, 9, 12, 15, or 18 ft. wave height off of the coast of Northern Africa? I simply have no idea. I can see the colors, I just can’t follow the shades over the distance between the map area and the key.
So, the next time your designing your application or your generating graphs or models, try and keep the people like me in mind and have an alternative way to see the information that you’re trying to present. In my case, it would save me countless hours finding out ways to hack around this type of oversight with my standard arsenal of color-picking tools.
I love this idea.
I’ve recently started instantly deleting any emails that are over a page to read. This is mostly because I don’t care to put the effort into reading emails from individuals that can’t (or won’t) take the effort to boil the email down to core essence of what they want to communicate. It’s working pretty well so far.
The 5 Sentences idea sounds like it can help out as well.
I was a podcast freak when I had a long commute to work. Now that I only live a few miles from work, I only have a few podcasts that I regularly listen to. One of the few gems that have made it to the top of my list is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Podcast from Stanford.
Great people, great talks, great presentations.
Check them out if you don’t already subscribe.
I’m incredibly intrigued by the idea behind the Cut & Paste battles. If you haven’t heard of this yet, it’s similar to DJ / B-boy battles, but it’s focused on design battles instead.
I guess I’ll have to find a way to make it to one of the eleven cities where the battles are (none are close to NC).
