UX Conference 2012:  Four Presentation Lessons

The UX Conference organized by internet info was a fabulous place to spend the day.  There were tons of interesting geeks to meet and the presentations were full of lessons, good and bad.  I thought I'd share a few with you.  

1.  Reading your slides makes people hate you

OK, that's a strong statement, but doing this horrible thing certainly doesn't make people fall in love with your presentation.  Think about what you're doing here:  When there are paragraphs or a few sentences on your slides (a bad idea anyway) and you decide that the audience can't read it themselves or that somehow you're improving their experience by reading the words to them, does this really increase the value of your presentation or make the audience understand the words more?  Absolutely not.  
As an observer in the back of the audience, when the first speaker started doing this with every slide, I saw that most people in the audience stopped listening.  Whatever message this presenter wanted to share was lost because most people had already turned him off. Avoid this presentation sin!

 2.  Case studies need a reason to listen

Helena Simkova was a wonderful example of how to make a case study a valuable presentation.  She had the unfortunate position of being the last speaker in a program that was already running late.  Even before she said her first word, people were starting to leave.  She had to make it worth people's time to stay later than they had planned - and she did so beautifully!  The challenge with case studies as presentations is that there is always a question lingering among audience members, 'Why the heck should I care about this?'  How can you overcome this?  Put lots of lessons for the audience within your case study. Some examples:  Did you try something different?  Tell us the situation and then outline how this can be applied in other situations.  Were there problems?  What were they and how can we identify and deal with similar ones in our work?  
Helena stated clear and simple lessons for us after each content point.  By doing this, she persuaded us to keep listening for more.  Nice work!

3.  Stop using 'Thank you for your attention' on your slides

Almost everyone uses this phrase for their last slide (not just in this conference) and I think it's time to kill it once and for all.  What possible purpose does this slide have?  It's clear that you wrote this sentence when you were preparing your slides before the conference.  How did you know that the audience will pay attention to you?  It's a sad fact that most of the time they don't pay attention to speakers anymore - there are too many things vying for our attention now.  But, let's assume that the audience listened to your whole presentation.  Is this phrase on a slide really the best way to end your talk?  I think it's much more useful and engaging to have your contact details on your last slide and to SAY something like 'It was a pleasure talking with you.  I look forward to continuing the discussion during the break. Enjoy the rest of the conference!'  Try it next time!

4.  Proper preparation is the key to success

The best presentation of the day was by Jan Ilavsky.  Some people said to me afterwards that Jan must have a talent for presenting and it's just easier for these kind of gifted people.  My answer?  Bullshit!  Jan was in my seminar in preparation for the conference and he had a lot of ideas, but he wasn't clear on what it should look like in the end.  He got some presentation basics from me and some great feedback from everyone in the training session.  But, the main difference for him was the hard work he put into the presentation after our session.  It was clear that he took this speaking opportunity seriously and he made sure that he was producing an engaging and fun-to-listen-to talk that had real value for the audience.  Want to have everyone praising you after your presentation?  Go through all of the necessary preparation steps and practice it until it feels natural.  And, when you're this prepared, you're relaxed enough to add some humor and make it look easy like Jan did. 

I'm happy to see that some conference organizers are starting to take the quality of presentations seriously and making the speaker selection process much more rigorous.  It's only fair that when people pay money and take the time to attend a conference that they are provided with the quality presentations that they deserve.  Congratulations to the UX conference organizers for creating a great day for all of us!