OpenIDNotes on public speaking
I’m pretty inexperienced as a public speaker, but somehow I landed two speaking gigs in as many weeks recently and learnt some useful lessons about presenting in the process.
I gave a talk at d.Construct in Brighton on the 11th, entitled “Ajax and the Flickr API”. d.Construct was a Web 2.0 themed conference and you don’t get much more Web 2.0 than Web Services and Ajax; as luck would have it, Flickr’s Ajax implementation makes use of the site’s public web service API to do its magic. The talk I gave described the basics of the API, showed some examples and described the basics of how the Ajax on the site works. The slides are available, as is an MP3 of the talk itself courtesy of Drew McLellan’s skilfully compiled d.Construct podcast series.
d.Construct was a great event, and I’m proud to have been a part of it. There are a bunch of photos from the event on Flickr; pictures from my talk are here.
The second talk was “An Introduction to Django” at the London Web Frameworks Evening on the 17th (slides here). Unfortunately I was less well prepared for this one, which was a bit of a pain since there were 200 people there (as opposed to 100 for d.Construct)! I felt the slide bit of the talk was adequate but thankfully the demo went down a storm—when you’re demonstrating www.lawrence.com it’s hard not to put on a good show.
Here’s what I learned about giving presentations:
- Run through a talk at least once, and preferably more. I ran through the d.Construct talk three times in total, and each time I made substantial changes. The Django talk wasn’t finished in time to have a full run through and suffered as a result.
- Show, don’t tell. The most valuable part of the Flickr talk (according to feedback afterwards) was the demo of the API explorer; the Django talk was completely saved by the demo at the end. Next time I talk about Django I think I’ll start with a demo and then discuss how Django was used to build the site.
- Never, ever put up a whole slide full of code. Half the audience will be scared off and stop listening; the other half will start trying to decode it and stop listening. Either way you’ve lost your audience. My Django slides make exactly this mistake. The correct way of presenting code is to do what Matt Biddulph did in his excellent Rails presentation: reveal one line at a time and omit anything that isn’t directly relevant.
- Have a backup of your slides in a neutral format (I use PDFs exported from Keynote) on a USB thumb drive. It’s amazing what can go wrong at the last moment—my VGA-to-DVI dongle failed at the frameworks evening and I had to switch to Matt’s laptop minutes before my talk (thanks Matt!).
I really enjoyed both events (both as a speaker and an attendee) and I’m looking forward to future opportunities to be enthusiastic in public.
Simon,
The Laws of Effective Communication have been established for centuries.
A good script that you know by heart and plenty of rehearsal time are the two essentials. If you have those in place you can do the rest blindfold. As for the PowerPoint stuff, Frank Zappa summed it up perfectly when he said: "It's the Garni du Jour way of life. You go buy a hamburger. If somebody gives you a hamburger on a dish, it means one thing. If somebody gives you a hamburger on a dish with a piece of green stuff and a wrinkled carrot and a radish--even though you don't eat that stuff--it's a Deluxe Hamburger. It's the same piece of dog meat on the inside, but one's got the Garni du Jour".
The best thing that can be done with PowerPoint is to leave it at home.Flotsam - 24th November 2005 05:26 - #
You should have shouted - I had a DVI-to-VGA with me!
FWIW, I thought your talk went well. More preperation is always good, but you didn't need to be "saved" by your demo.
It was good a good demo, though. I don't think I've ever heard spontanious applause during a demo before.
Putting code up is OK on occasion - just give the audience a little time to read it before you go on speaking. Don't be afraid of silence.
As for Powerpoint/Keynote/whatever - I wouldn't say *avoid* them. They are useful tools. Just remember that tools is all they are - they won't give the talk for you.
See London Web Framework Night for my take.
Simon Brunning - 24th November 2005 09:43 - #
Simon Willison - 24th November 2005 09:50 - #
Simon,
I can speak from a position of experience about presentations having retired from a highly successful career in that very field that started when I was 18 back in the early 70s. At the risk of sounding like the four Yorkshireman - "when I was a lad all we had were two slide projectors in a shoe box in middle t'motorway" - but the stuff we did even way back then was bleeding edge at the time and outstripped anything I've seen made with PowerPoint.
In '72 we used projection controllers with eight-hole paper tape memory to animate groups of slide projectors. By '76 we had microprocessor and RAM at our disposal. That gave us capabilities to control up to 120 slide projectors, 10 motion film projectors, 100s of channels of theatre lighting and all synced to multi-track tape decks with 100th second accuracy. Serious geek toys.
Throughout the 90s PowerPoint, to use billg's own language, empowered many people to create their own visual communication material. The reality is that a generation of skilled graphic designers, rostrum photographers and script writers were replaced by Fred from Accounts who fancied himself as a bit tasty with graded blue backgrounds, 14pt Times Roman in yellow or whatever else the standard Microsoft templates had to offer. I saw the future and it was sleeping audiences. I got out and retired while the going was good.
Even Rob Curley's presentation, while better than most I've seen, is pretty much from the stream-of-clip-art school of design that students produced in UK art schools in the 70s and 80s. It's lucky that the vid you linked to concentrates on his visuals for most of the time as his body language is sadly lacking. Standing hunched over a lappy doesn't look good; the guy really needs a remote control. He all the personal animation of a plank of wood and five minutes watching a TV news reader for presentation tips would work wonders too. But hey, I shouldn't be so picky, if it worked for him and it worked for you then everyone's a winner. :)
/me slips back into contented retirement mode.
Flotsam - 24th November 2005 14:51 - #
Simon Willison - 24th November 2005 15:03 - #
Dustin Diaz - 25th November 2005 01:14 - #
Presenting anything remotely technical ("You can request a all photos with the keyword 'dog' - here's the API call") is a lot harder than the traditional conceptial business presentations we often think of ("We must increase sales by 5% - here's a pretty graph")
I think the on going debate about which software is best for presenting is actually missing the real underlying point: it's about the approach (and that usually is dictated by the time available to prepare).
Some of the best presentations I've seen have been multimedia led, but they take a long time to prepare well. Other good presentation have consisted of no visual aids at all - and they take a lot of time to prepare too (you have to be really sharp on what you are going to say).
It's just like building a website - you need to design and plan properly before you start actually building it. Unfortunately most of us only have so much time and so the quality of our efforts is only going to be as good as the amount of time we can spend on it.
Finally, I also like reading Presentation Zen - always a good feed to have in your news reader.
Ben Metcalfe - 25th November 2005 12:47 - #
Simon,
My apologies for mixing up Dick Hardt and Rob Curley. Does Rob have Aspergers'? That'd liven things up a bit! Swearing usually comes from backstage when a waiter from the venue trips over a teleprompter cable in the dark in mid show.
Ben,
The cure for bumbling and mumlbing is easy. Rehearsal, even it's reading the script to yourself whilst sitting on the bus or bog, is key to coming over well. Knowing the material back to front gives tremendous confidence at the lectern. Charisma can't be faked but confidence helps massively.
Hey, I could go on about this subject for hours but I'll spare you both :-)
Flotsam - 25th November 2005 14:29 - #
Flotsam, better yet, start a presentation blog. I'd read it.
I am a pretty horrible presenter; I think I'm up to about 10 total. The one before last was a disaster. I gave it loads of preparation, including many rehearsals, recording my script to MP3 and listening to it during the day, etc. The problem was, I wasn't interested in what I was saying,
My last presentation, I knew the material, but more than that, I had something worth saying. My preparation time was near zero, but it didn't matter. I wouldn't say I read the audience to steer the direction, but I did basically wing it.
So... giving a successful presentation is complicated, and preparation isn't the only thing needed for success.
Jeremy Dunck - 25th November 2005 17:19 - #
Hi, Jeremy,
Start a blog? No thanks, I already spend too much time reading the good ones like Simon's and Ben's :-) I've been out of the business for several years now and have little interest in disturbing my retirement with the pressure of keeping a site up to date. Anyone that has worked in the communications industry will back me up on this one; it's a life spent stressing about other peoples' deadlines. If you think the pressure of one presentation is bad enough try thirty years of back-to-back deadlines.
The site that Ben recommended is pretty good so have a look there for tips.
Your last point about successful presentations being complicated. If the time isn't avaliable for preparation then simplify it. Presentations are only as complicated as you make them and they are only as good as their foundations, the subject and the script. Less is more is never more true than in live communication.
I've seen good speakers hold an audience entranced with just well-written words and just a company logo on the screen behind them. I've also seen others with all the budget in the world, lots of flim-flam and a great product (billg launching Excel 3 at Wembley springs to mind) and heard the sound of snoring all around me in the audience.
I'm not saying that there's no place for a multimedia spectacular, quite the opposite as they can inspire the "wow factor" and make a big difference, I'm saying that if it's backing up some thin subject material that is poorly presented then it'll just be perceived as exactly what it is: Garni du Jour.
Flotsam - 26th November 2005 11:02 - #
Rob - 29th November 2005 18:42 - #
Steve Harold - 10th January 2006 09:50 - #