Brief Tips for Presentations

Here are some brief tips or codes I live by to get people to think I'm a good presenter.

Preparation

• Know your stuff - you will be grilled, not only about content but presentation as well. Make sure you actually understand the content and have logical reasons for laying the information out the way you did. This is the basis of all advice below.
• Don't write everything - no one will read it. Stick to keywords, and by that I mean write one word. Keeping things simple on the slide will make the audience start to ponder what those keywords mean, hence they will start listening.
• Use different colours - a single colour for all text is boring. The audience will get used to it and start to become blind to the text unless their focus is 100% (in presentations it rarely is).Green is a great colour because humans detect green better than any other colour.
• Don't use bright colours - you don't want your audience to go blind. Use subtle darker colours.
• Don't make all the information visible from the start - especially when discussing bullet points, make them appear as you talk about them. Audience will lose interest if they see a whole heap of information in one go, not to mention they will track which one you are up to and wonder how long this is going to take
• Don't go overboard with animations - some animations are great. Fading in is one I use all the time, but don't make it take forever. Nobody wants to see a keyword whizzing by the screen.
• Use one picture per slide - and make it big. Once again, too much information, too much to take in. Unless of course you are doing a direct comparison, a before and after sequence.
• Don't make 100s of slides - audience will not want masses of images and text flickering in front of them.
• Don't practice - I know lots of people would advise you to, but I don't like it. Practicing makes you fall into a routine, you should never fall into a routine because you start sounding like a robot and and it becomes difficult to cut or elaborate on ideas. Rely on ad-lib, improvisation, it makes you more appealing to watch.

Presentation

• Start off with a question - you want to grab the audiences' attention from the get go. You also want to get a general jist of your audience so you know which areas you can skip or elaborate on. Have a brief chat with someone (very brief)
• Don't stand in one spot - you start to fiddle and look uninteresting. Move around, get the audience to move their heads.
• Look at your audience - if the majority of the audience is not looking at you or the screen, cut where you are immediately, they don't care about it.
• Use your hands - people don't know this but they like hand actions, they will find you interesting.
• Talk to your audience - don't talk to the wall, computer, screen or anywhere else. Also talk to them as if you were talking to them face to face. It certainly doesn't have to be a one way conversation and you don't need to sound like a robot.
• Never go overtime - be weary of the time. Nobody likes to be held back.

Q & A time

• Never take questions personally - they just want to know, tell them why.
• Understand the question - if you didn't get it the first time, ask again, just like in any normal conversation
• Answer it concisely - don't go over the same point over and over again. Ask the asker if they understood your answer.

If at the end of your presentation nobody has a question to ask, you have either bored them out or confused the hell out of them. Every good presentation has questions at the end, it means that what you said and had in your slides was easy enough to follow, but also interesting enough to get people to think.
Think of it as 'the more questions I get, the better I have succeeded in my presentation'.

These are the guidelines I go through whenever I have a presentation to do. I get people to ask questions all the time and by that I know that I've done a good job.

So there it is, tell me what you think.

Some other pages related to presentations:
Giving an Oral Presentation
Presentation Zen