作者：Christian Heilmann
编译：庄七
Slides are a tricky thing. The main problem with them is that, as a developer evangelist, you’re mostly facing a technical audience, and slides are a bit of a stigma for us. The term “death by Powerpoint” is more than just a Dilbert cartoon. Sadly, much of our daily office lives are spent sitting in a room trying to look alert while some old-school presenter shows us how many bullet points they can cram onto a single slide, and a little part of us dies inside.
Again, like other chapters, much of what you read here will change with your experience and environment, but I’ve found that what I share here has helped me bring the technical benefits to hungry, underappreciated developers. Also, my slides get a lot of good feedback and high view counts on slide-sharing platforms, which may indicate that I’m doing something right.
Know What You’re Talking About
The biggest mistake speakers make is relying on their slides as their primary source of information. If you don’t know the topic, aren’t interested in it, or haven’t done much work in this area, you will give a bad talk. Nothing makes you a better speaker than confidence and hands-on knowledge of your subject.
Sooner or later, you will be asked to stick to company-approved material or “reuse this great deck that XYZ made.” Try to avoid this. A talk is you telling people what you think is important, and what they hear is you. If you don’t know what the problems with the product are, or you don’t really care, you’ll get into trouble. Technical audiences are very good at spotting what you don’t know and will make that the first question in the Q&A.
Nothing is more painful than a speaker flipping through slides and reading what’s on them. You don’t want to become the person who bored you before. Also, as mentioned in the “Giving a Talk or Workshop” chapter, AV equipment hates speakers, and your slides might not be available to you for one reason or another. If you know the topic and you’re excited about talking about it, you will give a memorable talk no matter what.
Also, it’s you giving the talk. If the slides aren’t your style or your language, you’ll come across as wooden, and you’ll have to remember what’s on the signs. Public speaking is about entertaining while informing, not acting. You shouldn’t be playing the role of “corporate spokesperson” but being yourself. Only then will you be convincing and effective.
Start with Content, Not Slides
The first mistake people make is seeing slides as their talk. Slides are an aid to make your talk more digestible and the audience more engaged. For you as a speaker, they are cues for your narrative–reminders of what you want to cover in your talk. A good speaker can keep a room interested without any slides at all. However, good slides can give people memorable moments and information they might miss if they only listened to you.
Start in a Highly Portable Text Format
When I write a new slide, I start with a text editor. I write down the story of my presentation and follow the same rules as writing an online article. This way, I ensure a few things.
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I know what I’m talking about and to what extent–this also allows me to stick to time limits when speaking.
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I have this information in a highly portable format for people to read afterward–by later converting it to HTML or turning these notes into a blog post.
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I already know all the links I want to show and can create versions that are easy to look up.
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I won’t get distracted by visuals–a big danger when you play with good presentation software.
Tip: With these notes, you can ensure you have something people can read after your talk. You can mention this before your talk and give them a URL. This makes the audience very relaxed because the first question I get at every conference is whether the slides will be available.
Quick Presentation Creation Tip: Split the Bullets
Bullet points in articles and educational text are great because they break content into digestible chunks and provide a structure that flowing text may not. But as slides in your talk, they are the most boring, lazy, and inefficient way to convey your message.
Melissa Marshall explains this well in her “Talk nerdy to me” TED talk. “Bullets are for killing people, and bullet points are for killing audiences.” This is especially true when you show all the bullets at once and each has a long sentence after it. This will make the audience read ahead and stop paying attention to you as a speaker.
Bullet lists are a great way to cram a lot of information into short text and space. They are also a great way to structure your thoughts, messages, and narrative, and to be able to rearrange them.
That’s why I’ve found that starting your presentation material with a bullet point list works wonders. I tested this theory by making it an assignment for training courses and saw attendees create good talks in very short timeframes. I call this method “Split the Bullets,” and here’s how it works.
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Write out your entire outline of what you want to cover in your talk as a bullet point list
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Reorder as needed
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Take each bullet point and think about how best to represent it. Does it need an image? An illustration? Some demo code? A screenshot? A mix of all these?
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Make each bullet point into a slide, or a group of slides with the material you think is necessary.
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Add a cover slide and a thank you slide with resource links, and you have a presentation.
Essentially, you create a to-do list for your slides, and you predefine the narrative structure instead of gathering a lot of material and arranging it in a second step. This way, you ensure you present the right amount of information, not get overexcited and present a lot of information, hoping at least some of it sticks. Give it a try–it really works for me.
Pick a Presentation Tool That Helps You Present
Once you know your content, you can start putting together your slides.
Choose any presentation tool that makes you happy and can put your slides together. Picking the tool you use should be based on the needs of a good presentation.
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Show your slides on screen regardless of resolution–I’ve encountered every resolution imaginable and often get a “Can you do a 4:3 instead of 16:9” 20 minutes before a talk.
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Easily use, crop, and resize images - you’ll use a lot of images, and they never come in the right format.
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Allow you to position elements freely on screen–sometimes you need things next to another, sometimes you need to overlay a URL over a picture.
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Support remote control–since you should be moving around while speaking, you should be able to use a remote control instead of hitting the spacebar.
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Have a way to transition smoothly from one slide to another–it’s a subconscious thing, but it makes your slide show much more pleasant.
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Go full screen - browser bars or copyright lines and titles will all distract the audience.
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Have a way to fade things in one by one–this helps your narrative, and you don’t need to repeat content across several slides.
Reprinted with permission from: Developer Relations »
