Tips for an Engaging Presentation
Minneapolis web design firm, Rocket 55 wants to talk about how not to put your audience to sleep, but engage them. It's how we go about presenting our products to clients or team members. Technology in meetings have given you even more competition for your listeners' attention. So, let's talk about why creating engagement is so hard and how we can overcome it.
One of the main problems is that you aren't creating the final product, you're creating documents that help clients envision the final product. Ultimately, you're presenting the team with a proposed solution, not the finished product itself. As soon as you present your ideas, people start attaching their own meanings to them. Their meanings may or may not be what you've hoped the final solution to be. This is where communication breakdown starts to happen.
Stories are the best way to get our imaginations going. Stories create a vision in our clients' minds. A story creates a setting, fosters empathy, opens up opportunity for discussion, helps you set a perspective, and moves the discussion away from personal opinion to business-minded solutions.
Here are five steps to engage your audience with the solutions you're presenting:
1. State the design problem.
Solutions are boring and confusing if nobody knows what they're solving. Every problem is going to have many points. Summarize what you've heard.
2. Discuss the values and approach you brought to the problem.
Discuss the approach you used to solve the problem. What research did you choose and why? Outline the methods you used in general terms and explain how you maintained objectivity.
3. Describe your process and the ideas you experienced along the way.
Get more specific about your research and how the solution started to form. This is where having a narrative becomes extremely useful because you want your audience to empathize with the people who use the product you're trying to improve.
4. State the unifying concept that emerged from your process.
Always have a unifying concept. This is what steers the whole ship and glues all of the pieces together. If the research has been done well and you've had enough time to analyze the results, the conclusion should feel obvious.
5. Present your drawings and models, always describing them in relationship to the concept.
Talk about your documents in context. You've created meaning around an article that would have been two dimensional otherwise.
"Web sites are moving targets built on moving targets." To expect an airtight solution disregards the dynamic nature of the web. Everyone must embrace the constant changes of this medium and create strategies that accommodate for it.
