Having updated today to Lion, one of the first things I then did was check Software Update. There ready to be downloaded was a 96MB update to Keynote 09. No, not a new Keynote, just an update for Lion feature compatibility including auto save, full screen, resume and soon to come, iCloud features.
But hidden inside keynote are two builds which we have seen demoed in recent Apple Keynotes.
One build in features an image or word dropping and kicking up dust, which Keynote calls “Anvil”; and the second is a build out for text only, which is referred to as “Fall Apart”, where the word’s letters seems to individually break away from the main word and fall. We saw this effect when Steve Jobs first showed the iPad 1 in January 2010 and contrasted it with the current crop of netbooks. The Anvil drop has since been once of the most used builds in subsequent Apple keynotes.
A cursory look through Keynote’s transitions shows nothing new, and layout of the inspector and thus feature set is still Keynote 09.
If plentiful rumours hold to be true, in the next 72 hours we may well see Mac OS X Lion released into the wild. As I write this, it has just become July 14 in Australia, Bastille Day for Francophiles.
How timely would it be that a software which has leant itself to revolutionary products would be updated on a day which recognises freedom and independence? It would be a fitting acknowledgment of the contribution to OS X (and NeXT before it) of retiring Apple senior VP, Bertrand Serlet. Personally, I think Steve Jobs is something of a Francophile, having featured crosses to Paris when first demonstrating iChat at Macworld many years ago, as well as featuring the Eiffel Tower when showing off the iPhone’s Google maps in 2007.
The rumours of Lion’s imminent release gathered further credence in the last day or so with the updating of iLife’s elements, including curiously iWeb and iDVD which some have presumed are to be end-of-lifed soon.
And of course with Lion imminent, iLife updated and iCloud waiting in the wings, thoughts to turn iWork being updated.
It’s been two years now, and amongst other things, online training has become a billion dollar business. I have managed to convince my own professional society not to go with a Continuing Education online program which features Adobe Flash, so as to encourage more members to become mobile users of its website where the training is undertaken.
While I wasn’t able to convince them to use Keynote to create the training, it’s my belief more and more organisations will see Apple’s inexpensive application as offering real advantages for creating engaging presentations.
But now I’m going to stick my neck out and ponder the likelihood of Apple doing a “Final Cut Pro X”: that is, a radical rethink and repurposing of Keynote to meet the needs of modern presenters.
We know that many professional video editors have expressed sincere unhappiness with the new version of FCP, while others have expressed admiration for Apple’s desire to change familiar programs in the belief they can be significantly improved, but only with a complete rewrite and rethinking.
I for one will not be surprised if this same event occurs for Keynote in the next few days. While much of its energy has been expended on Keynote for the iPad, the small Keynote team has also been working on Keynote for the desktop to judge from keynotes delivered at Apple events in the past year.
While we’ve seen nothing radical in its effects, we haven’t been exposed to how Keynote is constructing these presentations. I’m going to offer an educated guess that one of Keynote’s most requested items, a timeline to better manage events on a slide as well as across multiple slides, will make its appearance, and will require a completely new look-and-feel. I’m aware from discussion with the Keynote team this has been a high priority but a difficult one to institute to match the velvety smooth workflow Keynote offers when compared to Powerpoint.
For instance, in the last day to two, I’ve once more had to resurrect a slide I constructed for a consultee. It’s a complex slide, incorporating several movies, builds and a voice over narration.
The builds require precise timing to match the voice over. But moving from one Mac to another and with repeated playings, the timings become inconsistent. Moreover, when adopting the workaround of exporting the slide to a Quicktime movie, the timings become even more bizarre. The best handling of this dilemma is to play the slide manually while recording a screen movie using something like Screenflow.
This is hardly the best solution for a professional software. Having a sophisticated timeline device to manage multiple media and their ins and outs is a truly missing piece of the presentation puzzle for Keynote to overcome. Professional users really don’t need that many more themes, transitions and builds styles, but better management of existing ones.
Other desirable elements include editing of sound and video within the Keynote slide. Editing currently is terribly crude, allowing for alteration of beginnings or endings, but altering something in the middle or multiple edits requires the user to head to an external app and do the editing there, and re-import the finished file.
While masking and Alpha masking photos has been a terrific addition to the most recent Keynote (2009), Powerpoint has caught up, and Apple needs to lift its game and improve the Alpha masking for finer detail. Moreover, it truly needs to find a way to perform masking for the moving image. We know Apple can do it judging from its recent efforts with masking with iChat, due to be updated in Lion.
And of course, exporting Keynote to another format, such as Powerpoint or Quicktime is a very hit and miss affair. With iCloud and document updating and perhaps some extra features in Lion to come, Keynote’s sharing abilities will also be enhanced.
We’ll know hopefully in the next little while whether the long wait for a new Keynote has been worthwhile. But given Apple’s history with successful apps., such as Final Cut and iMovie, whereby an inspired worker can initiate a radical shift in work flow, resulting in upset professionals, I won’t be at all surprised if we soon see a new Keynote with familiar features left out. But I’d expect that in time, with new features added which simply couldn’t be managed in the old but familiar version, long-time Keynote users will manage the transition with aplomb.
After all, some people did amazing things with Keynote 1.0 when it was released in 2003, coming as it did as a breath of fresh air when compared to the dominant Powerpoint. It’s eight years later, and it’s time for a new look and feel Keynote which takes presenting to whole other level.
Another Apple keynote has come and gone (WWDC 2011) and another opportunity to reveal Apple’s updated Keynote has also come and gone.
Sigh.
Like so many others who’ve delighted in Keynote’s ability to help us develop persuasive and engaging slide presentations and other visual delights, I look forward to each public display of Keynote by Apple senior executives to gather intelligence on new features and guess at possible release dates.
Since its last version update in 2009, Keynote has seen updates to text and build animations but no new transitions or special effects displayed in Apple keynotes. Those text and build updates, such as the drop and dust (demoed at WWDC, below) build have yet to be included in the official current version.
Apple VP iOS, Scott Forstall demoes drop and dust build-in
In my mind, Keynote 11 (or KN6 if you prefer) is pretty well cooked. I don’t mean toast, but cooked in the sense that it no longer needs baking in the oven to convert its essential ingredients into a tasty whole.
In the half dozen or so Apple keynotes since January 2009 (e.g. iPad 1 and 2, WWDC ’10 and ’11, and special Back to the Mac events) we’ve seen the same Keynote on display. Or at least no new effects or features have been sighted.
In the meantime, Keynote on the iPad is now at 1.4, meaning there have been five versions since its release in April, 2010 when the iPad 1 came to market. More a playtoy than a real presentation tool when first released, it’s clear the iWork team has been busy bringing Keynote up to speed such that it can stand alone as a presentation creation tool as well as the presenter app itself.
Contrary to what many think, Apple’s iWork team is quite small in number, dispersed around the US mainland rather than based entirely out of Cupertino. Apple does not have unlimited resources to throw at Keynote, and what they have seems to have been mustered to make sure Keynote on the iPad is the real tool it’s turning out to be, collecting features and capabilities aiming for, but not yet achieving parity with Keynote on the desktop.
Frankly, I don’t think Apple’s in any great hurry to do this, despite Keynote’s afficionados hoping for it. I think Keynote for iPad will develop along its own course, taking advantage of the iPad’s special and unique capabilities. Last week, I witnessed students at the Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School using Keynote on the iPad for their projects having not touched the desktop version at all. They don’t see weaknesses as we old hands at Keynote do, only possibilities.
In many ways, these students resemble those of us who began with Keynote 1.0 in 2003, when Powerpoint 97 or 2000 was the only show in town. Keynote fell way short of Powerpoint’s feature set at the time, yet those of us who persisted with it knowing it possessed special qualities, found ways to work around its shortcomings. We relished each update allowing us to push past boundaries and eventually create a new paradigm for presenting, such that anytime you witness a Keynote now, you know you’re not witnessing a Powerpoint slide show.
(Mind you, even in Keynote 1.0 we had superior file importing especially movies, transparency effects, rotations, and of course superior and cinema-like builds and transitions. Only now in Powerpoint 2011 do we see Presenter mode actively promoted, although I hardly ever meet Powerpoint users who even know it exists).
This is how these high school students are using Keynote on the iPad. Pushing it without concern for its limitations, not knowing that it is less featured compared to the desktop version.
But then again if you witness any of Steve Jobs’ recent keynotes, almost every build and animation he has asked desktop Keynote to perform can be done on the iPad too. None of Jobs keynotes in recent memory have really pushed Keynote to the limit such that I sit back and ask “Just how did he do that?” something I get frequently from even experienced Keynote users at my Presentation Magic workshops at Macworld and elsewhere.
Given that Keynote sprang from Jobs’ head originally, and he likely remains its primary beta tester (I’m guessing after OS X, iOS, Mail and iChat, Keynote might be his most used app on a daily basis), there is no hurry or demand to increase its feature set.
That has to come from the iWork team itself taking their ideas to Jobs to sign off on as both worthwhile, and not decreasing its stability. What other app do you see that gives you the option of including “obsolete” animations (below)?
Obsolete Animations? It's your choice...
My guess is that what gets Jobs’ approval are those additions which enable more things to be done with one click; allow Keynote to be more cinematic in its abilities, and now with the importance to Apple’s future of the cloud (as in iCloud) lend themselves to sharing between versions, locations and device.
Something that can only be done on one device is less likely to get a guernsey in future editions than features which can be included across the board.
At the moment, Keynote on the iPad seems to be driving the show, with Apple’s original uncertainty about its tablet’s success now replaced by confidence it’s on to something big, a part of which we witnessed being laid out (or at least its beginning) at last week’s WWDC keynote.
I still keep peppering away at my contact within iWork with feature requests and examples I have created in Keynote (albeit laboriously) as well as features I’ve witnessed in other media (eg., text effects in cinema, visual effects in television current affairs) but that contact is soon to leave Apple and I’m hoping I get a chance to continue my liaison with other members.
For now, we wait. Those features I have most asserted are needed to take Keynote up a notch are those I have labelled as call outs: features which kill the laser pointer and then allow presenters to bring audience attention to aspects of their slides where the essential learning takes place, using animations, colours, focus, and movement subtly.
To conclude, we know another version of Keynote is out there – we’ve seen some of its capabilities in each of Apple’s keynotes for the past two years. With iCloud, iOS and Lion 10.7 just around the corner, one can only hope that their release into the wild unleashes a new version of Keynote which takes advantage of all three elements shown at WWDC 2011 and helps raise presentation skills to a new level.
Getting a new version of Keynote in time for the new school year (in the northern hemisphere) and final presentations in the current school year in the southern hemisphere, would put the icing on the Lion cake.
By virtue of a tweet using the #keynote hashtag, I was alerted to a posting on Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire blog by guest blogger, David Meadvin.
Meadvin, who heads a Washington DC based speechwriting service after serving as a speechwriter for the US Senate, took to task Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney for his clumsy use of Powerpoint when delivering a keynote address in his home state of Michigan.
Perhaps adhering to his own speechwriter advice, Meadvin commences his post with no punches pulled:
“As a professional speechwriter, I often tell me clients that there’s no better way to sink a speech than to build it around a Powerpoint presentation. Watching Mitt Romney’s much-hyped health care speech only confirmed that theory.”
Well, let’s not beat around the bush here!
Further on, in assessing his fitness for leadership based on what he saw, Meadvin asserts:
“Standing in a lecture hall at the University of Michigan, this potential Commander-in-Chief looked anything but commanding as he read and summarized 25 informational slides from his laptop to the audience.”
If you’ve been reading Presentation Magic recently, you will at this point be reminded of a previous blog article where I described the importance of authority for scientists, and how it’s yours to lose via your presentation. In the case of presidential hopefuls, it’s an even more conspicuous set of actions which can either be advanced by your presentation skills or diminished very easily.
In calling Romney’s speech “a flop” and very much placing his Powerpoint at the centre of his #fail, Meadvin writes:
“…(Romney) sounded more like an Econ 101 professor than a potential leader of the free world….”
Lest he be seen as merely a critic, he then offers the following advice which by now will have a familiar ring to it for regular Presentation Magic readers:
“…I rarely advise a client to use Powerpoint. When a presentation enhances a speech with pictures and video, it can be a great tool. But too often, slides are poorly designed, overly dense, and accomplish little more than summarizing the main points of the speech. as a result, the audience and speaker’s attention is divided between text and slides.”
Of course, good blog writing need a pithy ending so Meadvin concludes thus:
“Romney had a chance to appear presidential on Thursday. Instead, he just had me thinking about cutting class”.
Ouch.
Not everyone focussed on the presentation itself, with many a political pundit looking beyond the message delivery system to the message itself. When I began looking for the Powerpoint slides, ultimately to find them here in the form of a pdf, I located commenters to political blogs who were anticipating a great lecture based on Romney’s Powerpoint skills.
Let me show you a few of those slides which so caused Meadvin to think he was back in college, and which he thought were so unbecoming to Romney positioning himself as a potential President:
Later, we get to see the kind of slide that makes modern presenters cringe:
And one more (out of the entire 25) for good measure:
Here’s what I consider Romney’s best slide, not because it’s well designed, but because it gets to the heart of his argument, in trying to make a mockery of president Obama’s health care initiatives. It’s the only one really designed to trigger an emotional reaction in the audience and is reminiscent of recent Pentagon Powerpoints:
The rest of the 25 are standard fare, not worth remarking on from a presentation standpoint.
Of course, one could argue that these are effective slides for his intended audience. But surely the intended audience were not those Republican students attending the lecture (it was organised by student Republicans), but the American voting public.
Indeed, in trying to understand Meadven’s criticism, not just did I track down the slides, but also the video of Romney’s delivery. And indeed, if you just watch Romney and ignore the slides, the slides are in fact utterly peripheral to the speech.
You’ll see Romney from time to time look at the slides, but at no time does he work them. He’s no Hans Rosling interacting with his slides, inviting his audience to share in his zeal.
Romney could just as well have done without the slides, the standing behind a lectern, the lecturing his audience, professorially.
Once more, an important presentation widely reported on in the mainstream media and the political blogosphere, draws attention to the do’s and don’t’s of using slideshows to delivery what is fundamentally an emotion-based message, couched as delivering “just the facts, ma’am”. Such arguments rarely win the hearts or minds of the voting public.
And even in professorial lectures, the overuse of text-based, dulling, disengaging slides must surely be coming to its last days.
One can but hope.
UPDATE (May 18, 2011): Looks like others are joining the “discussion”. Go here to see Ruth Marcus (Washington Post writer) and her observations in a blog piece entitled: Romney’s Presidential Disqualifier
Regular readers of Presentation Magic, and more certainly attendees of my workshops, will know of my emphasis on understanding the active ingredients of making presentations engaging, memorable, and persuasive.
To do this, I enlist my training and experience in the cognitive and affective neurosciences (how the brain forms the substrate of our thinking and emoting) to illustrate to audiences how to do the walk and the talk.
As such, I’m always on the lookout for evidence that my theories of presenting hold water. This is in stark contrast to most trainings in presentation skills which either focus on the mechanics of software use, or design theory.
Both of these are necessary but insufficient aspects of presentation skills, and I prefer to acknowledge their utility, but go beyond – way beyond in satisfying my audiences, who usually pay well to attend and hopefully learn something they can immediately apply.
Today’s New York Times reports on research published May 13 in Science here entitled (with abstract):
Essentially, the authors compared two styles of teaching introductory undergraduate physics to two groups of more than 250 students each.
One group received traditional lecture-style instruction, and without yet receiving the original publication from the authors (a request has been submitted), I can only assume it was the traditional Powerpoint style of information presentation together with white or blackboard live instruction as well as experiment procedures or multimedia.
The second group used as its medium something I’ve been referring to a lot with both my patients and professional groups (like commercial airline pilots), which is the concept of deliberate practice.
If you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers you’ll recall he refers to the length of time it takes to reach expert status (10,000 hours), and how it is best achieved through this concept of deliberate practice.
The Times, in reporting on the article, offers a link not to the original article, but to ScienceNow article at sciencemag.org by Jeffrey Mervis.
Let me offer you a quote from that piece which helps illustrate the concept of deliberate practice as applied by the researchers:
The research, appearing online today in Science, was conducted by a team at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, in Canada, led by physics Nobelist Carl Wieman. First at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and now at an eponymous science education initiative at UBC, Wieman has devoted the past decade to improving undergraduate science instruction, using methods that draw upon the latest research in cognitive science, neuroscience, and learning theory.
In this study, Wieman trained a postdoc, Louis Deslauriers, and a graduate student, Ellen Schelew, in an educational approach, called “deliberate practice,” that asks students to think like scientists and puzzle out problems during class. For 1 week, Deslauriers and Schelew took over one section of an introductory physics course for engineering majors, which met three times for 1 hour. A tenured physics professor continued to teach another large section using the standard lecture format.
Unable to tell you quite yet how this teaching was actually carried out, the ScienceNow article alludes to a much more interactive, problem-solving method, rather than, “here are the facts I want you to remember and regurgitate for the test.”
If you’ve attended a Presentation Magic workshop, you’ll know how much interactivity and playful questioning I employ to eventually lead you to inescapable (and thus memorable) conclusions.
What were the results of the experiment? Once more, ScienceNow:
The results were dramatic: After the intervention, the students in the deliberate practice section did more than twice as well on a 12-question multiple-choice test of the material as did those in the control section. They were also more engaged—attendance rose by 20% in the experimental section, according to one measure of interest—and a post-study survey found that nearly all said they would have liked the entire 15-week course to have been taught in the more interactive manner.
This is quite a contrast to the excuses I hear from academics who struggle with the extra work my way of instructing asks of them, who tell me their students want them to lecture by Powerpoint because it helps them. My reposte is that it helps the students to slacken off, and that it’s not the students’ responsibility to tell lecturers how they best learn, but to be informed by experts in their field how to best take on board their profession’s means and methods.
In thinking about the outcome, the senior researcher was quoted:
“It’s almost certainly the case that lectures have been ineffective for centuries. But now we’ve figured out a better way to teach” that makes students an active participant in the process, Wieman says. Cognitive scientists have found that “learning only happens when you have this intense engagement,” he adds. “It seems to be a property of the human brain.”
Hallelujah!
More:
Jere Confrey, an education researcher at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, said the value of the study goes beyond the impressive exam results. “It provides evidence of the benefits of increasing student engagement in their own learning,” she says. “It’s not just gathering data that matters but also using it to generate relevant discussion of key questions and issues.” She also notes that “the attendance results remind us of the importance of providing the right opportunities to learn.”
The Times article by Benedict Carey here casts some doubts on the enthusiasm of some who’ve witnessed the published outcome and reasoning:
Yet experts who reviewed the new report cautioned that it was not convincing enough to change teaching. The study has a variety of limitations, they said, some because of the difficulty of doing research in the dude-I-slept-through-class world of the freshman year of college, and others because of the study’s design. “The whole issue of how to draw on basic science and apply it in classrooms is a whole lot more complicated than they’re letting on,” said Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia.
Dr. Willingham said that, among other concerns, the study was not controlled enough to tell which of the changes in teaching might have accounted for the difference in students’ scores…
Experts said, too, that it was problematic for authors of a study to also be delivering the intervention — in this case, as enthusiastic teachers. “This is not a good idea, since they know exactly what the hypotheses are that guide the study, and, more importantly, exactly what the measures are that will be used to evaluate the effects,” said James W. Stigler, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, in an e-mail. “They might, therefore, be tailoring their instruction to the assessment — i.e., teaching to the test.”
I urge you to read both these sources if you are tired of your current attempts at knowledge transfer and think about shifting from a traditional, socially-normed means of presenting to something more evidence-based.
It’s an irony that when I apply to psychology conferences to present my work on presentation skills (I’m appearing at the APA Convention in Washington DC in August employing presentation magic to explore IT for psychologists) I advocate that psychologists value their evidence base to convince governments and insurers of their evidence base. But when they present their research, they conform to Powerpoint standards of information delivery: distinctly unscientific.
Thus I’m amused to read the conclusion of the Times article, where finally, a psychologist “gets it”:
Either way, Dr. Stigler said, the study is an important step in a journey that is long overdue, given the vast shortcomings of education as usual. “I think that the authors are pioneers in exploring and testing ways we can improve undergraduate teaching and learning,” he said. “As a psychologist, I’m ashamed that it is physicists who are leading this effort, and not learning scientists.”
(Coda: If you are intrigued by the concept of deliberate practice applied to various professions, the text of choice is that edited by the doyen of the field, Karl Anders Ericsson, entitled Development of Professional Expertise: Toward Measurement of Expert Performance and Design of Optimal Learning Environments, available at Amazon here.)
Before I continue with part 2 of my series on scientists and others presenting, a short distraction featuring the US President, Barak Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, April 30 in Washington.
These are usually fun events no matter which party is in power, and offers the incumbent an opportunity to show what a good fellow he is, usually poking fun at himself, and perhaps a few others worthy of retort.
This year, Obama played on the birther issue and whether he was really an American, and to his good fortune, the most recent doubter of celebrity status, Donald Trump, was in the audience.
Upon being introduced to the attendees, an old World Wrestling Enterntainment soundtrack, “I’m a real American” was played, this being Hulk Hogan’s anthem.
From there, the graphics displayed harmonised with the music, including a bopping enlargement of Obama’s birth certificate, something one can easily do in both Powerpoint and Keynote using the scale animations timed to match the sounds.
I can’t imagine too many other times you’d use this element to good effect, but it seems to work here.
Notice too, if you stay with the video, how Obama also incorporates other videos (The Lion King) to humorous effect to make his point about his origins.
It seems to me this relatively young President is showing he is au fait with new technologies and the need to engage audiences with multimedia, despite his being quite the orator, and raconteur. Some lessons to be learnt here, no doubt.
I don’t know what software was used to create the piece, but perhaps now that Obama carries with him an iPad, he may insist that any slideshows conducted in his presence are done with Keynote! That’d be one way to tell the military brass around him who is really Commander-in-Chief.
I was in Sydney several months ago presenting to the X World conference on Presentation Magic. Attendees are those who work in university settings administering and training in Apple based hardware and software. Apple Australia is a major sponsor and usually brings out a few speakers from the US who are experts in various Apple software implementations.
I was invited to give an hour’s talk, using Keynote, to help attendees make a shift from their standard way of presenting to something a little more appealing for their audiences.
Two of the slides I included, and spoke about of relevance to scientists, was the one below, using the Magic Move transition:
Slide 1 contains the words Triple A; slide 2 has the three A’s aligned vertically and the words, Authority, Authenticity, Attention then build in secondly using the animation, Dissolve by Letter from Centre.
I refer to the Triple A “engine” as one of the driving forces behind developing persuasive and engaging presentations, especially where the presenter is allegedly an expert in his or her field, and is delivering complex information to a lay audience. Such as in Climate Change science.
The term “Triple A engine” is one I’ve borrowed from a book entitled, Sex and the Internet: A Guidebook for Clinicians, by the late Al Cooper. You can find out more about the book here.
In the online sexuality context, Cooper spoke of how the internet was (initially) causing a sexual revolution due to the Triple A engine of online behaviour:
Access, Affordability, Anonymity.
Indeed, before Keynote’s Magic Move transition came along in the latest version, I’d offered workshops on online sexuality and created the same effect using these words manually over several slides, but Magic Move makes it so much easier, and is a major inclusion on the iPad version of Keynote, making up for much of that apps’ animation feature absence.
In the current context, it helps audiences get a grip on your ideas, especially ones they may be unfamiliar with or challenged by, if you keep those ideas initially to a maximum of three ideas. Any more, and it becomes a list and the switch off factor jumps by an order of magnitude. This is because of Cognitive Load being stretched if we go beyond three ideas being held simultaneously. It’s why we often “chunk” new telephone numbers into sets of three, e.g. 212-555-2091.
There are many “terms of three” in the natural environment to help us make sense of the world. We can describe objects by their length, width, and height; we can describe an aircraft’s movements in three planes: yaw, pitch and roll. Pigments can be described by hue, saturation and colour. And so on. Things described in threes seem to be more memorable to most humans.
Because I only had an hour or so at X World, it was enough to bring this Presentation Triple A engine to the audience’s attention. But in longer training sessions, I expand with examples on what each term means, and this can itself take an hour. This is because the concepts underlying the Triple A engine are so central in helping scientists in particular get across their complex messages to a variety of audiences.
Before looking at each one in turn, please think about the Triple A’s as if they were deposits in the Bank of A. Your rich Uncle Thaddeus or Aunt Maude has died recently and you being their favourite nephew or niece their will allows part of their considerable estate to be paid to you in trust. Your task, the executor of the will tells you, is to make philanthropic advances with your bequest, in particular, to improve knowledge sharing amongst both strangers and friends on important topics.
You can dip into the account to make withdrawals to invest in a potentially risky venture, but overall your task is not to become a spendthrift but to keep the account growing so you might eventually pass it on, or forward, to someone else who can continue the good work of knowledge sharing.
Your Bank of Authority
One trust account is entitled Authority.
When you are invited to give a keynote or address it’s more than likely someone will have setup the situation such that before you open your mouth there is a promise to the audience of your authority status: that you have something important to share, and it’s worth the audience’s time, energy and perhaps money to be there to witness your presentation. There is something they will gain by being there, both tangible and intangible.
(My hope after a Presentation Magic offering is that attendees can leave the presentation and almost immediately make changes to how they present or conceive of their next presentation. That’s a tangible outcome. An intangible one might be the memory of attending a concert by a favourite performer – oftentimes, the sound doesn’t match the recorded song, but being there will stay with you for a long, long time, like the time I witnessed Frank Sinatra perform in Honolulu in 1987 or so. His voice was already compromised but, ah… the experience of being there…)
Moreover, your presence will have been announced ahead of time in the usual publicity outlets, plus the newer social media ones, like Twitter as well as push email. Your audience might receive a flyer by snail mail or email detailing who you are and your subject.
Your background or bio will usually be spoken once more by the event’s host, and you will be invited onto stage, hopefully to generous applause.
Those on the motivational speaking circuit (doing it tough except for the most famous during the GFC) will hear their audience revved up with motivational music, and I get the feeling you’re expected to bound onto stage! Often times, when hype is part of the audience experience, the host will ask the locals to give you a real “Texas ( or substitute Organisation, or state, or country) welcome”. To then sit there with your arms crossed over your chest would be considered churlish.
Of course, for scientists, this plea for authority status is a little different! Usually, to help convey your status, the host will announce the number of publications (and journals) you have written; what professional memberships (and subcommittees) you belong to, awards and grants you have received, and so on. It would be unlikely the number of times you have appeared on Oprah, David Letterman or Good Morning America will be mentioned if the audience is made up of peers; but if it’s a lay audience, their mention will add to your authority not detract from it.
(As an aside, because of my awareness of such issues, I will usually supply the event co-ordinator my own bio having sussed out who my audience will be. Groups of psychologists will get one, IT managers another, lawyers a third, each emphasising what I want the audience to know about me to advance my authority, ie, to maintain my Bank of Authority balance).
The next contribution to your bank account will assisted by the physical attributes of the presentation setting. This is where I and my hosts usually need to negotiate. Hosts have usually in advance setup the location according to standard hotel or venue properties: a lecturn with a microphone, a laptop (usually a PC) sitting next to the lecturn, or if a little more advanced, a presentation remote following your uploading your powerpoint to a central server.
I get into trouble here because I insist on using my own laptop, my own remote, and my own remote monitor for real time monitoring of what the data projector is showing. This means I also bring with me my own 17″ monitor and VGA splitter box so that the laptop’s video signal goes to the data projector and the monitor. This usually means I bring a l-o-n-g VGA-VGA cable, as well as a powerboard for the monitor and splitter box.
(I did this at the X Conference and it surely impressed upon the A/V technicians present (it was a very professional conference setup) that I was also a professional in my field: “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” is the usual comment, especially when I also bring out my audio cable extension chord, showing I have thought about all possibilities. To the A/V guys, and the host who witnessed me setting up, it stamped my authority as an experienced presenter, before I even opened my mouth with my opening comment. By the way, treating A/V professionals with respect will get you a long way, especially if things start to go south. Treat them with disdain, and should problems develop, you’ll be amazed how the problems seem unsolveable or keep popping up. Capish?)
So with introductions over, it’s the presenter’s turn to hold the stage, and it’s here that either an almighty withdrawal from the Bank of Authority occurs, or a little interest is added. In other words, it’s the presenter’s for the taking or losing.
So here’s a list of how to squander that good fortune that has been carefully nurtured:
1. You approach the lectern and give the microphone a few strongs taps, sending thumps through the loudspeaker system, and a squeal of high-pitched feedback as well. The audio technician at the back of the hall rips off his headphones to protect his eardrums, and then curses you for potentially damaging his expensive Sennheiser microphone. In his eyes, you’re already an amateur regardless of the professional introduction made about you.
Of course, perhaps you’ve been told off by a technician in a previous talk, so you’ve now learnt to just blow into the microphone to make sure it’s on and achieve the same loss of authority. Next, you can squander your authority by speaking right into the microphone and causing more feedback and a sudden cutting of volume back at the mixing panel.
Wise speakers know just how far to stand from the microphone having watched their host introduce them, and leave it up to the audio technician, when there is one, to adjust the volume up or down to suit their your voice.
2. You start with a “Good Evening” or some other salutation, then say as you turn to face the screen (putting your back to the audience), “Let’s see if I can get these slides to work…” Or, rather than using the remote control, you hit a key on the the laptop nearby hoping to start the slideshow but instead you drop out of the show and reveal the three hundred text-filled slides which comprise your hour long talk, much to the collective groan of the audience who at a less than conscious level say to themselves, “Oh dear! Yet another boring Powerpoint”.
3. Your first slide is so complicated and overblown with words and images showing not just your subject title, and your name, but all the sponsoring organisations and stakeholders whom you’ll have to thank sooner or later. The less than conscious take from this by the audience is of someone trying much too hard, and a diminution of your authority. You see, after all the introductions and advanced publicity to establish your authority, the time for proof has now arrived, and any more padding is seen as artificially inflating. If artificial sounds like artifice, there’s a reason for that. One definition of artifice is:
Clever or cunning devices or expedients, esp. as used to trick or deceive others: “artifice and outright fakery”
Here’s one such “opening slide” from a deck downloaded from the web:
The actual presentation slides contain some very useful information for its intended audience, but the opening slide, perhaps seen on the screen while the speaker is introduced looks like it was put together hastily on the flight to the conference. The circular words on the logo bottom left would be so small as to be illegible to anyone at the back of the conference room.
Here’s another one from a figure of assumed authority:
I think you’ll agree, an incredibly busy and dense opening slide, meant to convey authority, but what it conveys to the audience is, “You’re gonna be working hard in this presentation reading lots of my slides”.
Now this would be a good slide to include in a deck that will be posted online, since it gives contact details for follow-up, but this type of slide should be avoided in a live presentation for what I hope are obvious reasons.
And if you think I’m wrong about the “working hard” criticism, take a look at slide 16 (of 51) of the deck:
How can you expect to have your authority confirmed (“do the walk and the talk”) when you:
1. Use stick figures embedded in non-sensical chintzy clipart
2. The left sided motif containing much wording and lettering is a positively distracting and overloaded slide “feature”.
3. The robotic continuation of the conference title and theme further adds to slide clutter. Show it on the first slide, and be done with it. Include it if you must on your downloadable slide set, and that’s it.
4. One hopes that the bulleted theories, lower right, were brought in singly perhaps each with a gentle dissolve, but the lack of thinking about the slide would suggest: Not.
I’ll finish this first part of this series of blog articles intended for scientists by suggesting that so many scientists or those who come from an evidence-base and whose selection for conferences is based on their research being evidence-based, appear to eschew any evidence for how best to present their work to a variety of audiences, if their published powerpoints are reliable sources of evidence in themselves.
It’s not that they don’t care. I don’t know any scientists who don’t wish their presentations to go well, and the old ideas of presenting just to add to your CV is an attitude of the past, I believe.
No, it’s the usual culprits: social conformity, time pressures, working in a text-based domain which is fine for personal communication but which is shallow for large group presentations, and of course, the ease with which tools like Powerpoint and Keynote can allow for slide construction which originally in 35mm format was the province of trained graphic designers.
We’re now living in a world where it’s so easy to convey or be bestowed authority but one where our need for quality assurance of experts is never more necessary. Learning how to take control of this by virtue of your slide construction and presentation skills is I believe a very important – no, essential – component for those who wish to make an impact on their audiences.
In the next blog articles, I’ll look at the other two A’s, Authenticity and Attention.
(Note to readers: I started this blog entry in June 2010 and for reasons I will work out with my therapist – ahem, just joking – never got around to finishing until today. It’s never been off my mind to finish it, and indeed when I went back to finish was astonished that I had started it almost 10 months ago. Truly, I thought it was only a few months old! So I hope you find it worthwhile for all the time and energy I have less-than-consciously spent working on it…)
There are often times when I visit businesses, not usually associated with high end mission statements, where the owner has put up in plain sight, appealing aphorisms or philosophies of life. Sometimes these are humorous warnings against stealing:
And at other times, there’s the plaintive cry of those feeling they’re stuck in a world of mediocrity:
“How can I fly like an eagle when I’m surrounded by turkeys?”
My thoughts turned to the world of presenting when I read this, yet again, on a visit to tire business. The lament of those who seek to break out of the usual paradigms but who feel held back by the dominant way of doing things.
As regular readers will know, I’m forever on the lookout for explanations for why the world of presenting is so… mediocre, when we have at our disposal such wonderful tools to allow us to share what’s in our heads with those around us. I remain particularly appalled at the lack of progress being made by those who use slide show software, such as Powerpoint and to a lesser extent Keynote, when there is a body of knowledge from the world of multimedia training that exhorts us to do away with the usual, and proceed with the less-than-usual which has an evidence base to support its takeup.
The relationship between the eagle and the turkey suggests that it is not an easy or simple procedure to lift oneself above one’s peers and perform the unconventional. That there is a weight of social conformity that keeps us close to the ground and not excelling.
Here are a few of the reasons I’ve thought about, including the reasons offered by others:
1. “There is not enough time to develop visually rich slides. It’s a better use of my time simply to write out my presentation, then transfer it to slides, and add bullet points and subheaders.
2. Everybody in my faculty/business does it this way, and I’m not one to rock the boat.
3. My ideas are too complex to be represented visually – words are my best way to convey information
4. When I open up a new Powerpoint or Keynote file, I’m presented with a Header and subheader, and first bullet point. Isn’t that how you’re supposed to present?
5. My marketing department demands my slides have a certain look and feel. I can’t breach their requirement.
6. It’s too hard to locate royalty-free images in the time I have to write my presentation.
7. No one ever showed me another way to present.
8. My students want my slides to have all text and room to write on the documents I hand out. I can’t argue against that.
9. I’m a scientist, not a story-teller. We deal with facts, not emotions and pretty visuals.”
Now these are the overt, spoken reasons I hear when I do my Presentation Magic workshops. And I need to prepare in advance my rebuttals in a manner that does not belittle the questioner but raises the possibility that change is likely and manageable without too much relearning.
But in the field of social conformity, which is one of the major reasons presenting has been so slow to change, it’s the unspoken norms which must be addressed. It’s the idea that some people don’t know the question to ask (about how to change) because they don’t see why change is necessary.
I know this because speaking with attendees at my workshops often elicits two connected responses:
1. I thought you were going to teach us about how to use Powerpoint (or Keynote). You know, the mechanics and special effects you can achieve, as well as things like font selection and colours; and
2. I didn’t get what I expected. I got so much more. You’ve made it really difficult to go back to how I was presenting before because it’s so clear to me now that I need to change. When is the follow up workshop!
I kid you not – this is what I hear over and over again. Even amongst my colleagues who are slowly coming around to acknowledging the important of presentation skills in their work as psychologists, their own experience of the workshop is sufficient to shift their thinking. The evidence base I demonstrate and refer to (by other psychologists such as Richard Mayer and John Sweller, as well as Stephen Kosslyn and Michael Gazzaniga) helps support what I’m doing but it’s the attendees’ own experiences within the workshop that are the most persuasive.
Social conformity – or “that’s the way we do things around here” to put one meaning to it amongst many, can also be referred to as an affordance in engineering or user interface design terms. It’s a shortcut that allows the user to “know” what to do next without resorting to a manual or code of ethics. It’s what helps you walk into an unfamiliar restaurant and know what to do to get fed:
Sit, wait for a server with a menu (if one isn’t on the table already), peruse menu, get waitstaff attention, give order, wait for meal to arrive, eat (with or without added liquid refreshments), seek bill, pay, leave. (One could add “refer restaurant to social media like Yelp to make comment” if it fits).
Occasionally, affordances get it wrong. I remember a local bank I used to visit where to leave the bank you pushed the door outwards. There was a sign saying “PUSH” to assist your actions, since doors can also be pulled inwards. But underneath the PUSH sign was a handle whose affordance was to hold and PULL it. I often just stood near the door, with my banking done, and watched how many people pulled on the handle even though the word above the handle specifically said, “PUSH”. The affordance offered by the handle superseded the word’s affordance. When things like this go against our expectations, and we try one or two times to make things happen they way we expect them too – and then they don’t – we can often experience a surge of panic, not knowing what to do because our usual assumptions are broken.
Eventually the bank learnt of its design error and removed the handle, leaving behind a flat plate whose affordance was “PUSH ME” aided by the word “PUSH” above it.
Many Macintosh users who often say about their computers “It just works”, speak not merely about reliability of the hardware. It’s also about the Human Interface Guidelines which have been part of the software design rules for twenty-seven years. It’s why so many users rarely open a software manual, preferring to let the interface “rules” common amongst all applications guide them. From freeware to shareware to expensive commercial applications, there is a similar “look and feel” across applications. Until of course, Apple decides to break its own rules when updating system software or differentiating between consumer or professional software, such as iMovie and Final Cut Pro (at least until Final Cut Pro X is released soon).
The same can now be said for the iPhone and iPad. By having the software change according to user need (“I’m going to make a phone call now; I’m going to check my voice mail; I’m going to watch a video“, etc.) these devices get around the physical limitations of their competitors’ hardware, and which is why the iPhone in 2007 so shook up the mobile phone marketplace. The easy transfer of user interface knowledge between iPhone and iPad mean that owning one of them easily lends itself to knowing how to use the other.
One small visual example before I move to my main idea is illustrated in the YouTube video below. Here’s a happy customer unboxing his iPhone 3G and about to sync it for the first time. The part I want you to focus on occurs around 24 secs into it, where we see the iPhone about to be tethered. Take a look then I’ll explain what I’m on about:
If you have an iPhone yourself you will have noticed what I’m referring to many times, perhaps now with greater awareness.
But at 24 secs in the YouTube video notice next to the right arrow at bottom left of the screen how a light seems to shine from left to right telling you to move the arrow in that direction. So, not only do you have the arrow icon itself, you have an animation that completes the message of what to do – slide it to the right for an action illustrated to take place.
If you have your iPhone on lock automatically, you’ll see the same animation highlighting the words “slide to unlock”. When you wish to switch the iPhone off by pushing the top button, a red arrow appears at the top of the screen with the same animation highlighting “slide to lock”. So we have two different messages, illustrated the same way but offering the same affordance to deliver opposing messages. They are separated by location and colour, so as to reduce confusion.
In a similar way to take a call, the “Accept” button is highlighted in green, and the “Ignore” in red, conventional colours for “go” and “stop” which you’ll see even on rudimentary phones complete with matching phone icon.
The animation of the “slide to unlock” words is something I’m working on emulating in Keynote, by the way. It’s not as simple as it looks because I want only the letters to highlight, not the spaces in between. Otherwise, it would be easy to do by moving a white shape with shadowed edges and partly transparent over the letters. I only want the letters to sparkle. I’m guessing the next version of Keynote may include these kinds of effects, and indeed many of the features which make the iPhone so easy to use, like the screen glowing where you touch it, or numbers of the keyboard highlighting in blue, are the sort of call outs I discussed with the Keynote team when I visited them in Pittsburgh almost two years ago. I hope they took heed for Keynote ’11.
So let me get to the main point of this blog entry.
All around us, sometimes in plain sight and other times outside of our immediate awareness but visible once we are directed to see, are affordances that let us know what to do. They require no further explanation, have immediate impact, and often are language-independent. Such affordances often last the test of time, and become cross-cultural icons.
If we have to think too much, the affordance is not that at all, but an interference, such that we have to slow down (if we’re driving for instance) or go back for another look, or we get confused and flummoxed. For instance, imagine a flight crew in a 747 when the interior lighting during an evening flight is momentarily lost due to smoke in the cabin or a fuse blows. As much as crews train repeatedly in simulators so they know where to place their hands in the dark when reaching for controls, in a moment of high arousal, even the highly trained can lose the plot. So aircraft developers have offered affordances to reduce the cognitive load or thinking burden in emergencies.
Take a look at the centre controls of a 747, below.
Each important control has its own shape, so that without looking the pilot has “haptic feedback”. That is, he or she can feel by the shape of the control, which moving surface or unit it controls. Flap settings, which extend and add curvature to the wing to aid takeoffs and landings is shaped like a wing cross-section, known as an aerofoil. The speedbrake, which controls moving surfaces on the top of the wing to aid in fast turns, rapid descents, and to help the aircraft “stick” to the runway on landing by destroying wing lift, has a unique shape.
The undercarriage retraction lever has a rolling wheel on the end of it (not shown). And the many other controls also have unique shapes connected to their shared purpose.
One of the things I like about Keynote, for instance, is that the main controls are kept simple and uncluttered. Other controls, for more subtle adjustments, like timings and text properties are kept in the Inspector panel which can be moved away or shut down, or duplicated if need be.
It has been this way, with minor variations since its introduction in January, 2003.
Powerpoint for Windows has undergone various more radical shifts from Powerpoint 1997 through to 2000, 2003, 2007, and now 2010.
Along the way from 1997 to now, Windows itself has been revised in its “look and feel”, from Windows 95, Windows 98 (and 98SE), Windows Me, Windows 2000/NT, Windows, Xp, Windows Vista and now Windows 7.
Mac OS X has undergone its own changes too since Keynote was introduced when the current system was OS 10.2 Jaguar, which many including myself would suggest was the first version of OS X which allowed one to put the previous system, OS 9, to final rest.
At the time of Keynote’s release then, the current Mac platform was Jaguar and the current Windows version was Windows Xp. This version was current (with the addition of various performance packs) from 2002 until Vista’s release to the public at the beginning of 2007, a very long time in computer measures.
So from the introduction of the first really useful Windows version (Windows 95) until the introduction of Vista, some twelve years elapsed. In all that time, the look and feel of Windows was very much the same, even if under the hood, extra measures in security and operating finesse were taking place.
Let’s have a look at the typical look and feel that Windows users were afforded during these times, which also marked the ascendancy of Powerpoint as the default slide presentation tool for academia and the enterprise, as well as the military and government sectors.
The best way I think to examine this look and feel is to review the icons Windows uses to tell the user what’s happening, and what to push to get something happening.
Let’s look at a potted history of Windows icons:
And as Windows matures:
And into Vista:
And a panoply of Windows 7 icons, showing the change process:
Many Mac and Windows will be familiar with these icons. They are short cuts if you like which clue you in as to their functionality without the use of verbal descriptors. In the main, they are unambiguous, as they should be. A few require some prior knowledge of their purpose and functionality.
Now shall we contrast these with icons offering similar purpose and functionality from the early days of OS X (Jaguar):
Notice, above, the icons in the Dock. Ever since OS X with its Aqua “lickable” interface was introduced by a synesthetically-oriented Steve Jobs in 2000, it has incorporated photorealistic icons together with animations to indicate what it is and what it’s doing. Remove an icon from the Dock and it disappears in a puff of smoke. Laughable if you’re a Windows long time user, but unforgettable if you have been around the Mac world long enough.
But Apple also introduced CPU-cycle sucking shadows around its windows to help display front and rear proximity, and indeed it appears giving OS X the perception of depth has been an important interface element which extends to iDevices too. In my Presentation Magic workshops, I spend a lot of time on best utilising the illusion of depth on slides to keep audience engagement high, and direct eyeballs where I want them to go, in anticipation of the next element to appear. Shadows are but one element influencing depth perception, by the way.
Click on an icon in the dock and it bounces while it opens, to indicate something is happening. For some people using the new App Store, the leaping of a downloaded app into the dock is a little too much perhaps! But this leaping effect also occurs when you download more podcasts on your iDevice, when the number of the downloaded podcast leaps from the “Install” or “Free” green rectangle to the bottom tray, flashing in red to tell you a download is underway.
As Mac OS X has evolved, its system icons as well as that of third party apps have also evolved and continue the theme of realistic pictures conveying some meaning other than being a place holder. Indeed, one of the things Mac users look for when purchasing apps, especially those that have been ported from Windows, is the look and feel of the apps’ windows and folders. If it looks too Windows-like, one’s expectations that it will behave like a Mac app also falls away. This is a halo effect of course, and may not turn out to be true.
But looking like a Mac app inspires confidence, and helps transfer learning from familiar well used and liked apps to new and unfamiliar ones.
Windows users accommodate to the well demonstrated fact that its applications seem not to have any similar look and feel across apps., and indeed one must act as if to learn a new interface each time one installs a new unfamiliar app.
To get to my point: I’ve been on the look out for why so many presentations from bright articulate people are so woeful. Most of the woeful ones seem to come from Powerpoint on Windows users.
As much as I have reason to believe social conformity and outright laziness and ignorance have much to answer for, I’m also suggesting that living on the Windows desktop to perform your professional work means you’re surrounded and influenced by poorly designed, childish, pixelated and garish icons. Which I suggest is not going to lead you – afford you, if you will – the desire to make visually pleasing slides as a major consideration, despite the overwhelming evidence that aesthetics has much to do with engaging audiences.
Microsoft’s designers have much to answer for, in this regard, perhaps out of their own ignorance, hubris, and slavishness to internal decrees. That Powerpoint in its current iterations on both platforms still persists in using a floppy disk icon to convey “Save” – one of the most important features of any application – is most telling (See below next to the orange P for Powerpoint).
It’s a real wonder, given most people under thirty have probably never seen a floppy disk in the flesh, and those over thirty would never want to see one again.
This is not the case of an icon becoming a universal standard, but laziness of thought and design which permeates so much of the Windows look and feel.
I’m of the belief it will take a whole generation to come up through the ranks to kill off this expectation about the quality of slides. This generation will have been exposed to dazzling graphics on TV and in the movies, as well as their own creative efforts hopefully using their school based Macs with Keynote, as well as the graphical charms embedded in their iDevices. Their expectations will hopefully influence current presenters to change their ways.
Until the current generation of Powerpoint users take on training in presentation graphics, brain-based learning or simply switch to Macs and Keynote, many of us attending presentations at conferences will needlessly endure examples of slide construction which reflect too much time subliminally taking in the Windows desktop and its lamentable icons as the de facto standard, without thought or reason.
(Coda: For an illustrated history of Apple’s User interface complete with inexplicable changes, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber’s presentation in New Zealand in February, 2011, should not be missed, here. Although how John finishes his talk is a salient lesson in how not to do it!)
Oh my, it’s not everyday I wet myself in slack jawed “Did I just see what I just saw” response to a presentation, but by both its content and its presentation style, I am blown away by one of TED’s latest talks posted.
This is from MIT Cognitive Scientist, Deb Roy, detailing – and I mean detailing – his son’s word development.
I promise you, you have not see visual display of data like this – ever. No wonder he is turning it into a commercial venture.
Stop what you’re doing and look below, and enjoy (Oh and after, go to the TED page itself here and scroll down through the comments, quite a few negative and unimpressed, and then read Deb’s reposte):
At last week’s iPad 2 keynote, those of us watching and waiting for evidence of new features for Apple’s Keynote presentation software received both good news and bad.
The bad news was that we saw nothing new beyond that which we’ve seen in the past year of Keynotes from Apple. In fact, we saw less evidence of the inclusion of new effects when compared to the keynote introducing the iPad 1 in January 2010.
The good news – by inference – is that the next update to Keynote has been baked and must now be cooling, ready for serving. What’s holding up its delivery to hungry Keynote users I would assert is a timing issue, rather than a development issue. Perhaps the next version of Keynote is tied to the release or update of some other Apple product, like MobileMe or iWork.com or AppleTV, before it goes to the public.
Or perhaps, as I have suggested in a previous blog entry, it will be released when Keynote for the iPad 2 is released March 11 in the USA, March 25 in selected other Apple countries, and then elsewhere. Keynote 2 will move closer to parity to the existing desktop Keynote feature set to take advantage of iPad 2 increased horsepower, one assumes.
The other good news for watchers of Apple keynotes was the sprightliness of Jobs’ performance. Many had assumed he would remain on medical leave, meaning his usual deputies would give the show. Clearly, Jobs has deep affection for the iPad, seeing it as yet another disruptive hardware/software product from Apple which “changes everything” to use an expression from a 2007 Jobs keynote, when he introduced the iPhone.
If you are a presenter who likes to watch others perform, for both inspiration, direct learning, or merely to admire expertise in action, this past week’s keynote is one to watch several times to truly add to your principles of presentation. While others may view the keynote to learn of the iPad’s attributes, presenters have an opportunity to view not one, but two masters of presentation in action.
Jobs clearly is one of them, and while his deputies did a fine job, only one truly stood out as simply astounding. And when you watch Jobs’ reaction as he accepts the slide clicker at the end of his deputy’s presentation, you know Jobs has witnessed presentation magic on the stage. It would be easy to think he’s pausing in wonderment at what the iPad has achieved, but without a blow it out of the water demo I doubt his reaction would be such momentary muteness.
I’m referring here to the presentation of Garageband by Apple Music Marketing Director, Xander Soren. You can see his presentation commence in the official Apple keynote podcast (you can subscribe to and download Apple keynotes in iTunes) at 47:30 when Jobs makes the introduction to Garageband.
Before I make my pitch for the quality of his presentation, you should know Xander doesn’t get it easy. Not just does he follow Jobs’ presentation, but he is the third and last of the deputies to do a demo: he’s preceded by Scott Fostall discussing iOS 4.3, and Randy Ubillos, Apple’s Chief Architect for Video Applications demoing iMovie.
Like Randy and Scott, he has to do both the walk and the talk when demoing, something that Jobs is doing less and less of in recent keynotes. If you recall, when Garageband was introduced in 2004, a year after Keynote was released, Jobs himself demoed the software, assisted by the musicianship of John Mayer. It was a fairly complicated demo, and close observers of Jobs will know he keeps a bound notebook on hand to follow the demo precisely, yet surreptitiously. (If you have very complicated presentation, it’s wise to emulate this and print out each slide and its builds and keep it not far from your Mac or PC.)
What is also known is that Jobs demands perfection of his fellow presenters. His own legendary rehearsal routines are well known, and over the years until recently he has held the stage on his own for more than two hours without reading a script, merely using Keynote’s presenter display (where he can see the current and next slide – invisible to the audience) to cue him in. I use the same method, but it requires much rehearsal knowing what stories to tell for each upcoming slide, and segueing easily between slides and their stories. It gives Jobs’ presentation an almost personal touch, as if he’s in conversation with you. (I am still amazed at how many Powerpoint users are unaware it can also employ presenter mode, perhaps because until Windows 7, using another monitor for screen splitting was a pain).
For those less fortunate in their presentation skills, Jobs can be a hard act to follow, where they might read cue cards as Cingular CEO Stan Sigman (below, left) did at the 2007 iPhone release (to the heehawing in the blogs that followed – one can imagine how the twitterati would have pounded on him. Indeed, one commenter on the Macrumors site said: “I was enjoying my cookies and milk, watching today’s keynote with marvel & excitement when the Cingular CEO came on and I passed out on top of my cookies and milk.”)
(At this point, I’ll share a fantasy I almost put into action at my first Macworld 2008 Presentation Magic workshop, a year after the iPhone’s release. Being an unknown at the time to Macworld audiences, I was going to appear from behind the very large projector screen, carrying a whole bunch of cue cards, approach the microphone, tap hard on it in a most amateurish way, and then introduce myself as Les Sigman, Stu’s nephew at which time I would “accidentally” fumble my cue cards into the air and onto the ground, where I would then stand frozen with fear. As it is, the talk still got plenty of laughs and the audience and I had loads of fun).
Sometimes, this desire for presentation perfection means the keynote seems a little out of kilter, as if a product or more likely a person couldn’t meet Jobs’ standards and that demo was aborted. At other times, beyond his control perhaps, Jobs concedes the stage to a fellow CEO with hilarious results, as in the time in the 2005 Macworld keynote he introduced Sony President, Kunitake Ando, to discuss video products for what Jobs declared would be the Year of Video HD Editing.
Usually, Jobs exists the stage when anybody else presents, staying on long enough to shake hands and handover the slide clicker, then he’s off to the stage wings to observe. Contrast this with performances by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer where he stands on stage, hands on hips brooding over the demo. (See my blog entry here for my description of Ballmer’s epic fail at CES 2010 when he “introduced” Windows powered tablets in an attempt to gazump Apple’s rumoured tablet introduction a few weeks later.)
If you read the blog entry, you’ll see how I wondered aloud why Ballmer was so ill advised as to demo the tablet standing and holding it on his belly, working it upside down. It’s a perfect metaphor for Microsoft’s historic poor grasp of human factors and useability. I suggested in the same blog he ought to have sat in an armchair to do the demo, the way most people would be expected to use the device. Perhaps he was in such a hurry to get it over and done with, that sitting down would have drawn it out too much. A few weeks later, it’s exactly how Jobs, Schiller and others demoed the iPad.
Let’s come to Xander now, after this rather long prologue, and why I believe it will be a long time before you see another presentation of a tech product that will surpass its quality.
Unlike his colleagues, Xander (who has presented previously on stage at the Back to the Mac event in October 2010), went directly to the armchair and picked up the iPad to rip straight into his demo. At this point, we knew he meant business, yet he appeared warm, effusive and welcoming. He had a tough task, moving his attention – and thus ours – between looking and working the iPad, giving eye contact to the audience, and occasionally looking up at the big screen behind and to his left, mirroring his iPad’s display.
From there, he is word perfect. I don’t believe I caught one “um” or “er” or word trip. He pauses appropriately, his words flow mellifluously, and essentially he’s easy on the ear and the eye. His presentation is musical in its tone, and content.
At 49:00, as he begins to demo a keyboard instrument, he says: “I can type on that (piano) icon right in the middle there” and that’s exactly what he does, and we share in what comes next. Xander repeats this style throughout his demo, leading us easily as to what will happen next, even if our knowledge of musical instruments is lousy, like mine!
His demo could have been incredibly hard to follow, as I find most of Randy’s for iMovie, I’m afraid to say. But Xander’s presentation style allows me to be comfortable in my ignorance, remain engaged, and share in his delight at the iPad’s capabilities.
Xander then takes his presentation to another level, by creating music on several different devices, from keyboard to guitar and drums, and it all sounds so musical. You just want to grab an iPad and play it, even if you don’t know a G string from a boombox. Of course, the “wow” factor is helped by Garageband’s capabilities, turning the iPad from the critic’s “toy” into something you can expect professional musicians will use on stage. I imagine they can put three iPads side by side (the picture below shows 15 white and 11 black keys) and get a full keyboard, each with its own octave range.
As Xander takes us through several of Garageband’s instruments, those of us who might be getting a little concerned that we will miss out on all this fun because we’re unmusical are saved when he demoes how the software can help us create music with its built-in tools (This part of the demo starts about 54:20). What could have seen the presentation meander down an unhappy path is saved by another “Gee Whiz” demo of Smart Instruments, which wraps up his presentation. Watch how he emulates a text based slide by mentioning the name of the instrument and then sliding the iPad screen to the instrument in perfect synchrony: “We have smart guitars… (slide)… smart keyboards… (slide)… ..smart bass… (slide) .. smart drums…”
Xander then refers to Smart Instruments as “musical training wheels”, a great metaphor. From there, a new feature is shown, allowing a canvas to display various instruments in order for a song to be created, returning us from baby steps, to how professionals construct songs. In order for us to understand the significance of this technical achievement, Xander cites how the Beatles in their heyday created their songs with huge equipment which could only record four tracks while the iPad can record eight. The Beatles’ four track recorder was “the size of a washing machine and… weighed 300 pounds” up against the iPad’s 1.3 pounds. This kind of presentation comparison helps us remain in a state of delight with what we can potentially achieve (leaving aside a heavy quantum of innate talent!)
At 1:00:00 Xander finishes his presentation with words of encouragement to us, his audience, stating Apple can hardly wait to see what its users come up with once they get a hold of iPad with Garageband. It’s hard to believe he has packed so much into just 13 minutes – less than a standard TED talk.
Jobs walks back on stage, momentarily flummoxed himself!
"I dont believe what I just saw"
In conclusion, if you’re a presenter of any material – technical or otherwise – you owe it to yourself to watch the iPad 2 keynote and in particular Xander’s performance. And then watch it again to extract all the presentation magic and musicality you can. It would not surprise me at all to learn that Xander also plays a horn instrument, such is his breath control throughout his performance.
I think soon I’ll have to write that blog article about how to control for all those off-putting “ums” and “ahs” and other connectors that connote nervousness and possible lack of preparation and rehearsal.
Les Posen's Presentation Magic 