You’re on mute: the art of presenting in a Zoom era.
Originally this post was to accompany a past post around my struggles of public speaking. How physically standing in front of people and talking aloud can be daunting.
Now that we are remote, I thought this article might be redundant. Far from it. As we are forced to present via video, gone are the days of moving in physical space, using your body to emphasise meaning or the weight of a statement. You’re now sitting in a chair, your chair, presenting to video squares on a screen or even faceless avatars.
Benefits — you’re in control of your environment. You don’t need to worry about the physical space, if the venue has the right adapter, whether people turn up late and disrupt you, or even what you wear.
Negatives — people might be more distracted by their own surroundings. This is why what you’re communicating needs to be that much more engaging.
One of the most important attributes a designer should have is being a great communicator, whether that’s to your team, clients or even users. It is essential that you are able to articulate your thoughts and the rationale behind your decisions whether this is written or spoken. Writing is part of design.
“Words are one of the most powerful design materials available. They convey deeply complex meanings in a compact space.†— Scott Kubie
It can be daunting to start writing if you don’t do it regularly. It’s ok, it just takes practice. Being dyslexic I’ve always shied away from it. I’d much rather find an image that conveys what I’m trying to say. To overcome some of my barriers, I would open a google doc, add some content and then also open up Keynote and start looking for images. We’ve all done it, don’t lie. I’m sure I’m not the first to do it, nor the last.
But then I found a resource in my former colleague Jeremy Keith who created a technique for writing talks. If you don’t know Jeremy, you should. He’s spoken at pretty much all of the events designers or developers would want to attend, he’s written many books and one of the first alongside Jina Anne to think about Design Systems.
Below I’ve outlined how I used his technique to create a talk that I gave at a Ladies That UX event. You can use it for a talk you are giving or even adapt it for a Zoom presentation. Either way I hope it’s useful for you.
“There are two aspects to preparing a talk: the content and the presentation. I like to keep the preparation of those two parts separate.[…] So, to begin with, I’m not thinking about how I’m going to present the material at all. I’m only concerned with what I want to say.†Jeremy Keith.
Step Zero — Banish your inner critic.
“You know who I mean. That little asshole with the sneering voice that says things like “you’re not qualified to talk about this†or “everything has already been said.†Find a way to realise that this demon is a) speaking from inside your head and b) not real.†Jeremy Keith.
I had committed to the talk. It was advertised, the Eventbrite page was launched, people signed up. I couldn’t back out. Trust me: that little asshole spoke to me on many occasions. People bang on about comfort zones and how you should step out of them, how you will grow…. At this point I was perfectly fine where I was. I didn’t need to do a talk.
Step 1 — Start scribbling out a mind map
“The idea here is to get everything out of my head. Don’t self-censor. At this stage, there are no bad ideas. This is a “yes, and…†exercise, not a “no, but…†exercise. Divergent, not convergent.†Jeremy Keith.
My talk hadn’t truly been defined at this point, I purposely left the title loose since I didn’t have a clear definition of my talk. It was around UX and my journey, so pretty broad. For those UX designers reading this, you know how big that scope can get. I created a good old fashioned brainstorm, or if we are being technical, a Mind Map. I put everything down; subjects that I really wanted to talk about, subjects that should be mentioned or even words that sparked my imagination. I was watching a designer on an Adobe Live class once and whilst he was experimenting he said “Pixels are freeâ€. It’s the same concept with this. It’s not really going to cost you anything to get an idea out of your head.
Step 2 — Create chunks
“ I start to group related ideas together. Then I give a label to each of these chunks. […]Each chunk should represent a self-contained little topic that you might talk about for 3 to 5 minutes.†Jeremy Keith
For each stem of my mind map or an idea, I broke it down into a manageable chunk. You could do this with post-it notes or a new piece of paper. I then created a new file for each chunk (I used text edit). Seeing all these files was slightly overwhelming but this is where his technique really helped.
When I had a spare ten minutes I picked one idea and started writing. I didn’t worry about which chunk I picked first, I just started writing. I didn’t stop. I just got it out. I also wasn’t precious with my choice of words. Some files were just bullet points at this stage. The idea being that I could just open one chunk at a time. Before you know it you should have a fair amount of files. In my case I had 30 files. I had all these files, with no structure, no order, no narrative.
Step 3 — Find the narrative thread
“Finding the narrative thread is tricky work, but at least, by this point, it’s its own separate task: if I had tried to figure out the narrative thread at the start of the process, or even when I was chunking things out, it would’ve been overwhelming. Now it’s just the next task in my to-do list.†Jeremy Keith.
We sat down with all the files printed out. By having them printed out I saw how much I had actually achieved in the short amount of space. Don’t worry: I wrote far more than I intended (you might only have 10 chunks). At this point, I felt overwhelmed. How was I going to say all of this in 20 minutes? Truth is, I wasn’t.
When you present to a client you could talk about the tiny details, the hundreds of times you moved the pixels around the screen, the hours of research findings, but you can’t. You have to edit down your main discussion points and tell the story.
Jeremy explained five different narrative frameworks that could be used:
- Flashback
- Dialogue
- In Media Res
- Backstory
- Distancing Effect
At this point I had multiple stories that I could tell and narrative frameworks options. What is it that I wanted to say? If people walked away from my talk what three key points would I want someone remembering? With that in mind I selected and grouped the print outs into three areas: personal, process, philosophical.
Don’t worry if each section doesn’t flow. When writing I dipped between bullet points, full sentences and some snippets. If you have access to a printer, I recommend printing them. Within my three areas, I sliced them up, and moved them to create a dialogue, added space for segues. This was surprisingly easy. I found it much easier to comprehend. Things are easy to move and I could literally see the story I was about to tell.
Step 4 — Slide design
“The slides should illustrate the talk …but the slides are not the talk.[…] It’s all too easy to use the slides as a defence mechanism. You’re in a room full of people looking towards you. It’s perfectly reasonable for your brain to scream, “Don’t look at me! Look at the slides!†But taken too far, that can be interpreted as “Don’t listen to me!†Jeremy Keith.
As mentioned in the past I have approached this is in a completely different order. This was foreign to me. I had to hold back from thinking about typefaces, the colour palette and sourcing imagery. I had to trust this process.
This is the one of the most important lessons from this technique. First I read through the talk in one go. I figured out where I needed to pause. Where I needed the audience to understand. Where I needed to emphasise a thought. These became the different slides, now was the time to open Keynote. In the speaker notes I pasted the broken down content.
Ever pasted a long copy in the speaker notes and ended up scrolling through it mid presentation? Stop. Just create a new slide with the same content on it, the audience won’t know. Plus you can figure out your timing when practising. Hold ten seconds on that slide, on click move to the new point with the same slide.
Once this was complete I could finally add visuals and practise.
Summary
In short, try this process. Trust me: it’s a lot easier than trying to find a funny gif that tells your story.
Oh, people enjoyed my talk. ðŸ‘ðŸ»
