The Fine Art of Demoing: Content design
The eight seconds rule is the one I live by when designing my presentations. It’s the sole principle I follow when distributing content on the slides and designing my demo segments. You can read more about how why that’s important in the previous post in The Art of Demoing series, but now, let’s see some of the guidelines you should follow when designing your presentations.
Let’s start with:
Getting two birds with one stone
All that this means is that if you are smart when designing your slides, you can both, spread the content in more digestible chunks AND have something new to show every eight seconds.
Consider the following slide…
It’s extremely cluttered with text. As soon as this slide pops up, your audience will no longer be listening to you but reading extensively.
Don’t get me wrong, the slide includes the right information and as a handout at the end of a call - it’s more than ok. But there are far more effective ways to present the information.
I want this to be as effective as possible, so let’s take a look at how the same information can be presented more effectively:
Pay attention to how more dynamic the presentation is and how much easier it’s to follow and it works as a prop to the actual story I’m telling rather than trying to expose it itself. There is something happening on the screen at least once every 8 seconds to draw attention to the screen. This keeps the flow of the story. The information is delivered in a loose non-cluttered way that is easy to digest and the audience remembers a lot more from the actual story.
A presentation is more than just your slide deck.
It’s everything combined - slides, delivery, story, design… Each one is a piece to complete the puzzle.
We will touch on all of those in the Fine Art of Demoing series.
If you need to remember three things from this post, these are the ones:
Show only what you absolutely need on the slide. You can add the rest in your storytelling.
Use the slide deck as a prop to draw attention.
Spread out content as much as possible. Fast slides are engaging slides. As long as they aren’t an epilepsy hazard of course.