If you know anything about me, you know my dream is to give a TED talk at some point in my life. So when I saw the tedPAD, and this video, it was love at first sight. With all the data available on TED talks, the statistics show everything from topics, to what color to use for creating the best presentation. They even help you figure out what to wear, so it looks like I may need to get some thick-rimmed eyeglasses and grow my hair long.
Whatever your perspective on the great American healthcare debate, it's undeniable that the discussion has spawned some interesting presentations of people's various viewpoints. The two that stood out to me were "Healthcare Napkins All" by Dan Roam and C. Anthony Jones and this animated video I found on YouTube called, "Health Care Reform Thought Bubble." While one was SlideShare's first prize in The Best Presentation 2009 contest, the other is just one person's perspective explained on the issue using motion design from Thought Bubble. I don't necessarily agree with everything in either of the pieces, but I think it's awesome that digital media has given us the platform to create and share visual "explanations" like these.
No doubt healthcare (and its possible reform) is an incendiary topic. After all, we're not just talking about an intangible, abstract policy, we're talking about people's health and their ability to access medical care. It's a touchy subject (if you were in doubt, just read some of the comments on ReadWriteWeb's post about the presentation created by Roam and Jones). However, when we have visual aids such as these two videos--and many others--at our disposal, I think we have an opportunity to inform ourselves and at least understand the basics of very complex issues (reminds me of my post about Jeff Jarvis' "Credit Crisis" video).
What do you think of the way these two groups of people expressed their opinions about healthcare? What could they have done better? Is anything lost by creating presentations and videos like these?
Nobody likes boring presentations. Even worse, boring presentations don't provide any value to viewers. If you're giving a talk or a presentation, don't bore your audience! Just follow some advice from Garr Reynolds and his Presentation Zen method.
Realize that your presentation is an opportunity to tell a story and impart some knowledge. Don't make people do the work of trying to figure out the purpose of your presentation. Tell them what it is.
Don't give it all away. This is perhaps the most important piece of advice: don't put your entire presentation, word for word, on the PowerPoint slide. Pick out the main points and then do the hard work yourself and speak semi-extemporaneously (you'll need to memorize a little). You can't ask the audience to get down in the trenches with you--they want a succinct presentation with key points illustrated on the screen in front of them, so give them that.
Bring some design to your presentations. No, you don't have to be a graphics guru, but try to stay away from using the cartoonish images that came with your laptop. That's a sin. Try iStockphoto, which usually has some good options that can add visual interest to your presentation. And while this does make more time, it's better than polluting your screen with massive quantities of text. People want to be enlightened, not overwhelmed.
Make transitions seamless. You don't want to look like you're doing a lot of work to make your presentation or you'll make the audience tired, too. One of the easiest ways to make flawless transitions in your presentations is by purchasing an Apple Remote if you've got an Apple laptop, or a mini slide changer if you've got a PC. Seems like a no-brainer, but I see a lot of presentations where people forget to do this and fumble around as they move through the presentation.
For more advice, watch the Presentation Zen video, part of the Google Talk series, below.
Resource, tips and tricks
I love data visualization and fun ways of communicating complex information. I found this video on Knowledge Fulcrum blog, but after a little more investigation, discovered that the inspiration for it was a music video for the band Royksopp's track, "Remind Me." The version shown on Knowledge Fulcrum was created by a talented motion designer named Tomas Nilsson who, at the time he created the video, had only been using After Effects for a year. He cites the Royksopp video as inspiration for his Little Red Riding Hood animation (featured on Knowledge Fulcrum). You can view both videos below. Regardless of which version you prefer, both videos tell a story with pictures and a ton of data. Reading this would take forever if you even paid attention past the first few sentences. The music is a nice addition.
Today TechCrunch posted that Information Architects released the Web Trends Map 4 final beta. This very cool visualization "maps the 333 most influential Web domains and the 111 most influential internet people onto the Tokyo Metro map." Seems like iA Inc. releases this once a year based on research on traffic, revenue and other key metrics.
This is a nice way to see a massive amount of data which is interrelated and provide some visual interest to what otherwise would have been a pretty boring report. A nice twist is iA has released the high quality images of this in "beta" asking for the "crowd" or internet community to help catch any errors before it goes to final production. This is a great way to get a passionate group of people to improve a product or service.
South by Southwest (SXSW), held in Austin, TX, seems to get larger each year, and 2009 was no exception. While I wasn't able to attend, I'll make sure it is on my calendar for early next year.
For people like me who missed the big event, Mike Rohde's sketchnotes are an excellent resource. Rohde takes "visual notes" at all sorts of events, including South by Southwest. It's great for people who don't take notes (but should), for visual thinkers, or for those who may have wanted to take notes during the event, but were otherwise occupied meeting, speaking, or even Twittering about what was happening at the mega networking event.
I'm not as familiar with sketchnotes as much as graphic recording or graphic facilitation, but these notes contribute to the type of visual learning that I love and find most helpful. Here are three pages from Mike Rohde, which show the major points Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, made during a talk at SXSW. Tony has been doing a lot of speaking lately and has done a great job turning the Zappos culture into a true story.
A month ago I posted an example of visualizing core values and how GotVMail has used this technique to make our core values as visible as possible. But then we thought, "Where do we show other important ideas about our company?"
So, after creating the original graphic for the center we decided to expand to include company goals, department goals, and personal goals. Getting these on the same page wasn't enough, though. Originally, we were going to print these "visualized goals" for each team member, for every quarter. We realized the extra paper was unnecessary, however, and and decided it would be more effective to integrate the info into our corporate wiki. With the document now posted on our wiki, updates are easier than ever, and the concepts stay fresh in people's minds as they visit the wiki each day.
As regular readers of my blog know, I'm a big believer in using graphics, pictures and other types of images to explain complex problems. We've used graphic facilitation experts in the past and every time I see their output I'm amazed at their work, and then faced with the brutal reminder that I cannot draw. It's is truly overwhelming the amount of complex information you can represent using simple graphics. In many cases, these graphics have a greater impact on the consumer/reader of that information.
In my never-ending quest to find ways to visualize information, I turned to @Google Talk, this time with Dan Roam. Roam also wrote a book this, but I've not read it, so that's still sitting in a pile of guilt somewhere. But in the video, Roam provides a set of simple tools that anyone can use to draw complex information. Well worth the 55 minutes it runs.
Unless you've been living under a rock over the past few months, it's clear there's a credit crisis that's been very costly for US taxpayers--in short, we've had to "save" companies too large to fail. There's a lot of debate about what could and should have been done instead of bailing out these companies, as well as discussion concerning what we should do now that we're knee-deep in this financial crisis. This kind of debate will only intensify with the latest stimulus package.
How we got here is pretty simple, from a financial standpoint: the cause was a combination of greed and complex financial instruments, which even senior people on Wall Street didn't understand. Credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations allowed risk-averse funds to invest in high return assets that were supposed to remove the risk. As people know now, this all fell apart and caused a global financial crisis.
The credit crisis is a complicated issue, which makes it the perfect candidate for a visual explanation, which can sometimes be easier to understand. Jonathan Jarvis created this video about the credit crisis, and it's nothing short of awesome. In just over 11 minutes, "The Crisis of Credit Visualized" explains--in a very powerful and interesting way--the actions that caused the crisis. The video is pure simplicity:
A more detailed whiteboard presentation about collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)
I don't remember when I found Wordle but as soon as I did, I bookmarked it thinking it would be fun to play with. As many bookmarks do, it sat there for a while, untouched, until I thought I would dump some content in there and see what came out. The results were actually pretty interesting.
Wordle allows you to dump a body of text into it and then pulls out the most common terms from the data. For example, we had a ton of user feedback about GotVMail's website and service--over 4000 submissions organized into 'promoter' and 'detractor' categories. When I dumped those two sets of data into Wordle, I was able to see which terms appeared with the most frequency. The bigger the term is in the Wordle "cloud," the more it appeared in the data. This allowed me to see quickly what the two data sets had both in common and what they didn't.
Below see a quick Wordle image I created from a draft document for new user help content. As I expected the word "extension(s)" was the largest, followed by "greeting" and "edit." Think about the text data you have that would benefit from being inserted into Wordle--what patterns do you identify and do you find it useful?
At GotVMail, we love testing and optimizing our website. A small investment of time generates significant returns in conversions and revenue. We also learn a lot about our customers and how they interact with the site.
Recently, for one of our test plans, we wanted to optimize our site's sales funnel (each step of the main website navigation). Starting with the first step, the How it Works page, we decided to test the flash video. For the past few years, we've used the video to educate visitors how our service works. It took months to develop, had a custom soundtrack, narration, graphics, the works - and cost a lot of money to make. The two minute video got great feedback in terms of branding. Everyone loved it.
We tested the video we had come to love against a very simple graphic that explained the service in three easy steps: One number - multiple extensions - tons of free advanced features.
The test ran for two weeks with half of the visitors seeing the video and the other half seeing the image. We quickly saw some significant results. The simple image resulted in a 10% increase in visitors getting to the next step of the sales funnel and yielded an 18% higher conversion than the video. So, less work, lower cost, more orders. Not a bad concept.
Do you have a multi-step sales funnel on your site? Ask yourself how you can educate visitors faster and quickly get them to the next step.
I've written a number of blog posts about our culture and core ideologies. Most recently, I wrote about how to keep these values top of mind and visible, and this graphic came to mind. Trying to visually represent all of these important concepts, link them with our longer term goals ('big hairy audacious goal' or 'BHAG' for short) and to ultimately show how interconnected it all is wasn't an easy task.
In order to take such an abstract concept and make it concrete, we worked with our graphic facilitator to create an interesting graphic that we've since used in company communications, a goals worksheet, and our wiki.
Starting from the left, the core purpose is the first concept, then we integrated all the core values around an apple core to give it some visual appeal (apple core, core values--get it?). Each core value has a few actions or notes next to it remind us exactly what it is.
Our brand promise is next and highlights the four concepts that are most important to us as a company. Finally, tying it all together is our long term goal, or "BHAG" as Jim Collins called it, one million influential entrepreneurs as customers. This creates a very powerful graphic with visual appeal while still communicating very important concepts which are at the core of what we do.
I recently discovered a great website called Moo. Moo prints business cards in all shapes and sizes, sticker books, postcards, and sells other cool items like mosaic frames. What I like most about Moo is that everything is fully customizable; you can even print different designs on cards within the same set! Genius. Here's what they have to offer (and no, I don't get kick backs from Moo--I just love this site):
Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery
by Garr Reynolds
Death by PowerPoint is a hyperbolic title for an all too real phenomenon in both academia (primarily business schools) and enterprise: mind-numbingly boring and useless PowerPoint presentations. Garr has some great sample processes and thoughts about how to change PowerPoint presentations to make them effective and useful. Super easy read, lots of pictures, examples, graphics, and quotes. If you want a quick overview watch the Authors@Google video where he talks and gives examples.
Key takeaways:
The comic below from Dueling Analogs was sent to me this morning, and it was a good laugh. Two of the characters featured are from the television commercials Apple produced in which PC's are depicted as arcane and institutional machines, and Macs as the undeniably cool and anti-establishment computer of choice. The third character is something Apple never added to the official commercials: the Linux operating system personified. Linux is an open source operating system that in many circles is considered superior to Mac or PC operating systems (full disclosure: Mac's OS is loosely based on some of Linux). Why? Because Linux allows individuals everywhere to collaborate on it using the knowledge of groups to produce an operating system that has been refined an infinite amount of times, and by different brains. Obviously this system would be perceived as a threat to Mac and PC operating systems if they were personified, and of course, let loose in a white-walled room with no windows (like the Apple commercials). Anyway, a funny little bit of geek humor for you today.
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