What are the best ways to enhance your software presentation with visual aids?

Picture unveiling a project management software like curating an art exhibit. Each screenshot showcases task organization, diagrams act as bridges to highlight seamless integrations, and videos offer glimpses into collaborative capabilities. This transforms your presentation into an immersive experience, leaving your audience captivated and informed about the profound benefits your software provides.

Indeed, sometimes less is more. If your squeeze too many pictures in a single slide, your audience may feel overwhelmed and you will lose your efficiency. But then, at times, you need to have a slide that is a bit more dense. For example, if you need to explain a process, it may not be advisable to split the explanation across multiple slides. Under these circumstances, I usually leverage the animation features of the slide deck software. This way, I can introduce one step at a time, progressively explaining the whole process one step at a time. This way I am taking my audience on a journey, I don't lose them by presenting a dense slide, and I still can present at the end the process in its entirety on one single slide.

I would add here that you want to be careful with the type of decorations you may want to put on a slide. During one of my many business trips in Japan, I visited the software development department of an Auto OEM. I presented a slide deck that had been provided to me where the screen shots were "enhanced" by having explosion-like images on certain portions of the UI. The goal was to attract attention. And indeed they did attract attention - just not the right kind. Suddenly, I had all of these Japanese engineers that approached the screen, genuinely puzzled. I was surprised until they asked me whether these explosion-like images would actually show up in the software application while using it!

Aligning visuals to narration. Creating storyboard to explain benefits of your product is very effective. This can be in form simple drawing and a day in persons life kind of journey map.

I would go further here. Slides and visual aids are complement to your story. They are NOT the story! The slides are there to (1) be signposts for you as you proceed with your explanations, and (2) as a way to render visually what you are saying orally. The idea here is that the slide supports what you are saying, making your words more powerful. However, slides that are cryptic, confused or just bad will distract from your story. They become impediments to effective communication. You should also not read from the slide and sometimes keep stories to illustrate the points on the slide at the ready. These "for example" moments during a presentation where you explain how others are using your software, keep your audience captivated.

Your slide deck is there to help you explain. But it can also become your worst enemy. If you squeeze too much text in small characters, your audience may choose to devote their attention to decoding your slide... instead of listening to what you are saying! Each bullet points should fit on one line. Each should be quickly readable. In some cases, that may mean putting the really important keywords in BOLD. A mix of nice visuals with bullet points will give your presentation a high-quality feeling, but it doesn't mean that bullet points-only slides cannot be used at times. Above all, please, PLEASE avoid spelling mistakes! For highly visual people (like me), these literally "jump at them", and distract them from what you are saying.

A demo will show how the solutions aligns with the pain of your customers and how it can provide a real value, apart from features. This demo should be focused on features more aligned with the use cases that arose during your first conversation and discovery meetings. If you can perform this demos in order to show the value to the customer, the presentation could not include more than some slides to show how you understand the use cases and how the demo will show value to your customers.