Better presentations with lessons learned from the makers of apps

As you know, preparation is key to any successful presentation, however many presenters fail to prepare adequately. A powerful lesson can be learned from the digital app industry, and specifically the field of UX (User Experience). UX is a measure of how it feels to use a product or app. It's safe to say that many of us use digital apps on a daily basis, and I’m sure you can recall a time when using an app wasn’t fun. Words like frustrating, annoying, infuriating come to mind when we think of bad experiences with digital products. These are powerful emotions. UX research techniques are used by every successful digital product company, from Google to Amazon to guide product, marketing and operations decisions to help these companies thrive. So what can a presenter learn from these techniques to help them deliver a better audience experience (AX)? In this article I will share three big learnings from UX Research, and show you how these principles can be applied to result in a better outcome for your presentations, because whether you’re presenting to delegates at a conference, investors at a pitch, or your boss at a stand up, every audience wants nothing less than a great experience.?

Learning 1: People and personas.?

Humans are a curious species. Just like detectives, we gather info about the lives of other people all the time. Whether it’s following the latest tips from our celebrities, or just seeing who is flavour of the month in the neighbourhood. Knowing about the actions and opinions of other people informs our own actions and opinions and helps us to navigate our sometimes complex social world. But how do you know and? understand a person in a way which is easy to recall and informative to your decision making process??

In the world of UX, Digital product companies are always looking for tools to help inform fast paced decision making in response to people's needs and behaviours. Rather than getting bogged down in the detail of a person's individual characteristics, they group them according to shared characteristics in what are known as personas. The shared characteristics might be demographical or behaviour based. For example, one persona might be a female professional in her 40s, who enjoys playing team sports and cares about social justice. The trick is to build a set of personas with varying preferences, to give you visibility of the full spectrum of your users’ needs and behaviours.?

As part of your presentation preparation process, you can adapt and use personas to inform your content and delivery. To start I recommend asking the presentation or event organiser for some hard data on the audience. How many people will attend the presentation? Ask for names and roles? Then organise these into groups. Let's take an example; Say you are presenting an IT solution to a large audience at a hospitality conference. You might find that the audience arranges naturally into the following personas: accommodation providers, food providers, tour operators, transport providers, or visitor attractions. You then ensure your presentation includes specific content which appeals to each persona throughout your presentation. If your presentation is more up close and personal, such as an investor pitch, you can still request the names of the audience members and categorise them by persona. Whatever the scale of your audience, you will find they can be arranged into personas.?

There are many rich sources of data out there to help build your personas. Do some in-depth desk research on the individuals. Scan the internet for their digital footprint. Are they on social media? If so, trawl through their activity, interests and network. Do they publish content or articles? What do they look like? What are their interests and hobbies? Do they have kids? Do they champion any causes? Whatever you can find, pull this together into the persona. It's through this meticulous process of data synthesis that your audience personas emerge, guiding you the presenter towards tailored content that deeply resonates with the audience's sensibilities.

Lesson 2: Get to know your audience by listening.??

Great understanding starts with a well framed question followed by active listening. There is a popular UX research technique known as in-depth interviews, which are basically one-to-one interviews with users. The aim is to understand their needs and behaviours by letting them recall relevant past experiences.?

Again you can use this technique when preparing for your presentation. Start by finding interview candidates from the same persona as your actual audience members. Going back to our hospitality conference presentation example, you start by recruiting interview candidates from the accommodation provider persona. Ask around your own network of peers, friends and family, for a contact who fits the persona. When you’ve found candidates, you’re ready to start the interviews. Ask about their background in hospitality and the challenges they face (eg around their IT systems). Steer them towards describing their real experiences of the challenges. Ask them how this affected their situation. What did they do in response to the challenge? As you progress you will begin to build a picture of the needs and behaviour of this persona. Use these insights to supercharge your persona profiles, and let new understanding guide your presentation.?

Lesson 3: Let their choices guide you.?

We’re lucky to live in a world of choices. We choose the style of clothes we wear, the breakfast cereal we eat, the music we listen to and the friends we keep. Similarly presenters have choices to make during the preparation process. Eg, Should you go long or short? Should you display a prop or not? Should you give a detailed background, or keep it light? Ultimately these choices affect the success of your presentation? But how do you know which choices will lead to greater success? The answer lies in the data, and the makers of digital apps know this.??

For a long time they have employed a technique known as A/B testing to test their product ideas. The practice involves putting multiple versions of a design in front of real users, and letting their feedback decide the most successful version. It’s been proven to be an extremely powerful technique in a range of situations and was instrumental in the successful election of Barack Obama as US president in 2008 when campaign managers ran multiple versions of specific email campaigns, and let the users decide which was most appealing with their clicks and interactions. When scaled up to the level of the American presidency race, the insights gained from this had a huge impact on not only the election and the wider political world.?

In presentation preparation, A/B testing can be an extremely powerful tool to refine and validate variations in your possible content and delivery. Whilst this technique can bring benefits at all stages of your presentation preparation, if you’re in the early stages, you could simply show the test candidates two or more versions of your presentation outline, and ask them to rate their understanding of the topic or what action they would take in response to your CTA. If you’re at a more advanced stage, you could share two or more recorded rehearsals of your presentation.The key is to test early and test often, and trust the data.?

Summary

So to summarise, presenting to an audience doesn’t need to involve guess work. Make a little extra time in your preparation process and incorporate some research techniques such as those outlined above, then let the data guide you. You’ll be more confident in your message and your audience might just love you for it.