Being boring
iA has an interesting article about business presentations, titled Being Boring. The text is introducing their new coming product named Presenter. I´m quoting their claims – which resonate with me – below:
PowerPoint gets us started—with a procrastination bonanza, by delaying the decision on what we want to say and how we structure it in favor of picking fonts and colors.
No matter how experienced you are as a speaker, designer and typographer, you will never quite know what you’re supposed to do with a slide. Is it a picture? Is it an index card? Is it a page? Outside of presentation apps we don’t use slides to communicate, so they feel a little awkward and unfamiliar.
Speaker notes are supposed to help, but they can be hard to read with “adrenaline eyes”. That’s why the bullet points sneak into our slides. Bullets are great in theory, but in practice, they trigger a lot of umms and errs as we fumble to expand them. And they are hard to process for spectators, too.
The audience gets bored when our presentation isn’t moving them towards their personal goals. … Boring presentations lower our status and leave us on the sidelines, watching others playing the game. We lose our credibility and the opportunity to influence people in the future.
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