Hi, I’m Matt Balara.I solve design problems with my head.

If you’d asked me how I felt last Wednesday morning, I might have answered “shoot me.” That’s how nervous I was about leading my workshop, “Scribble Your Way to Success!” at UX Australia last Wednesday afternoon. It was the first workshop I’ve ever given for complete strangers, and the first time I’d ever tried to teach anyone to draw.

In an attempt to control the utter panic that overtook me at having committed to doing a workshop, and inspired by my friend Donna Spencer’s blog post, How I Draft an Information Architecture, I went back to a method I’ve often used in the past to organise my thoughts for a pitch presentation. I thought you might find it useful, so here it is.

What You’ll Need

It starts (as so many good things do) with a stack of index cards and two Sharpies, black and red. You’ll also need a large, flat surface where you can spread a large number of cards out and move them around. It might sound odd, but I recommend that you pick a surface that isn’t white, or if your surface is white, use cards that aren’t. This allows you to really see the structure you’ll be creating. I used to use a pinboard and pins for this, but it’s far quicker and easier to place and move the cards around on a horizontal surface.

Brain Dump

The first step is to get everything out of your head and onto cards. Take the stack of cards and your black Sharpie, write an idea on a card, and throw it onto the pile. Then another, then another, and so on. Only write one idea (rule of thumb: maximum 5 words) on each card, and don’t worry about penmanship or eloquence - you’re the only one that needs to understand these. Don’t worry about order, don’t worry about “getting it right”, don’t sort as you go - there will be time for all of that later. Just like popcorn, when your ideas stop popping, you’re done. Don’t fight to squeeze every idea out - as you move along, more will come. Pick the low-hanging fruit and move on.

Rough in Some Structure

Now that you’ve got a stack of ideas, start sorting them. First, flip through the stack quickly and make a few smaller stacks of ideas that go together. Now look at each of those stacks and sort them into some sort of order, as in “this idea leads to this ideas leads to…” Now take your sorted cards and lay them out on your table. We read top-to-bottom & left-to-right, so I tend to put “chapters” one after the other from the top, and within the chapters ideas build up from the left, as you can see in the photo above.

Get the Details In

Odds are that you got new ideas and noticed things missing (hrm, how do I get from that idea to there?) while laying your cards out. No problem, think a moment and add what you need at this point. If you can’t think of what you need right away, don’t get hung up on it - make a note in red, and move on. At this point you can also add chapter titles (in red in the photo above), timing (the stopwatch icons on the right of the photo), notes to yourself about possible imagery or diagrams, whatever.

Now step back and take it all in. Read through the cards from start to finish and note where the ideas flow, and where the holes are. Move chapters around and see if things flow better. If you want you can take the time to fill the holes now, although the point of this exercise is to get ideas & structure down quick.

Once you’re more or less satisfied, do what you need to move this structure into Powerpoint or Keynote. Take a photo to refer to, write down a hierarchical list, or bring your laptop over to the cards and whack in a slide with each card’s text, which is how I do it. Now the real fun begins - Powerpoint acrobatics! But that will have to wait for the next post…

What a Blast!

Although I was terrified, the workshop seems by all accounts to have been a success, and I enjoyed it immensely! The nine remarkably nice participants made my day by kindly and obediently jumping through whatever hoops I put before them, and they remained creative, friendly and funny throughout. Thanks guys! More than one of them best possible feedback afterwards, “I never thought I could draw, but now I know I can.” And that was the whole point.

I enjoyed it all so much, I can’t wait to do it again! If you think you and your colleagues would benefit from breaking down the “I can’t draw” barrier to collaborate & communicate better, generate ideas faster & easier, and simply enjoy your work more, let’s talk.

What do you think? Leave a comment…

If you attend two geek conferences back to back, you get to see alot of slide decks. And while the decks at SXSW and the IA Summit were chock full of good content, many of them had a few little practical problems, which would’ve all been easy to avoid. I’ve done plenty of pitch presentations, so I was thinking, “if I was presenting, I would wish I’d thought of that!” the whole time.

Here are ten practical tips for giving good deck, aimed at geek conferences, but hopefully useful for others as well.

1. Make sure that your Twitter handle is big and clear on the first slide. If you say smart things, people will want to follow you, and the backchannel will want to use the shortest name they can find for you.
2. Likewise, don’t forget a hash tag for your session, and keep it short. #gp is better than #greatpresentation, for example. Eating as few of the backchannel’s 140 characters as possible is good for your karma.
3. If you’re on a panel, tell the audience to ask questions through Twitter. It can be a nice way of answering what you want when you want, and dodging the long, drawn out, “I have something to prove” questions that everybody hates.
4. Use LARGE typography. From the back of a big room, type smaller than 64 px is going to be hard to impossible to read.
5. We’ve all got laptops with us. If we want to read, we’ll use them. Keep your slides visually interesting, but go light on the text. The best presenters use the least text in their slides.
6. Do not put slide-junk like the date, the name of the conference and your logo on every slide. We all know where we are, who you are and what day it is, and we’re having a hard enough time concentrating on your incisive insight without unnecessary distractions.
7. Anything you really want people to see should be in the top two thirds of any slide. People’s heads will invariably block the bottom third.
8. You never know how well set up the projector and screen will be, so keep away from the edges of your slides to make sure nothing gets cut off. As a general rule, keep a 10% zone on top, bottom and both sides free of content.
9. Make sure your type/background combo is high contrast. If you present in a well-lit room, grey on black will be hard to read. Highest contrast, but boring, is black on white. White - or any bright colour - on black works too, and generally looks fancier.
10. Unless you’re presenting some massively complex essay, present your material, don’t read it. If you’re reading your presentation, you seem stiff and you can’t connect to the audience. Even if you flub a line or two, you’ll always get more sympathy if you present without reading. Reading is a refuge for nervous presenters, but one you should work on getting over as soon as you can.

These tips won’t make you a great presenter, but they will ensure that your great presentation can be seen, looks good, and encourages backchannel discussion. Hope it helps!

What do you think? Leave a comment…