Presentation Pet Peeves
Have you heard the term “PowerPoint poisoning“?
I have come to dread presentations especially those that involve PowerPoint: this fear has developed over the years mostly due to sitting through way too many terrible presentations. Here are several trends I have noticed in these painful presentations.
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Reading the slides to the audience.
This is my number one complaint, most people can read faster than they can talk yet most presenters fall into the trap of reading their slides to their audience. I read pretty fast, so I am usually finished reading the slide way before the presenter is finished reading the contents of the current slide. I would rather be emailed the presentation so I could read it myself than have to sit through someone else reading it out to me without any extra embellishment.
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PowerPoint encourages bullet point lists.
The large text size, overuse of team or corporate logos and stylised templates encourages the use of bullet point lists. Bullet points list in presentations are terrible as the text size prevents any sort of length or detail. This means that the information has to be condensed to the point of being almost worthless.
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Lack of hand outs.
Most presenters don’t give out hand outs: they expect the PowerPoint slide deck to be all the audience requires for future reference on the presentation, most are not even aware of the note feature built into PowerPoint for generating printed hand outs. If you are giving any sort of technical presentation a handout that is more in depth than the presentation is a must.
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Slide layouts & logos.
To a lot of presenters it would seem that having a fancy PowerPoint template complete with corporate or team logo is more important than the actual content of their presentation. I suspect that more time has been spent on the layout and logos of a lot of the presentations I have seen than the actual content. Which is a disaster as the content is what is going to keep the audience engaged, not some fancy slide template or moving text.
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Lack of pictures.
You see very little eye candy in most presentations, but having images gives your audience something to look at other than text. We all know the phrase ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ yet the content of most presentations is mostly text not images. This makes no sense as images are one of the most effective tools for the communication of ideas and concepts.
I’d highly recommend reading this brief article which also talks about the pain of PowerPoint usage in particular and recommends a general product recall. I think a lot of the issues I’ve outlined above about presentations can be traced to the assumption made by most presenters that they are just delivering information: this is false as merely delivering information is not enough. You must teach your audience the content of your presentation, not throw the information at them and hope it just sticks (it won’t).
Friday Linkage
Some of the web pages I found most interesting this week:
Mentoring is something we do not see enough of in this industry especially compared to other industries e.g. tradesmen where new workers have to serve under a master tradesmen till they learn their craft. I personally find one on one sessions very valuable to my personal growth but only if I am having a one on one with the best people available: why learn from anyone else other than a master?
The definition of Done is Badly Named
I’ve written about what done looks like before as it is something software engineers get wrong a lot: every witnessed an engineer claiming they are 99% done on a tasks for days? This brief article points out that we should not consider done as a concrete definition but as a flexible concept that will change and grow over time: evolving as the scrum team does.
Advanced Segments and E-Commerce
This post on the official Google Analytics blog provides an good overview and introduction to the segmentation features that were recently added to the Analytics service. It also demonstrates their capabilities to create custom segments to help analyse and understand your websites traffic patterns.
This Google service that lets you register your domain and then view GoogleBot‘s view of your site. You can upload sitemaps too to help GoogleBot index all the pages on your site correctly. You can also check out statistics for your domain like top search queries, crawl statistics and subscriber statistics too. The service also diagnoses common problems detected by GoogleBot like broken links, HTTP errors, times outs and unreachable URLs. Very useful for anyone running their own website.
Quick Security Checklist for Web Masters
Another post from a Google Blog this time from the Webmaster Central blog. It is an old post but still useful as it provides a short checklist of basic security checks to preform for your website.
Friday Linkage
The web pages I’ve found most interesting this week when I’ve not been puppy herding or ill:
Open plan offices make workers sick
The results of this research is no real surprise, as putting lots of people is a room is a fairly efficient germ distribution mechanism. Yet it is another useful bit of information in the great debate on open office work spaces versus individual/group offices for productivity and worker happiness.
I must admit to being a bit of a Rands fan: I read his blog and own a copy of his book (its even in my recommended reading list). His latest post is about scaling as a manager to allow yourself to grow, he also talks about skills managers need and the transition from developer to manager.
I’ve been a long time user of Perforce at work and I’ve always preferred the original P4Win client application to the newer P4V client. But I’ve recently discovered that as of release 2008.2 that P4V now has the features that were in P4Win that I could not live without! P4V has the added bonus of being less demanding on the Perforce server you are connecting to than P4Win.
We had some seriousally thick fog in Vancouver over the last week, this amazing shot was taken from Cypress a nearby mountain. This has serious desktop wallpaper potential!
Friday Linkage
The web sites that I’ve found most interesting this week are:
In my continuing quest for a decent To-Do list application I have signed up for ‘Remember the Milk’ an online To-Do list service and so far it seems pretty decent a distinct improvement over Microsoft Outlook’s task management anyway but that is not particularly hard. The fact this is an online service originally put me off, as I find some web applications clunky and slow but that worry proved unfounded. It also has the added bonus of being available from any computer with a web browser and an internet connection, without any need to install anything.
Overnight Success: It Takes Years
Jeff Atwood (‘Coding Horror’) wrote an post I found very encouraging about how real success takes years and that the concept of an overnight success really is a bit of a myth. It is encouraging to me as this blog is a very public project of mine and currently the readership is tiny but that is what I expect, slow growth in readers and if I stick at this then at some point in the future quicker growth. I also think the concept of an overnight success is really a case of confusing when a project reaches a certain critical mass in terms of public awareness with the duration of a project’s development. The results of the project suddenly becoming general knowledge produces a feeling that the project has come from no where (an unknown) to be a success overnight: this is very misleading as work has usually been going on for a long time before critical mass is achieved.
This excellent little PC game merges stylised graphics,sophisticated physics, cunning problems and addictive game play to produce a puzzle game possibly as addictive as the original Bridge Builder game, which seemed to bring game development to a halt world wide upon release. If you have a PC I’d highly recommend downloading the demo and giving this truely innovative puzzle game a try.
25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors
The MITRE Corporation released this weak a list it has compiled of the twenty five most dangerous programming errors, the report is well worth a read by all programmers who are interested in self improvement. If you find the length and depth of the report off putting then Jeff Atwood has written an excellent summary of the report which you can find here.
A friend tipped me off about this site which is an excellent music site, the feature I have been using most is their excellent (in browser) streaming music player: simply sign up for an account (its free), enter the name of a favorite band and press play. Then the site will match your favorite band to other bands in its extensive database and play you a mix based on its results the more music you play and rate the better the matches become.
What interesting sites have you discovered this week?
Friday Linkage
Here are the web pages that I have found most interesting this week:
- Ten Killer WordPress Hacks
I was surprised to find that this article was interesting enough that I intend to experiment with implementing some of the suggestions. This is unusual as I usually find lists of essential addons or plugins or hacks for WordPress uninspiring to say the least. - Fruitful Time
This is a personal productivity profiler, which also has a fairly rich feature set although unfortunately is PC only. I especially like the fact it can show you the sites you spent the most time looking at as well as the programs and files. I am both interested and a little scared of the potential findings of this tool, although I think curiosity is going to win out in the end! - Drop Box
Personal remote storage would seem to come of age with this service: its multi-platform, free, has slick syncing and recover features. Rands also likes it, which is enough for me to try it out. I intend to try this for syncing personal files between work and home and also between Vista and MacOS on my iMac at home. - Learn Objective C
I’m thinking about doing some Mac development, so learning objective C and Cocoa would seem to be required to achieve this. This Objective C tutorial looks fairly decent: both in terms of content and presentation. - World Of Warcraft – Patch notes 3.08
I’ve started dabbling with World of Warcraft again and after two years I find my self rolling a druid again (I used to play one in the UK), mostly to PvP with mates. New patch notes means it is time for more entertaining theorycrafting, on which classes are being buffed (improved) or nerfed (diminished).
What web pages have you found most interesting this week?
Reaction versus anticipation
It is not enough to react quickly to meet your customers feedback as a software engineer, if you truely want to be an excellent engineer you need to anticipate their needs (to an extent). This does not mean creating applications that are so generic that they can meet any user need: as such systems usually suffer from feature overkill, take too long to develop and are overly complicated to use or maintain.
Anticipation takes many forms and covers many areas of software development:
- Anticipating Questions:
- Have you described your software in terms the customer can understand?
- Do they still want the software now they understand what you are proposing?
- Have you been precise with your description? Vague descriptions can lead to confusion and user disinterest or down right resistance to your software (if they think it is something it is not).
- Do you have design documentation you can show the customer?
- Is your design documentation actually understandable (by the user) and is it user focused e.g. work flows, user interfaces etc? High quality, readable and concise design documents are an excellent way of allowing the customer to soak in the design in their own time.
- Anticipating deployment:
- How is the user going to run your software?
- Have you test run your software on the customer’s platform with a similar environment configuration before you attempt to roll it out?
- What other dependencies will need to be installed to support your software?
- How do you plan to push out those dependencies?
- What sort of configuration management (CM) system is your customer using and can you harness it?
- How will you install and configure your software?
- Anticipating integration:
- How will your software integrate with the customers current work flow and application stack?
- Does your software have dependencies are shared with other applications that could require those other applications to be upgraded too? What extra cost would this introduce?
- Does your application have specific operating system configuration requirements that could cause side effects for other application?
- Anticipating support:
- How will you support your software post roll out?
- How will diagnose problems on customers computers when you don’t have your development environment available?
- Have you built any logging, metrics or error reporting tools built into your software?
- Is there a help system integrated into the software and is that help system’s content usable and understandable by the target users?
- How do you intend to upgrade your software or its dependencies in the future?
- What sort of testing do you have in place to prevent upgrades breaking existing functionality?
- Anticipating retirement:
- How easy would it be to remove your software from the customers application stack?
- Do you have some sort of uninstallation script?
- What about your applications dependencies: will any dependencies be orphaned and how will you remove them?
- How tightly coupled is your software to the other systems it interacts with? Can it be easily and gracefully decoupled?
You don’t need to answer all of the above questions but spending some time thinking about them and jotting down even single senence answer will help you anticipate potential problems. It is never fun to have to tell a customer “I hadn’t thought about that.” after some show stopping problem emerges…
