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Off-topic HN rant: I think this is an unfortunate definition of skeuomorphism: "an incidental feature of an object that persists even in a new medium where the
by wilg 7y ago
Off-topic HN rant: I think this is an unfortunate definition of skeuomorphism: "an incidental feature of an object that persists even in a new medium where the incidental feature no longer makes sense".
It is good to understand the origins of features, but it's not a good idea to apply a value judgement to it based on their origin.
The "official" (i.e. trivially googlable) definition doesn't have this value judgement: "an object or feature which imitates the design of a similar artifact made from another material" and "an element of a graphical user interface which mimics a physical object".
I would encourage people to more clearly separate the idea of porting ideas from other mediums and the concept of a "vestigial property" of some feature.
That said, I think these are valid usability concerns for presentations, but depending on the context of a presentation, you may want to more tightly control the flow.
I've worked with executives who insisted the slides get sent out before the presentation, which IMHO is an antipattern because it takes away your tools for clearly presenting the information and encourages bikeshedding. (The other antipattern is making slide decks for executives.)
It might be cool to have presentation software that isn't "slide" based exactly, but still lets you go BACK but not FORWARD, and also adjust the text size and other aspects of the presentation. Ideally also you'd limit the "creativity" available in the presentation format to make it so people cannot make terrible slide decks.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> slides get sent out before the presentation, which IMHO is an antipattern because it takes away your tools for clearly presenting the information I sort of disagree with this. I'd argue that having complete control over information transfer is desirable only if you're trying to manipulate someone, not when you're trying to inform them. I.e. when you're a salesman, not a scholar. Having slides available beforehand lets one prepare, keeping a cache of points of interest their head. Having slides available for random access lets one focus better and catch up in case the speaker went too fast past a slide. Having slides available after the talk is essential to not forgetting everything 5 minutes after the talk ends.
- wilg 7y agoI understand your point, but I don't think it changes the manipulability – you could just manipulate the messaging on the slides. But the problem is that the slides aren't necessarily perfectly formatted so as to be consumable on their own. For example, perhaps important context was forgotten about a chart, but someone reading it ahead of time without the author present will get the wrong idea and focus the whole meeting on that. Or you increase the workload of preparing the deck because now you're trying to make it suit two purposes. So I think the author should present the information the way they intended, have follow-up in realtime or shortly after, and make the slides available during or afterward for reference.