10 ms·

Start presentations on the second slide

455 points by andyjohnson0 2y ago

davidkunz 2y ago
Like in video games: Show the door before the key.
OskarS 2y ago
It's very true. When watching programming talks on YouTube, I often hover the mouse over the time bar to find the first preview which looks like the slide has syntax highlighted code on it. I'm here for the cool coding stuff, not the preamble!
- 8372049 2y ago
  Rule of thumb for Youtube videos is to hit 3 to get to where the video actually starts. Obviously not meant to be taken literally, but surprisingly often could be.
herpdyderp 2y ago
Genius for technical presentations. I must admit, though, I’m always turned off when entertainment mediums do this (fiction novels, TV Shows, etc.). If the action sequence doesn’t need any background info to make sense, I argue you can just skip the background info altogether. Don’t ramp the pace up and then drop it back down to nothing so quickly.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  News stories do this a lot, particularly sports or politics. But I suppose they lead with the most important part of the story so there's a reason for it.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  In entertainment mediums it often feels like a last-minute band-aid. A novel ramps up too slowly, test readers are giving up on the story before the interesting stuff happens, so the editor suggests "let's just put that cool fight scene in chapter 10 in the beginning so people know what the book is really about". That rarely works well
simonw 2y ago
I gave a talk at PyCon a few weeks ago where I was really struggling to fit my content into the time slot. I ended up editing out the first couple of minutes of the talk - the bit where I ramped up to the topic, gave a little bit of background about why I was qualified to talk about it, that kind of thing. Instead I launched straight into my first point (which included a good joke)... and it worked. A lesson I learned is that if the topic is interesting enough you can skip the intro and jump straight in to that material, and if you combine that with a joke you can capture the audience's attention just fine.
- matsemann 2y ago
  I agree, but one good thing about starting with the soft and boring parts (like your name and credentials), is that it's easy to do when you're nervous in the beginning. Can't really stumble that too much, and then you're warmed up for the real talk. But of course, the shorter you can keep it the better. Instead I often try to memorize my first lines, word by word. Then I know I will nail them when at my most anxious, and then the rest can be talking more freely.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    I also assumed that part of the first few minutes was filler while butts are still trying to find seats, still chatting amongst themselves, or haven't quite closed whichever social media app as well as letting the presenter shake off any butterflies
    - ghaff 2y ago
      That's a good point. A presentation isn't really a written story or even a film. You don't want the people who missed the first few minutes to be "dazed and confused." :-) You don't want to do too much throat clearing (to use the metaphor a former boss used with respect to writing research pieces). But you probably don't want the first few minutes to be too essential to be jumping into the rest of the talk either.
  - larsrc 2y ago
edgarvaldes 2y ago
In that case, is the "first slide" even that important?
- inhumantsar 2y ago
  it's not that it's not important, it's just not that engaging. Most of the time there's a minute or two where the first slide is up but everyone is still getting settled. The less engaging info can be on that first slide and when the talk starts you can skip ahead to the second slide without discussing that first one.
time-less-ness 2y ago
When I present, I just go through the introductory stuff at lightspeed. Who am I? Why am I here? What do I do? What is the history of this topic? Why should you care? All that takes about 30 seconds. If you aren't talking like Ben Shapiro for this bit, you're talking too slow.
soared 2y ago
Maybe a good way to trim off unnecessary context but for presentations I’ve done on concepts novel to the audience, the context is critical for understanding. Skipping to some meat then giving context just produces more confusion. I much prefer leading with “why does my audience care”. They don’t care about context - but I like literally saying “you should care about this because X” or “after this presentation you will be able to do Y”. That engages people and focuses your presentation on the lens of audience’s needs rather than yours. Then context is reasonable as they’re hooked and want to know where you’re going.
AndrewOMartin 2y ago
I always start a technical presentation with "spoilers", for anyone who is busy or is happy to just trust me, they can leave almost immediately with the most important bit of information. Anyone else who wants disagree, or wants proof any claims can get involved.
- marginalia_nu 2y ago
  Yeah, the inverted pyramid[1] is almost always a good pattern when conveying important information. Not only do you end up telling people why they should care first, the less interesting stuff ends up at the end, so if you run over time (or someone zones out), they aren't missing much. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
  - hackernewds 2y ago
    In practice, this ends up with attendees interrupting with pointless questions that are covered in the next slides
    - anamexis 2y ago
      I think that is an invariant of presentations
- eisenman 2y ago
  This tracks with the product demo idea of ‘do the last thing first’. No need to make the audience ‘earn’ the payoff - just skip right to the good stuff and then go over the rest for the folks that care. (This and much more from reviews of a whole bunch of demos here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220126051034/https://www.secondderivative.com/surprising-new-insights.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220126051034/https://www.secon...)
- floatrock 2y ago
  Similar to BLUF -- Bottom Line Up Front. Hear that one used more for memos or emails, but same concept. Give people a sense of what's at the end so they see where the background is going. Use the story-spine if you want, but show a trailer to convince the audience there's some juicy explosion-ladden scenes at the end of the rainbow.
albert_e 2y ago
Isn't this the PPT version of this movie trope? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res
- ska 2y ago
  It’s used in some movies also, but the idea predates movies by millennia :)
  - hackernewds 2y ago
    No need to be snarky :)
    - ska 2y ago
      No snark was present :)
  - kleiba 2y ago
    Correct. This technique really seemed to have been very popular in main stream cinema around 5 to 2 years ago, I think. So much so that my best buddy developed a kind of aversion to "3 hours earlier" etc. being displayed across the screen after the opening act.
cseleborg 2y ago
This very technique is why I loved Salman Khan's teaching videos on Khan Academy so much. On any topic, he goes straight to the content, no intro whatsoever.
- hackernewds 2y ago
  Sally Bhai never misses a beat. Khan Academy has been a generational change for education
seidleroni 2y ago
As the article mentions, this is also used by authors. I went to a book signing for Mark Z. Danielewski, the author of House of Leaves and he mentioned that for his books, he always ends up throwing out the beginning of the book.
jerf 2y ago
More generally, you should view presentations as stories. Obviously not stories presented solely for their drama as one might watch a movie, but the fundamental "conflict -> tension raising -> resolution" cycle ought to be in your presentation, multiple times as needed just as they nest within a traditional story. It is tempting to the technical mind to present them as we see mathematical proofs, building from the fundamentals up to the final result in a completely-temporally-ordered manner, but the reasons that works in a math text don't apply to presentations. And a lot of people don't find it all that useful in math texts intended for learning either, if you read one of HN's periodic discussions of "how we learn math best". This post is basically to use the "start with a hook" approach to story telling, which is a good option. There are others, but there's a reason so many good stories-for-the-sake-of-stories use this approach. In general if people are showing up to your presentation voluntarily, you do have a couple of slides you can use to build some tension up before they'll zone out on you, but you do want to get to your first "conflict" fairly quickly. This is pretty abstract, so let me give a specific technical example to show what I mean. It's been a while now since pretty much everyone knows git, but for a while I was the de facto git trainer in my company. I had a prepared presentation I used for this, and I had the people in the presentation follow along, running commands in a local repo they create on the spot. I did not immediately start with a hook; I did start with general overview of git and how it works, but on what would be the fourth slide or so, rather than take them through nothing but the happy path, I start getting them into trouble, detaching the head. Everyone detaches head sooner or later without meaning to. This is the conflict & tension, and the resolution is, how do we solve this problem? The rest of the presentation does not just guide through the happy paths, but periodically either gets them into one of the common error states or walks them through a common pitfall by not just warning them about it, but taking them through the process of getting into various common troubles and then getting out of it. Each of these cycles is an implicit story, where the main character gets into trouble, as appropriate the trouble gets worse, then the trouble is resolved. Obviously no one would go to a movie theater to watch someone get stuck in git and then get unstuck; it is not that kind of story. Programming and hacking get dressed up the way they do by Hollywood for a reason; the real thing is unwatchably boring. But it still has the story cycle in it. You can also spice you presentations up by showing some of the wrong paths you encountered or the problems you had to solve instead of just presenting the bare results; in addition to being more compelling in the abstract, such presentations are more valuable anyhow in a lot of other ways. This is far more effective then a standard dead presentation that just shows "how to do this. how to do that. how to do the other thing. now you know things go forth and do" while the audience's eyes glaze over.
drewcoo 2y ago
I agreed with a lot of that except this: > set some context and then present the problem to be solved And this is exactly why: > Pose them a problem and they'll start trying to solve it Addressing an audience of programmers is already like herding cats. Giving them a problem they can each individually try to solve instead of paying attention to the presentation is counter-productive. If you absolutely have to tease the problem, consider doing it in the invitation to the presentation so that they can work through the problem before showing up.
aaronbrethorst 2y ago
In other words, a ‘record scratch’ narrative structure https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/record-scratch-freeze-frame-yep-thats-me https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/record-scratch-freeze-frame-y...
- agumonkey 2y ago
  Some people argue that it's becoming the norm for youtube videos too. People start with in action introduction and later on intersperse background details with outcomes.
tomrod 2y ago
Isn't this just the STAR comms model? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation,_task,_action,_result https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation,_task,_action,_resul...
felixhummel 2y ago
So basically: in medias res https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res
- rdlw 2y ago
  Yes, the subtitle of the article is "AKA in media res"
robomartin 2y ago
In my opinion, Professor Patrick Winston's lecture (MIT) is likely in the top-5 when it come to advice on how to give presentations. I have used his framework multiple times, for both technical and business presentations in groups of a few to hundreds of people and have always had good results. Well worth watching. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY
jjslocum3 2y ago
For me the real nugget is the first comment: "Programmers have a pavlovian engineering response. Pose them a problem and they'll start trying to solve it."
- bityard 2y ago
  Ah, Nerd Sniping: https://xkcd.com/356/ https://xkcd.com/356/
tqwhite 2y ago
Absolutely. Do this. I speak as a person with a long lifetime of public speaking behind me. Also, do this if you have to write a memo or a paper. I very often swap, or repeat, the last paragraph to the beginning.
codazoda 2y ago
“I’m okay, the bull is dead”, for presentations. https://www.computerworld.com/article/1702433/i-m-ok-the-bull-is-dead.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/1702433/i-m-ok-the-bul...
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
  > “Please, God, kill me now.” Who among us hasn't had that exact reaction?
- asalahli 2y ago
  While I get the point made in the article, I'd prefer being told "I hit a bull with my car. I'm ok, but the car is damaged" first, rather than having fed bits and pieces of info slowly, or worse, having to fish it out. It's understandable for people to not be calm in this situation and struggle to explain things clearly, but it sounds like that wasn't the case here. So if you are calm, do the other person a favor and give a 10-15 second explanation of what happened instead of leaving them guessing.
- Too 2y ago
  Same principles as BLUF, Bottom line up front. Start with the punchline and the impact, then fill in the background that lead up to these events.
- mkl 2y ago
  Big discussion about that last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37087459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37087459
__mharrison__ 2y ago
Presenting is hard. Know your audience. Some need an introduction. Others might not.
jedberg 2y ago
A technical presentation still needs a story. This is standard storytelling technique -- you start with the inciting event, the hook that gets you interested. How does The Matrix start? With Trinity about to get caught. Bambi? Mom gets shot. Star Wars? A tiny ship is getting chased by a huge ship with lasers. A good tech presentation follows good storytelling: 1) Inciting event, build to a semi-climax, pull back a little, hit the climax, then conclusion. If you want to be a great technical presenter, read some books on telling good stories. :)
- IshKebab 2y ago
  Yes, although I think you have to be careful not to piss audiences off with that technique. E.g. think of those too-long form articles that start "<Interesting hook and then...> David lives in a 3 bedroom house in rural blah with his two dogs, boopy and bloppy...". Instant close. I did an amazing presentation course once run by a comedian. He was very very good, and the main advice that stuck with me was to have your presentation follow the hero's tale. Everyone knows it: all is good, tragedy strikes, problem is overcome, celebrate. You might think that you can't fit technical talks into that format, and I wouldn't say every presentation needs to be like that. But it's applicable way more often than you'd think. Basically anything that solves a problem can be told like this. But too many presentations are like "I'm going to tell you about the X project. Here's an overview of the slides. Right, what is X?" instead of "We have a lot of things that do Y. This all worked great until Z, then disaster! Existing solution A doesn't work at all for this case. So we created X. But it didn't work because ... so we had to do ..., and finally everything worked!"
  - gretch 2y ago
    > I think you have to be careful not to piss audiences off with that technique. E.g. think of those too-long form articles that start "<Interesting hook and then...> David lives in a 3 bedroom house in rural blah with his two dogs, boopy and bloppy...". Instant close. I would say that’s because the example is the antithesis of the advice given. In this case, I don’t know who David is, I don’t care. Why are you telling me about him.
- 2y ago
btbuildem 2y ago
I've read all the sentences in all the paragraphs, but I'm still not sure what OP was trying to convey. Are they saying "skip the introduction"? I try to start my presentations with a quick rundown of what the presentation will consist of. You can't always tailor the content to the audience, but you can at least give them an index/coles notes up front, so they know when to pay attention and when to zone out.
- blowski 2y ago
  1. Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em. 2. Tell ‘em. 3. Tell ‘em what you told ‘em. There should be 2 or 3 key points that you reinforce multiple times. No more. And my #1 tip: The more natural you want the presentation to sound, the more you need to practice it in advance. If you’re an experienced presenter you’ll know how and when to break these rules.
  - beryilma 2y ago
    Absolutely not. Please don't do this. Treat your audience as smart people and just tell them. All that pseudo-psychology just doesn't work with presentations.
    - blowski 2y ago
      Treat your audience as people with lots on their minds, distracted by their phones, and who are likely sitting in their 10th presentation so far this week. And be humble - your presentation is probably not as interesting as you think.
    - Too 2y ago
      It's not pseudo-psychology, it's just common sense. Imagine a 1h presentation consisting of three topics. If the listeners don't know how many topics you are going to cover, by minute 42 they will start zoning out, instead of looking forward to the next topic that sounded more interesting. By the end of the presentation they may also have forgotten about the first topic if the last topic was very engaging, even if the first key point was equally important as the third. It doesn't have to be complicated, just a short agenda or table of contents in the beginning and a quick TLDR summary at the end. Of course you have to apply the technique with finesse, if you only have a short, single topic, it may be repetitive. For longer presentations with several key points it becomes more important.
bluishgreen 2y ago
Related: Millennial Pause https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EVHLBdZ6Oxw https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EVHLBdZ6Oxw
jll29 2y ago
My recommendation is: start with an image (no text) on the first slide. It is important that the image has seemingly nothing to do with the topic of the talk that was on the (unnumbered) title slide. Now people are curious what explanation you are giving, and are paying attention. After resolving the mystery, you can move on to the second slide, you can give e.g. a problem statement or research question and then follow with the usual structure (outline, method, data, experiments, evaluation results, discussion and limitations, summary, conclusions and future work. Caveat: This works only for oral presentations; there is an important type of slide deck with is the predominant type in large international corporations, and it's a mix between PPT presentation and Word document, where slides are full of text so that the deck is self-explanatory. Those are written not just to be presented but MOSTLY for being passed around by email to be read. They intentionally violate all the rules of good slide decks to accompany good presentations, because they are mainly used to summarize e.g. a new business case for senior management, who may never listen to the presentation, but who may browse the slides.
- dimatura 2y ago
  There's a related medium where I think similar advice applies, technical papers. At least for my field - computer vision / machine learning. You choose a cool, hopefully self-explanatory, figure to feature prominently in the first page. Something that will grab the attention of someone flipping through pdfs and get them hooked. In computer vision you can usually find something visually appealing, like a 3D reconstruction, or an image with highlighted object detections. If nothing else, you can go with a plot showing how much better your method is compared to a baseline, but that's probably less engaging for people who aren't super familiar with how meaningful the numbers are.
- interludead 2y ago
  The hardest thing sometimes is to capture audience’s attention and spark curiosity
danielovichdk 2y ago
The best presentations, just like the best literature, tells a good story. It takes character and personality to tell a good story. You can't lie to the audience. They will know right away if you are lying. And lying in this case is okay as long as the story is good. Presentations should be about getting people to think and reflect, it should not be about what the author believes. Slide one or two. Doesn't matter. Tell a story with a whole heart or don't try. Don't fake it. Give it all. Empty out or don't try.
beryilma 2y ago
Government presentations are the worst, including the likes of NASA, NIH, etc. Extremely overcrowded slides, the logo of the institution on EVERY slide, equations all over the place, no care for providing value to the audience. This gave rise to the assertion-evidence style of presentions, which sound right on the surface but it has also been taken to another extreme where every slide tries to use the approach. My single concern for my presentations is to provide value to the audience; this usually fixes a lot of stupid presentation content...
godelski 2y ago
I've gotten a lot of training on presentations while in grad school and my former advisor used to often quiz us during our practices. One thing is to treat the first slide as a kinda holding place while you're not talking. Like the cover of a book, and nothing more. One of the things he would do to "trick" us is introduce us in various ways. The two common ways would be And our next speaker will discuss BlahBlah To which you respond Thanks SoAndSo. I'm Godelski and I'll be discussing *next slide* BlahBlah The other is And our next speaker is Godelski and he'll be presenting his work on BlahBlah Which you respond with Thanks SoAndSo. *next slide* There's a few variations (including no introduction) and they're all formulated in this way that you don't repeat the information from the person introducing you and you move away from your T̶i̶t̶l̶e̶Placeholder Slide quickly. It is only there for saying who you are and what the talk is about. If any more information is to be conveyed to the audience, you should not be on that slide. There's also a lot more to what goes into the slides and how to organize them but that's less general. Other than I think it is quite helpful to have outline slides even if they're only seen for <1 second (often more important because slides get posted online. I like to use slides for talking so they don't post well online and I wish when they were it was easy to include slide notes. This works fine for Google slides but not PDFs. Maybe someone can push for a new paradigm here. I feel like we could likely do this with beamer, if it is not already done).
riiii 2y ago
The first slide is the book cover. Guess what, people do judge a book by it's cover.
niebeendend 2y ago
SCQA - https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/executive-communication https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/executive-communicati...
analog31 2y ago
>>>> Now the first chapter starts with a gun pointed at the hero's head. By the end, he is teetering on a cliff about to jump into a crocodile-infested river. Just when the tension reaches a peak, we're introduced to the character but we have reason to want to get to know him. Amusingly, every New Yorker article is structured in this way, but with a twist: The character and not the action is actually the main subject matter.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
s2l 2y ago
similar to Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto (McKinsey)
kragen 2y ago
i'd go further: instead of slides, start with a demo. if the demo is compelling enough then people will want to hear how it works compare the popularity of twitch streamers with recorded wwdc talks
oaktowner 2y ago
For demos, I long ago learned to "start with the good part." If you have some fantastic monitoring software, don't start with an intro for how you installed it, how you set up the metrics collection, how you hooked the front end up to the time series database, then show a cool graph with info that the user never had before. Instead: start by showing a cool graph they never had before. Explain why that graph is so useful. And THEN, now that everyone cares...you can take the time to show how you got to nirvana. I've seen so many demos that start with a longish, boringish process to get someplace cool, and they would have been better had they started by showing something cool.
jtxt 2y ago
Wadsworth constant. (Older Reddit meme) Skip (30%) to the good part!
treflop 2y ago
My technical presentations are pretty popular and non-technical people pass my slides around the company, despite having no interest in the topic… - Having a story is the bread and butter. A presentation will not be interesting without a story - I regularly comb through my slides as I’m building the presentation to make sure the story flows - As you watch my presentation, a ton of information will never just appear on the screen. I use the PowerPoint timeline so slides slowly form as I speak, almost as if I was using a whiteboard. No one likes being confronted with a wall of text on a slide advance - I don’t avoid text only slides but I rarely have them because they are rarely the best way to tell my story or the concept - I also regularly read through my presentation as I’m building it to make sure it never gets too technical (aka boring) or too non-technical (aka boring). There is a fine balance and if you suddenly have to get too technical, you have to pull back in the next few slides and vice versa - Despite having very little text, you can actually print out my slides and they still make sense and tell you everything that you need to know because I use a lot of hand drawn visualizations that exactly describe the concept Lastly, I have to say that it doesn’t matter what app you use to make presentations. A bad artist blames his tools. I personally use PowerPoint because it has both iPad Pencil support and also a full blown animation timeline so are basically making a movie if you know how to use it, although I mostly use it to split slides into smaller parts.
- antixk 2y ago
  Hi, mind sharing the links of your talks or slides? Thanks!
- kumarvvr 2y ago
  Is it possible for your to share any of those presentations?
amai 2y ago
If you want to waist some time start your presentation with a table of content. Then explain the CV of your coworkers, yourself and everyone involved. Also don’t forget to mention the history of your company and all the stuff your company is doing besides what you’re presentation is about. In the end make a summary, thank your mom and dad and mention that your company is hiring.

455 points by andyjohnson0 2y ago

Like in video games: Show the door before the key.

It's very true. When watching programming talks on YouTube, I often hover the mouse over the time bar to find the first preview which looks like the slide has syntax highlighted code on it. I'm here for the cool coding stuff, not the preamble!

8372049 2y ago
Rule of thumb for Youtube videos is to hit 3 to get to where the video actually starts. Obviously not meant to be taken literally, but surprisingly often could be.

herpdyderp 2y ago

Genius for technical presentations. I must admit, though, I’m always turned off when entertainment mediums do this (fiction novels, TV Shows, etc.). If the action sequence doesn’t need any background info to make sense, I argue you can just skip the background info altogether. Don’t ramp the pace up and then drop it back down to nothing so quickly.

HPsquared 2y ago
News stories do this a lot, particularly sports or politics. But I suppose they lead with the most important part of the story so there's a reason for it.
wongarsu 2y ago
In entertainment mediums it often feels like a last-minute band-aid. A novel ramps up too slowly, test readers are giving up on the story before the interesting stuff happens, so the editor suggests "let's just put that cool fight scene in chapter 10 in the beginning so people know what the book is really about". That rarely works well

simonw 2y ago

I gave a talk at PyCon a few weeks ago where I was really struggling to fit my content into the time slot. I ended up editing out the first couple of minutes of the talk - the bit where I ramped up to the topic, gave a little bit of background about why I was qualified to talk about it, that kind of thing. Instead I launched straight into my first point (which included a good joke)... and it worked. A lesson I learned is that if the topic is interesting enough you can skip the intro and jump straight in to that material, and if you combine that with a joke you can capture the audience's attention just fine.

matsemann 2y ago
I agree, but one good thing about starting with the soft and boring parts (like your name and credentials), is that it's easy to do when you're nervous in the beginning. Can't really stumble that too much, and then you're warmed up for the real talk. But of course, the shorter you can keep it the better. Instead I often try to memorize my first lines, word by word. Then I know I will nail them when at my most anxious, and then the rest can be talking more freely.
- dylan604 2y ago
  I also assumed that part of the first few minutes was filler while butts are still trying to find seats, still chatting amongst themselves, or haven't quite closed whichever social media app as well as letting the presenter shake off any butterflies
  - ghaff 2y ago
    That's a good point. A presentation isn't really a written story or even a film. You don't want the people who missed the first few minutes to be "dazed and confused." :-) You don't want to do too much throat clearing (to use the metaphor a former boss used with respect to writing research pieces). But you probably don't want the first few minutes to be too essential to be jumping into the rest of the talk either.
- larsrc 2y ago

edgarvaldes 2y ago

In that case, is the "first slide" even that important?

inhumantsar 2y ago
it's not that it's not important, it's just not that engaging. Most of the time there's a minute or two where the first slide is up but everyone is still getting settled. The less engaging info can be on that first slide and when the talk starts you can skip ahead to the second slide without discussing that first one.

time-less-ness 2y ago

When I present, I just go through the introductory stuff at lightspeed. Who am I? Why am I here? What do I do? What is the history of this topic? Why should you care? All that takes about 30 seconds. If you aren't talking like Ben Shapiro for this bit, you're talking too slow.

soared 2y ago

Maybe a good way to trim off unnecessary context but for presentations I’ve done on concepts novel to the audience, the context is critical for understanding. Skipping to some meat then giving context just produces more confusion. I much prefer leading with “why does my audience care”. They don’t care about context - but I like literally saying “you should care about this because X” or “after this presentation you will be able to do Y”. That engages people and focuses your presentation on the lens of audience’s needs rather than yours. Then context is reasonable as they’re hooked and want to know where you’re going.

AndrewOMartin 2y ago

I always start a technical presentation with "spoilers", for anyone who is busy or is happy to just trust me, they can leave almost immediately with the most important bit of information. Anyone else who wants disagree, or wants proof any claims can get involved.

marginalia_nu 2y ago
Yeah, the inverted pyramid[1] is almost always a good pattern when conveying important information. Not only do you end up telling people why they should care first, the less interesting stuff ends up at the end, so if you run over time (or someone zones out), they aren't missing much. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
- hackernewds 2y ago
  In practice, this ends up with attendees interrupting with pointless questions that are covered in the next slides
  - anamexis 2y ago
    I think that is an invariant of presentations
eisenman 2y ago
This tracks with the product demo idea of ‘do the last thing first’. No need to make the audience ‘earn’ the payoff - just skip right to the good stuff and then go over the rest for the folks that care. (This and much more from reviews of a whole bunch of demos here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220126051034/https://www.secondderivative.com/surprising-new-insights.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220126051034/https://www.secon...)
floatrock 2y ago
Similar to BLUF -- Bottom Line Up Front. Hear that one used more for memos or emails, but same concept. Give people a sense of what's at the end so they see where the background is going. Use the story-spine if you want, but show a trailer to convince the audience there's some juicy explosion-ladden scenes at the end of the rainbow.

albert_e 2y ago

Isn't this the PPT version of this movie trope? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res

ska 2y ago
It’s used in some movies also, but the idea predates movies by millennia :)
- hackernewds 2y ago
  No need to be snarky :)
  - ska 2y ago
    No snark was present :)
- kleiba 2y ago
  Correct. This technique really seemed to have been very popular in main stream cinema around 5 to 2 years ago, I think. So much so that my best buddy developed a kind of aversion to "3 hours earlier" etc. being displayed across the screen after the opening act.

cseleborg 2y ago

This very technique is why I loved Salman Khan's teaching videos on Khan Academy so much. On any topic, he goes straight to the content, no intro whatsoever.

hackernewds 2y ago
Sally Bhai never misses a beat. Khan Academy has been a generational change for education

seidleroni 2y ago

As the article mentions, this is also used by authors. I went to a book signing for Mark Z. Danielewski, the author of House of Leaves and he mentioned that for his books, he always ends up throwing out the beginning of the book.

jerf 2y ago

More generally, you should view presentations as stories. Obviously not stories presented solely for their drama as one might watch a movie, but the fundamental "conflict -> tension raising -> resolution" cycle ought to be in your presentation, multiple times as needed just as they nest within a traditional story. It is tempting to the technical mind to present them as we see mathematical proofs, building from the fundamentals up to the final result in a completely-temporally-ordered manner, but the reasons that works in a math text don't apply to presentations. And a lot of people don't find it all that useful in math texts intended for learning either, if you read one of HN's periodic discussions of "how we learn math best". This post is basically to use the "start with a hook" approach to story telling, which is a good option. There are others, but there's a reason so many good stories-for-the-sake-of-stories use this approach. In general if people are showing up to your presentation voluntarily, you do have a couple of slides you can use to build some tension up before they'll zone out on you, but you do want to get to your first "conflict" fairly quickly. This is pretty abstract, so let me give a specific technical example to show what I mean. It's been a while now since pretty much everyone knows git, but for a while I was the de facto git trainer in my company. I had a prepared presentation I used for this, and I had the people in the presentation follow along, running commands in a local repo they create on the spot. I did not immediately start with a hook; I did start with general overview of git and how it works, but on what would be the fourth slide or so, rather than take them through nothing but the happy path, I start getting them into trouble, detaching the head. Everyone detaches head sooner or later without meaning to. This is the conflict & tension, and the resolution is, how do we solve this problem? The rest of the presentation does not just guide through the happy paths, but periodically either gets them into one of the common error states or walks them through a common pitfall by not just warning them about it, but taking them through the process of getting into various common troubles and then getting out of it. Each of these cycles is an implicit story, where the main character gets into trouble, as appropriate the trouble gets worse, then the trouble is resolved. Obviously no one would go to a movie theater to watch someone get stuck in git and then get unstuck; it is not that kind of story. Programming and hacking get dressed up the way they do by Hollywood for a reason; the real thing is unwatchably boring. But it still has the story cycle in it. You can also spice you presentations up by showing some of the wrong paths you encountered or the problems you had to solve instead of just presenting the bare results; in addition to being more compelling in the abstract, such presentations are more valuable anyhow in a lot of other ways. This is far more effective then a standard dead presentation that just shows "how to do this. how to do that. how to do the other thing. now you know things go forth and do" while the audience's eyes glaze over.

drewcoo 2y ago

I agreed with a lot of that except this: > set some context and then present the problem to be solved And this is exactly why: > Pose them a problem and they'll start trying to solve it Addressing an audience of programmers is already like herding cats. Giving them a problem they can each individually try to solve instead of paying attention to the presentation is counter-productive. If you absolutely have to tease the problem, consider doing it in the invitation to the presentation so that they can work through the problem before showing up.

aaronbrethorst 2y ago

In other words, a ‘record scratch’ narrative structure https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/record-scratch-freeze-frame-yep-thats-me https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/record-scratch-freeze-frame-y...

agumonkey 2y ago
Some people argue that it's becoming the norm for youtube videos too. People start with in action introduction and later on intersperse background details with outcomes.

tomrod 2y ago

Isn't this just the STAR comms model? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation,_task,_action,_result https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation,_task,_action,_resul...

felixhummel 2y ago

So basically: in medias res https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res

rdlw 2y ago
Yes, the subtitle of the article is "AKA in media res"

robomartin 2y ago

In my opinion, Professor Patrick Winston's lecture (MIT) is likely in the top-5 when it come to advice on how to give presentations. I have used his framework multiple times, for both technical and business presentations in groups of a few to hundreds of people and have always had good results. Well worth watching. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY

jjslocum3 2y ago

For me the real nugget is the first comment: "Programmers have a pavlovian engineering response. Pose them a problem and they'll start trying to solve it."

bityard 2y ago
Ah, Nerd Sniping: https://xkcd.com/356/ https://xkcd.com/356/

tqwhite 2y ago

Absolutely. Do this. I speak as a person with a long lifetime of public speaking behind me. Also, do this if you have to write a memo or a paper. I very often swap, or repeat, the last paragraph to the beginning.

codazoda 2y ago

“I’m okay, the bull is dead”, for presentations. https://www.computerworld.com/article/1702433/i-m-ok-the-bull-is-dead.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/1702433/i-m-ok-the-bul...

HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
> “Please, God, kill me now.” Who among us hasn't had that exact reaction?
asalahli 2y ago
While I get the point made in the article, I'd prefer being told "I hit a bull with my car. I'm ok, but the car is damaged" first, rather than having fed bits and pieces of info slowly, or worse, having to fish it out. It's understandable for people to not be calm in this situation and struggle to explain things clearly, but it sounds like that wasn't the case here. So if you are calm, do the other person a favor and give a 10-15 second explanation of what happened instead of leaving them guessing.
Too 2y ago
Same principles as BLUF, Bottom line up front. Start with the punchline and the impact, then fill in the background that lead up to these events.
mkl 2y ago
Big discussion about that last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37087459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37087459

__mharrison__ 2y ago

Presenting is hard. Know your audience. Some need an introduction. Others might not.

jedberg 2y ago

A technical presentation still needs a story. This is standard storytelling technique -- you start with the inciting event, the hook that gets you interested. How does The Matrix start? With Trinity about to get caught. Bambi? Mom gets shot. Star Wars? A tiny ship is getting chased by a huge ship with lasers. A good tech presentation follows good storytelling: 1) Inciting event, build to a semi-climax, pull back a little, hit the climax, then conclusion. If you want to be a great technical presenter, read some books on telling good stories. :)

IshKebab 2y ago
Yes, although I think you have to be careful not to piss audiences off with that technique. E.g. think of those too-long form articles that start "<Interesting hook and then...> David lives in a 3 bedroom house in rural blah with his two dogs, boopy and bloppy...". Instant close. I did an amazing presentation course once run by a comedian. He was very very good, and the main advice that stuck with me was to have your presentation follow the hero's tale. Everyone knows it: all is good, tragedy strikes, problem is overcome, celebrate. You might think that you can't fit technical talks into that format, and I wouldn't say every presentation needs to be like that. But it's applicable way more often than you'd think. Basically anything that solves a problem can be told like this. But too many presentations are like "I'm going to tell you about the X project. Here's an overview of the slides. Right, what is X?" instead of "We have a lot of things that do Y. This all worked great until Z, then disaster! Existing solution A doesn't work at all for this case. So we created X. But it didn't work because ... so we had to do ..., and finally everything worked!"
- gretch 2y ago
  > I think you have to be careful not to piss audiences off with that technique. E.g. think of those too-long form articles that start "<Interesting hook and then...> David lives in a 3 bedroom house in rural blah with his two dogs, boopy and bloppy...". Instant close. I would say that’s because the example is the antithesis of the advice given. In this case, I don’t know who David is, I don’t care. Why are you telling me about him.
2y ago

btbuildem 2y ago

I've read all the sentences in all the paragraphs, but I'm still not sure what OP was trying to convey. Are they saying "skip the introduction"? I try to start my presentations with a quick rundown of what the presentation will consist of. You can't always tailor the content to the audience, but you can at least give them an index/coles notes up front, so they know when to pay attention and when to zone out.

blowski 2y ago
1. Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em. 2. Tell ‘em. 3. Tell ‘em what you told ‘em. There should be 2 or 3 key points that you reinforce multiple times. No more. And my #1 tip: The more natural you want the presentation to sound, the more you need to practice it in advance. If you’re an experienced presenter you’ll know how and when to break these rules.
- beryilma 2y ago
  Absolutely not. Please don't do this. Treat your audience as smart people and just tell them. All that pseudo-psychology just doesn't work with presentations.
  - blowski 2y ago
    Treat your audience as people with lots on their minds, distracted by their phones, and who are likely sitting in their 10th presentation so far this week. And be humble - your presentation is probably not as interesting as you think.
  - Too 2y ago
    It's not pseudo-psychology, it's just common sense. Imagine a 1h presentation consisting of three topics. If the listeners don't know how many topics you are going to cover, by minute 42 they will start zoning out, instead of looking forward to the next topic that sounded more interesting. By the end of the presentation they may also have forgotten about the first topic if the last topic was very engaging, even if the first key point was equally important as the third. It doesn't have to be complicated, just a short agenda or table of contents in the beginning and a quick TLDR summary at the end. Of course you have to apply the technique with finesse, if you only have a short, single topic, it may be repetitive. For longer presentations with several key points it becomes more important.

bluishgreen 2y ago

Related: Millennial Pause https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EVHLBdZ6Oxw https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EVHLBdZ6Oxw

jll29 2y ago

My recommendation is: start with an image (no text) on the first slide. It is important that the image has seemingly nothing to do with the topic of the talk that was on the (unnumbered) title slide. Now people are curious what explanation you are giving, and are paying attention. After resolving the mystery, you can move on to the second slide, you can give e.g. a problem statement or research question and then follow with the usual structure (outline, method, data, experiments, evaluation results, discussion and limitations, summary, conclusions and future work. Caveat: This works only for oral presentations; there is an important type of slide deck with is the predominant type in large international corporations, and it's a mix between PPT presentation and Word document, where slides are full of text so that the deck is self-explanatory. Those are written not just to be presented but MOSTLY for being passed around by email to be read. They intentionally violate all the rules of good slide decks to accompany good presentations, because they are mainly used to summarize e.g. a new business case for senior management, who may never listen to the presentation, but who may browse the slides.

dimatura 2y ago
There's a related medium where I think similar advice applies, technical papers. At least for my field - computer vision / machine learning. You choose a cool, hopefully self-explanatory, figure to feature prominently in the first page. Something that will grab the attention of someone flipping through pdfs and get them hooked. In computer vision you can usually find something visually appealing, like a 3D reconstruction, or an image with highlighted object detections. If nothing else, you can go with a plot showing how much better your method is compared to a baseline, but that's probably less engaging for people who aren't super familiar with how meaningful the numbers are.
interludead 2y ago
The hardest thing sometimes is to capture audience’s attention and spark curiosity

danielovichdk 2y ago

The best presentations, just like the best literature, tells a good story. It takes character and personality to tell a good story. You can't lie to the audience. They will know right away if you are lying. And lying in this case is okay as long as the story is good. Presentations should be about getting people to think and reflect, it should not be about what the author believes. Slide one or two. Doesn't matter. Tell a story with a whole heart or don't try. Don't fake it. Give it all. Empty out or don't try.

beryilma 2y ago

Government presentations are the worst, including the likes of NASA, NIH, etc. Extremely overcrowded slides, the logo of the institution on EVERY slide, equations all over the place, no care for providing value to the audience. This gave rise to the assertion-evidence style of presentions, which sound right on the surface but it has also been taken to another extreme where every slide tries to use the approach. My single concern for my presentations is to provide value to the audience; this usually fixes a lot of stupid presentation content...

godelski 2y ago

I've gotten a lot of training on presentations while in grad school and my former advisor used to often quiz us during our practices. One thing is to treat the first slide as a kinda holding place while you're not talking. Like the cover of a book, and nothing more. One of the things he would do to "trick" us is introduce us in various ways. The two common ways would be And our next speaker will discuss BlahBlah To which you respond Thanks SoAndSo. I'm Godelski and I'll be discussing *next slide* BlahBlah The other is And our next speaker is Godelski and he'll be presenting his work on BlahBlah Which you respond with Thanks SoAndSo. *next slide* There's a few variations (including no introduction) and they're all formulated in this way that you don't repeat the information from the person introducing you and you move away from your T̶i̶t̶l̶e̶Placeholder Slide quickly. It is only there for saying who you are and what the talk is about. If any more information is to be conveyed to the audience, you should not be on that slide. There's also a lot more to what goes into the slides and how to organize them but that's less general. Other than I think it is quite helpful to have outline slides even if they're only seen for <1 second (often more important because slides get posted online. I like to use slides for talking so they don't post well online and I wish when they were it was easy to include slide notes. This works fine for Google slides but not PDFs. Maybe someone can push for a new paradigm here. I feel like we could likely do this with beamer, if it is not already done).

riiii 2y ago

The first slide is the book cover. Guess what, people do judge a book by it's cover.

niebeendend 2y ago

SCQA - https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/executive-communication https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/executive-communicati...

analog31 2y ago

>>>> Now the first chapter starts with a gun pointed at the hero's head. By the end, he is teetering on a cliff about to jump into a crocodile-infested river. Just when the tension reaches a peak, we're introduced to the character but we have reason to want to get to know him. Amusingly, every New Yorker article is structured in this way, but with a twist: The character and not the action is actually the main subject matter.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

s2l 2y ago

similar to Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto (McKinsey)

kragen 2y ago

i'd go further: instead of slides, start with a demo. if the demo is compelling enough then people will want to hear how it works compare the popularity of twitch streamers with recorded wwdc talks

oaktowner 2y ago

For demos, I long ago learned to "start with the good part." If you have some fantastic monitoring software, don't start with an intro for how you installed it, how you set up the metrics collection, how you hooked the front end up to the time series database, then show a cool graph with info that the user never had before. Instead: start by showing a cool graph they never had before. Explain why that graph is so useful. And THEN, now that everyone cares...you can take the time to show how you got to nirvana. I've seen so many demos that start with a longish, boringish process to get someplace cool, and they would have been better had they started by showing something cool.

jtxt 2y ago

Wadsworth constant. (Older Reddit meme) Skip (30%) to the good part!

treflop 2y ago

My technical presentations are pretty popular and non-technical people pass my slides around the company, despite having no interest in the topic… - Having a story is the bread and butter. A presentation will not be interesting without a story - I regularly comb through my slides as I’m building the presentation to make sure the story flows - As you watch my presentation, a ton of information will never just appear on the screen. I use the PowerPoint timeline so slides slowly form as I speak, almost as if I was using a whiteboard. No one likes being confronted with a wall of text on a slide advance - I don’t avoid text only slides but I rarely have them because they are rarely the best way to tell my story or the concept - I also regularly read through my presentation as I’m building it to make sure it never gets too technical (aka boring) or too non-technical (aka boring). There is a fine balance and if you suddenly have to get too technical, you have to pull back in the next few slides and vice versa - Despite having very little text, you can actually print out my slides and they still make sense and tell you everything that you need to know because I use a lot of hand drawn visualizations that exactly describe the concept Lastly, I have to say that it doesn’t matter what app you use to make presentations. A bad artist blames his tools. I personally use PowerPoint because it has both iPad Pencil support and also a full blown animation timeline so are basically making a movie if you know how to use it, although I mostly use it to split slides into smaller parts.

antixk 2y ago
Hi, mind sharing the links of your talks or slides? Thanks!
kumarvvr 2y ago
Is it possible for your to share any of those presentations?

amai 2y ago

If you want to waist some time start your presentation with a table of content. Then explain the CV of your coworkers, yourself and everyone involved. Also don’t forget to mention the history of your company and all the stuff your company is doing besides what you’re presentation is about. In the end make a summary, thank your mom and dad and mention that your company is hiring.