A Lifetime of Presentations in One Book
By: Olga Kouzina
Tags: Visualization, Presentations, Data Visualization, Learning, Book Recommendations

If I were to pick the one-in-a-lifetime book on how to create presentations, with no option to get hold of any other book on the subject ever, I would not hesitate. This book would be slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte. In our work life, as software development people, we do need to sell ideas, at one point or another. This is not the prerogative of sales & marketing only. Have you ever struggled with bringing your vision across to the rest of the team? Have you ever thought: “How could they miss this clue, why?” If you ever asked yourself such questions, then this book is for you.

It delivers tons of right-to-the-point tips on how to intermix visuals, text and concepts. There’s a major warning, though: slide:ology is mostly about presenting ideas. If you’re looking for the ways to visualize data nicely, I’d refer you to some other books (see Data Visualization 101: A Basic Guidance). Nancy’s book goes beyond “visualizing all that moves”. It provides concrete ideas backed by years of experience and by sound knowledge of cognitive science, design, and typography. Data visualization is just one component of a good presentation, and slide:ology does not give that much detail in this respect as compared to Edward Tufte’s books. If you’re looking for the ways to visualize some corporate data, then this book alone probably would not work.

Without going into too much detail, I will cite just one meta-idea from the slide:ology book: reduce the cognitive burden. Make it easy for the audience to focus on your main point in a limited time frame, and steer them in your tunnel vision, for that matter. Presentations are not about giving wide options and taking final decisions, but about raising the awareness. I remember a keynote presentation on UX delivered by Jared Spool at a conference in Chicago, way back in the day. This presentation had a profound impact on the CEO of the company where I worked, and we started some strong internal movement toward interlacing a better user experience with our product. It didn’t happen overnight. But this one presentation sparkled the awareness. It took some time for us to digest the ideas and to come up with a better product UX.

In the same fashion, if some issues in your team lack mutual understanding, there might be no better persuasion tool than a well-prepared internal presentation. By “well-prepared” presentation I mean this:

a great idea wrapped in carefully chosen words and visuals

.. and there’s no better companion in this job than the slide:ology book by Nancy Duarte. There are a few other great books about presenting ideas. Probably, I’ll write about them later. But this one is a sure win. And I’m not promoting slide:ology for the sake of promotion. This is all based on personal experience. I saw a presentation once, and it appealed to me a lot. Then I asked the person who delivered this presentation: “How did you do it?” She told me about the book, and that’s how I ended up reading it and sharing my opinion with all of you.