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“Blah, blah, blah.”
Click!
“Blah, blah, blah.”
Click!

I was out of it yesterday (some sort of food poisoning) so I didn’t see the email from TEC 2009 proclaiming the availability of the slides from the conference sessions until this morning.

I groaned, partly because I was still a bit queasy from all those hours in the bathroom, but also because I was about to be annoyed all over again by TEC. The problem is an easy one to make—no, not annoying me—and TEC was knee-deep: mistaking slides for documentation.

I downloaded a few of the slides and went through them and sure enough it is near impossible to follow the gist of the talk just by going through the slide; in other words, it makes little sense without the context of the speaker’s words. Take a look at this slide for example:

This one’s from a talk by Dmitri Gavrilov who is one of the most intelligent speakers I’ve every heard, but also one of the most boring unfortunately as he himself admitted during the talk.

Regardless of that sad fact, this slide really only makes sense in the context of Gavrilov’s discussion. Without it, it is possible to piece some information together if you have the required base knowledge but you’re left twisting in the cold wind if you don’t.

How about you? Looking at this slide, can you understand this information without some explanation? Perhaps, you say, if you had the entire slide deck, you could make it all make sense?

Yes, good point, but one shouldn’t have to work this hard to ascertain what’s in some speaker’s mind and head. The only reason I was able to sort of understand what was going on is because I happened to attend his talk/discussion.

So that’s the main problem with TEC 2009: most of the speakers were, shall we say, your run-of-the-mill boring technicians, with the notable exceptions of such as Dean Wells and Jeremy Moskowitz. But even they fell into the trap of making their presentations pass for documentation.

Presentations are not documents and if you make the mistake of conflating the two, you will end up (as Rob Nottoli of Microsoft did) with the following:

That’s from the PowerPoint program itself. The writing actually scrolled down further a few more paragraphs and his excuse for dumping all this data on a slide 75% of his audience couldn’t see? He wanted to make sure this information was available to them when they downloaded the slide.

But slides are not documentation! Slides are not documentation!!

The Presenter is the center of attention during a presentation. Slides support the Presenter and anything that detracts from the Presenter is by definition a distraction which invalidates such a presentation.

If you want downloadable content, remember Word? Create a Word document that contains full sentences and diagrams that summarizes the talk. Trying to make slides do the work of documentation while also supporting the Presenter is counter-productive.

So TEC, while I realize there’s little you can do to make your presenters better speakers, I would suggest you ask your speakers for two pieces of information. One, the slides themselves and two, a document detailing the important points of the talk.

That way, you unburden your speakers from having to perform data dumps and free them instead to concentrate on talking and presenting.