7 Design Thinking tips when preparing your next presentation slides
Recently, I was asked to participate as a guest speaker in an IT Management class. With an open topic, I had many ideas about what I could share. My intention was to make the lecture interesting, but that it would also share a message. Basically, I wanted to give the students something new and actionable that can spark their curiosity to keep learning and researching. In this article, I’m sharing some useful insights into the process of preparing the presentation.
First things first: planning!
When planning the presentation, I asked myself a couple of questions:
- What is the objective or goal that I have?
- What message do I want to transmit?
- Who is the audience?
- What kind of language should I use?
- What do I know about this audience?
- What would they find useful about the presentation?
In this stage, I used the Personas technique and focused on behaviors, needs, and pain points. Having a clear picture of the audience allowed me to immerse myself into their environment; having this input was helpful when brainstorming and defining the main themes I wanted to cover during the conversation.
Tip 1: Understand → Researching about the audience, their context and interests are key to get a good perspective into their expectations. Think about what would be an innovative topic and avoid repeating something that your audience already knows about, what topics should be included in the talk, and ways to address the main message.
How was the topic defined?
After getting excited with ideas, I had too many potential topics and too many different things to cover, and that one presentation would not be enough. Clearly, it was not a great strategy. Then, I drew on the Affinity Diagram technique to group topics and subtopics to build a narrative; this strategy helped me to re-focus some ideas and also discard some ideas completely (maybe for the next time). Even if I had not yet defined the title of my presentation, I now had a clear idea of what I wanted to transmit during the lecture.
Tip 2: Define → Do not cover a little bit of too many topics. Carefully, pick the main topic and subtopics that you want to cover, determine how deep you want to go in each topic, and how you want to distribute the available time for your talk.
Letting my ideas flow…
The grouping exercise was a great input to craft the storytelling of the whole presentation and to be able to convey the message to the audience. I also needed some additional research to ensure that the right concepts were included, and make sure that the concept was up to date. Once the outline was created, I ran a quick validation of the content titles so that the storyline was understandable for the audience.
Tip 3: Brainstorm and be creative → Once you have a defined idea about your talk, brainstorm and create all the topics you want to cover, as well as the storyline you want to follow. Create a list of potential titles and how they are connected. Spend some time generating ideas on how things will connect and also how to present them (text, images, diagrams, or verbally)
Crafting the message and designing the slides
After refining the titles and the content that I wanted to address, I researched information about visuals and best practices to ensure my slides would engage the audience. In this case, the presentation was online, so the visuals had a significant role in engaging the participants. My goal was to include the audience in the presentation (I didn’t want it to become a monologue and be super boring), so I was looking for different ways to interact with my audience. I wanted to have some interactive slides, so I tested some ideas and different services to get that interconnection up and running.
Once the outline was clear and the themes were defined, it was time to create the slides! I decided to go with a combination between illustrations and real photos to have a friendly and eye-catching style. Understanding my audience, I leveraged on graphics and diagrams instead of big paragraphs, ensuring that my presentation had a clear message and that it would not be too boring. To make my presentation interactive, I decided to use interactive slides to ask questions, leveraging on the audience’s real-time answers to introduce some of the topics I had planned. In this way, people needed to pay attention, and I ensured my audience’s contribution and engagement during the presentation since they were part of it and their answers were shaping the way some topics were discussed.
Tip 4: Prototype → Get hands-on and start working on your content. Even if a particular slide is not finished, just start building the storyline, and even add your graphic content (or use placeholders if you don’t have the components yet). Check how different layouts adjust to working with your content. Ask yourself, am I transmitting the message I want to share?
Time to test!
I decided to do a dry run with some people with either similar profiles to my audience or that had no previous background related to the topic of my presentation. As a result, I got some interesting feedback, ensuring that I answered their questions and that I removed things that didn’t make sense. The most important takeaway was being able to validate my hypothesis and my assumptions about the overall objective and the storyline, and ensuring that the topics and explanations were not too technical.
After the testing phase, I did some tweaks to the content, re-ordered some slides, and even changed some pictures to match them better with my message. I ran a final test with the new version (with a previous tester and with a new tester) everything worked better, and it was time to go live!
Tip 5: Test & Validate → It’s good practice to always dry run your presentation — it’s better if you have someone similar to your audience, but you can also do it alone. This will ensure that your timing is tuned, that the content and slide sequence makes sense to your audience, and that you are sticking to your storytelling. Validate that the graphics and slides are helping to convey the main message, and that everything is ready to go live!
Presentation Day!
P-Day! I was doing the presentation remotely, so I tested the tools and had everything set up. I had two monitors connected so that I could run the slides and check the audience’s reactions, and simultaneously have my presentation notes at hand.
The presentation ran smoothly, people were engaged with the slides, the topic, and the overall storyline. The interactive section was an absolute win; the students were not expecting that and they liked that the conversation turned a bit more “customized” based on their responses. Basically, the feedback was great.
Tip 6: Check your tools!→ Check that your materials are correctly saved and accessible when it’s time to present. And don’t forget to test your tech-stack in case you are doing it remotely!
Tip 7: Execute → Enjoy while you present! Get feedback once you finish and check if there are areas of improvement. For sure you will get learnings after going through this exercise. If you plan to use this presentation in another talk, you will have input for a new iteration.
This is how I leveraged Design Thinking to prepare my presentation. Following the process helped me craft a slide deck that matched my audience’s expectations and validate that the topics addressed were useful, understandable, and enjoyable.
