The web is a visual medium, so present it that way

In my experience web teams often need to get out and about to explain what they can do for an organisation. And so we should!

But what’s the best way to present our ideas about the web to bosses and colleagues?

Should our approach be any different to presentations from other teams?

I’ve just read a great blog post from Steph Gray about what it takes to present ideas about the web.

Quick plug: If you don’t know Steph Gray, I recommend you change that by subscribing to his blog. Steph is someone in e-Government who really knows what he’s talking about with lessons and thoughts that are relevant well beyond Whitehall.

Anyway, plug over and back to this post…

In Steph’s post he rightly says: ‘…Make sure you have a bunch of material from which you can tell stories selectively, rather than needing to build a grand argument slide by slide. In Powerpoint, you could have a structure which lets you jump to slides from a master page using hyperlinks.’

That got me thinking.

You do the web, so present like the web

Two years ago (or so) David Miliband became Foreign Secretary. At the time I worked in the FCO’s Web Team and we were pretty excited by his appointment. This was a Minister who knew the potential of the web, his Defra blog was something of a Whitehall rarity. We knew our web stock was going to rise.

After a few months we were invited to present to him and his advisors about our vision / strategy / ideas for how the FCO could or should use the web in its work. Four of us, including Stephen Hale (now Head of Online Engagement at the FCO), got busy pulling together the things we wanted to discuss, and more importantly, the things we wanted to get a green light on.

Keep it visual and interactive (like the web)

We knew we didn’t want do deliver a standard 10 (ordered) slide presentation. A few months into the job he must have been sick of PowerPoint presentations.

So we made the presentation into an actual website. In truth it was a bunch of exported images from Fireworks with clickable hotspots, but to anyone else it looked, felt and behaved like a website.

So we had our homepage which had big graphic links to the key themes… ‘Flickr, Youtube, Blogs, Google Maps’… in hindsight we were definitely too tool focussed, but you live and learn! Each linked to a ’section’ homepage which had links to screenshots of third party examples such as Obama Girl on Youtube, key facts and stats, and our own interactive protypes for how the FCO could use these tools.

We wanted it to be as visual as possible and not rely on spoken explanations. Sure enough, it was so much easier to explain how Flickr could be used by clicking through an interactive prototype.

Anyway, to cut a long story short we went on to deliver most of the ideas we pitched that day including the FCO Youtube and Flickr channels, policy Google Map, and the successful FCO blog platform. These tools are commonly used across Whitehall now, but not so back then.

A web approach can make the difference

Benefits of this approach:

• you can quickly navigate to anywhere in the ’site’ in response to the flow of conversation
• you don’t have to modify your presentation for a different audience or time length – you just go to the bits you need
• it is much more interesting to look at – you keep your audience’s attention
• it demonstrates you can actually do what you are talking about
• feels real – if you’re asked “is this real then?” you know you’re on to a winner, you almost want your audience to be disappointed that it doesn’t actually exist yet… you’ve got them excited about what’s possible.

Drawbacks:

• it can take time to get right – it is important to create templates in your graphics package with the header etc to reuse for each page
• may be overkill for the situation
• you may lose structure to your presentation if you dart from one section to another – be clear before you go in what you want to get out of the session to help avoid this
• requires a reasonable amount of ability in the graphics package of your choice
• the more links and interactivity you have the more to go wrong – test it to destruction

Play to your strengths

I’m certainly not trying to say it was all down to the way we presented those ideas, but I do know that using that format played to our natural strengths as webbies.

We were far more comfortable navigating through a website than an alien PowerPoint format and that allowed us to convey the passion and imagination we clearly had for the topic.

And we also knew our approach would make the experience something a bit different for our audience, nothing radical, but enough to make us stand out and get our point across.

Try this now

I like to finish my posts with something you can have a go at.

Steph mentions Prezi in his post. I’ll put my hands up and say I’d never heard of it, but love what I’ve seen.

I won’t say any more, but if you have been interested by the ideas in this post I’d recommend you take 5 mins to try the Prezi demo version.

It’s certainly inspired me – bring on the next scary presentation.

As always let me know what you think.