Presenting Straight to the Brain
Monday, March 16th, 2009Jared Goralnick - AwayFind
Cliff Atkinson - BBP Media
Craig Ball - Craig D Ball PC
Kathy Sierra - CreatingPassionateUsers
Cliff Atkinson - BBP Media
Craig Ball - Craig D Ball PC
Kathy Sierra - CreatingPassionateUsers
Cliff Atkinson
- World is full of things competing for our attention, stress, stimuli, time, etc
- engage your audience, understand their psychology
- we use bullet points because we’ve always used bullet points, not because they’re good
- We assume that we can slap a bunch of info up on something and the viewers will just understand it
- Sensory memory, long-term memory, working memory: sensory and long-term are “infinite” but working memory is only capable of storing 3-4 things at a time
- 1.) respect the limits of the mind, 2.) Sync the two channels (visual & verbal), 3.) guide attention, show specifically what the viewer should be paying attention to
Kathy Sierra
- Modern world, legacy cave-man brain
- Brain has a spam filter, but it can be pretty lizardy
- Brain pays more attention to chemistry, are nothing but expectation mechanisms
- joy = play = learning survival
- brains love to resolve things, fill things in, what is the story?
- Brain doesn’t care about code
- Talk to the brain, not to the mind (they’re in an epic battle)
Craig Ball
- Weiss-McGraff study
- Move in a non-linear manner
- The “Ken Burns Effect”
- Break things down into easily understood metaphors, slowly introduce new concepts that build on the previous
Q&A
- Mistakes: folks use the screen as the speaker when it should be used for the visual; Brochure vs manual; If you put text on a page while speaking the brain is going to have to choose which to pay attention to
- Equip users with the information, let them come to their own conclusions
- What is the story thread? Would you put bullet points in a movie?
- Is a bullet point the best way to anchor information in the brain? No? Then use something else.
- Don’t make a better presentation of X, make a better user of X
- Blackberry prayer mode -> Failure to communicate - Ball
- LOL: “Trying to compose the bon mot haiku for the most interesting twitter” - Ball
- Always ask yourself about every slide: “Does it have a pulse?” Make every slide beg for its life - Sierra