Over in his blog, John Nelson gives us a full step by step recommendations on how to successfully demo an app in front of an audience.
In my case, my two biggest mistakes are usually going too fast or not providing enough context before beginning. I know it because of the questions that rise later during the presentation. So I’m putting this here also to remind myself:
- Slow movements and self-narration.
- Each click has cost, be click-stingy. Viewers want to understand and follow along; don’t inadvertently mislead them with nervous clicking and unrelated mouse movements.
- Move slowly and deliberately. Take your hand off the mouse when not actively demonstrating an action.
- Narrate your movements aloud, describing where your attention is moving to, the UI parts involved in the action, each action you take as you take it, and the result.
- Speak slowly. Pause from time to time to see if someone is trying to chime in (conference calls pretty much mute everybody when you are talking -so give them windows to interrupt).
- Provide a statement of context for the viewers. Remind them why they are watching you demo. Don’t dive into the guts (and don’t ‘bury the lead’). If this were a newspaper article, what would the headline be? Some examples, depending on what sort of demo it is:
- A feature pitch: “So wouldn’t it be nice to be able to quickly and easily roll up your manufacturing data by whatever geographic region you like? Here’s how.”
- An iterative walk-through of an agile project: “We’ve been heads-down this week on our latest set of tasks and we’ve made some exciting progress.”
- An overview demonstration of a product: “Really, what VCC does, is give you a single picture of the people and places that you care about in the context of events that pose a risk to them so that you can get the jump on threats.”
This also reminded me of something I read the other day at Don Melton’s blog, about presenting to Steve Jobs:
When demoing something to Steve, you had to pace yourself. If Steve said, “Stop,†you fucking stopped. Hands down and waited. And you didn’t jiggle the cursor while he was looking at the screen. Certain death.
