There are many, many bad presentations out there. Really bad presentations. Presentations that bore, presentations that confuse but more importantly, presentations that simply fail to function as a communication medium. But it's not always the presenter's fault, quite often it's just because they've just never learnt how to properly organise a presentation and they aren't able to recognise their mistakes. Other times it's because they've only ever seen other bad examples of presentations. To most people many of theseproblems are obvious, others are extremely subtle but all of them were of course allowed and often encouraged by mainstream presentation software. I've attempted to prevent or reduce some of these common problems by re-organising several aspects of the typical presentation software interface.
I have nothing to do with the KOffice project (although I would like to in the future), and I don't pretend that herin lies The Answer. I would however like to throw this into the public and see if it can be improved on and eventually implemented in an extremely usable presentation software package. I have far more confidence in the combined skills of the KDE community and the rest of the world, than I do of my own creativity and problem solving.
Organising a presentation cannot be done at the slide level when the user needs to organise 30–40 slides. They are at any rate not grouped logically and the user has to think about which slides belong together and which can be moved around etc. We need a better modular decomposition for presentations, where the user is able to easily organise the presentation as a whole, and work on a small enough section of the presentation without having to think about other sections.
Trying to reuse exactly the same text for three different mediums can be very bad. For most presentations, users should generally avoid repeating what appears on every slide, and simply printing out slides as handouts means that you will end up with handouts on the wall: too much distracting visual information.
Separating the texts and providing three easy to use editors helps to:
The most important of those mentioned above is the non-slide text. The focus of the program should be on what the presentor has to say and distribute afterwards (or beforehand), and not on what should appear on the wall. There is notes functionality generally associated with slide-making programs, but it is typically difficult to use, and the user is drawn towards the actual slides, as they appear more important.
Doing this helps:
Context is extremely important for the perception of color and light. Most people don't realise that a black background on a slide is not black: it's the color of the wall. The problem is that presentation software displays black on the screen, so it looks extremely black.
Showing the slide's colors in a more accurate context will:
Note that some users may display the presentation on a screen, which means black really will look black.
Editing a presentation where the slides are shown in full screen and brilliant color misleads the user into thinking that they will be equally readable during the presentation. The audience member in the back row will not share the same experience as the user might think she will.
Doing this should:
It is often important to visually draw the user's attention to where we expect them to be looking, so that we can position features where they can find them. This is already done in a number of ways, for example using active window palettes and blue borders in Mac OSX. But I think it could be turned up a little.
This can be achieved by:
Adding functionality comes at a cost. Mostly the cost is the added complexity for using the basic functionality of the program. It is important to identify less-important features and make sure they don't get in the way of central tasks, however useful they might be for a minority of users.
By putting the focus on a full text document, a presentation can be attached to any pre-existing document. The user can easily integrate slides into pre-exisiting documents and continue to maintain the “two” documents easily.
Users quite often really want flexibility in the form of unnecessary/dangerous features, such as rich-text editing tools and fancy slide transitions. Think MySpace. At any rate, users like having the perception of many features, and like to be able to implement whatever crazy ideas they might have.
Consistency allows users to feel comfortable with the application because it is familiar.
Linking slides to sections of the full-text, or to paragraphs of the full-text is a good idea, but it needs to be clearly explained to the user, preferabilty through the use of fancy visualisation or metaphors. This means all sorts of benefits for displaying text and slides simultaeneously and re-organising slides and text simultaeneously. It also allows automatic blank slides for unmarked text (if the user is ready for this!).
Possible implementations include:
Blank slides are also A Good Thing, but are rarely used. It may be worthwhile to promote the use of blank slides and lighter rooms.
Nothing can be assumed to be true unless it has been tested. Even then it might not be true, but it least it has a stronger case. Here is a list of aspects of this interface that might need to be tested, in order to confirm, refine or reject various aspects from a usability point of view.
Here are some relevant files: