10
votes
Recommendations for a conference talk
My friend and I are going to co-present at an industry conference soon. We are comfortable with the subject matter and have finished the first draft of our slides with a very light script. I'm curious if anyone on Tildes has experience with speaking at conferences either solo or co-presenting and what tips you can share from your own experience.
We've already established a few things:
- In the agenda/overview slide at the beginning we'll politely ask people to save all questions for the end for when we've budgeted time. This is because I've seen from the audience other presentations be derailed and run out of time due to a single member of the audience regularly interrupting with questions.
- Keep the text on slides to a bare minimum so that the audience's attention doesn't shift away from us and onto the screen. We're working on this and plan to use images/diagrams wherever appropriate although budgeting time to create these is difficult.
- We're also planning to ensure the speaker notes cover what we're saying so if someone reviews the slides later instead of a recording they'll be able to follow along.
I have more experience with academic conferences talks than industry ones, but there are some points that I think carry over. Most of these are on designing your slide deck:
Humans are good with making associations, take advantage of that. Speaking generally here, place similar items near each other on the screen, and add whitespace between items you want to categorically separate in your audience's mind. Keep style and color consistency. If a red circle and arrow means bad, don't also use red for good and neutral things. If blue means a particular kind of approach and green means a different approach, keep using blue and green to mean the correspond approaches through out the presentation. If dashed lines and dotted lines mean something or if squares and and circles mean something, be consistent.
Use animations to help break down large complicated things into small easier to understand things. If you have data to show for 30 cases, don't show all 30, just show maybe 2 or 4 but then animate zooming out to get a broader trend picture. With that said, too many moving things can be hard to follow, it's better to not use animation than to overdo it.
On the topic of moving things, videos are worth a thousand pictures in the same way a picture is worth a thousand words. But videos are also very distracting. People simply won't listen to your words if a video is playing. So use video purposefully.
Your audience won't listen at points. Either they were talking to their neighbor or they just spaced out for a moment. Put important points as text on the screen so the audiences can still follow along even if they stop listening for a bit. It's also helpful to nail home important points by repeating them throughout the talk.
I think @menturi covered most of the bases on structuring a talk that I would generally give with regards to the presentation itself, ie. the slides and the content. Here are some things about the actual presenting.
Practice. Practice giving the actual talk, multiple times, in front of different people. Use a timer, and know how long it takes. Ask whomever you give the talk to for honest feedback, and be pointed about it. "What was the most boring part?" is a useful question to ask.
Pick a couple of checkpoints during the talk. If your talk is 30 minutes, then you might pick ten and twenty minutes, and you should know pretty specifically where in the talk you are supposed to be when you hit the ten and twenty minute marks. This lets you know if you are off your timing, and whether you need to pick it up, or slow it down. This can be adjusted to the length of time of your presentation; if it's shorter (like 3-minute thesis style), you might get to the point of picking specific words, and if it's longer, you might know which section you should be at.