Every presentation is an emotional journey.
Nancy Duarte said that during an interview and it stuck with me. Every successful presentation takes the audience from one emotion to another. Ignorance about you to excitement or apathy to interest, it’s all about emotional changes. Nancy’s simple statement changed the way I communicate.
I’m a software engineer and I give demos more often than slide presentations. Engineers are judged by demos and most engineers give terrible ones. Programmers are loathe to admit it, but the best software demos come from the marketing department.
So why are the people who write the code so bad at showing what it does? Programmers show what and not why. Programmers spend most of their time with what and how. They spend their entire careers focused on what the code does and how it does it. The journey instead of the destination.
That laser-like focus stops most programmers from seeing what software is all about why. People have problems and they look to software for solutions. You don’t really care that Microsoft Word saves in a new file format, you just want to write your document and email it. Too many programmers lose sight of this and forget about why their audience wants to do something.
The marketing department is so much better at software demos because they care about why. They know you sell solutions, not technology. They focus on the question users care about: what will this software do for me?
Some engineers do give effective demos. David Merrill got it right in his TED talk. Garr Reynolds already wrote a blog post praising him. David was showing a set of tiny block-shaped computers called siftables that interact with each other based on their proximity. He spoke to a non-technical audience and he didn’t talk about the circuits in the devices or the software that makes them work. David showed the audience why they should care. Instead of using slides he combined videos of children using the siftables, live demos, and a discussion of the technology and what it can do. And he did it all in under eight minutes.
Every software demo is an emotional journey. David took his audience from zero knowledge of his project to excited and ready to try it out. As an engineer I can do that by remembering a fundamental truth: the user doesn’t care about code. They don’t care if something took me a long time or was easy and they aren’t interested if I’m proud of my algorithms. They care about what the software does for them, so I should too.
A good presentation isn’t about the slides and a good software demo isn’t about the software. They are about sharing your message with someone else and starting them on the journey to caring as much about it as you do.