[Sigia-l] Smackdown: Edward Tufte vs. Don Norman

[James Aylett]

sigia-l-bounces at asis.org wrote:

> Be content with crappy tools? No thanks. I use PowerPoint for some
> presentations, the ones where PowerPoint structure allows me to convey
> the meaning I want to convey. But Powerpoint still doesn't support
> most of the things I want to communicate, so it's not the tool for me in
> most cases. I am sure there are people who think it's great. They either
> make sucky slides or they really have to present things that demand that
> structure. If I had to guess I'd say the later is a minority.

I have to point out (briefly :-) that the people here who are really good
presenters don't like Powerpoint. I suspect one of the reasons for this is
that they tailor their presentations on the fly to their audience, and what
people seem interested in (like any good performer). Powerpoint makes it
tricky to deal with this, because it's really designed to be driven
sequentially (or rather, it's difficult to use otherwise). If someone came
up with a remote pickle for Powerpoint that allowed branching and skipping
easily, they might prefer it.

I've heard of top presenters for people who really need to communicate well
(such as lawyers) sometimes using Powerpoints that just have abstract
images, with no actual data. (Presumably with branching you could then drop
in specific charts and so forth.) I personally hate having bullets up as
people are speaking, because they usually don't match exactly. Bullets are
good for summaries, though - but concentrating on both screen and speech is
hard for most people (myself included), and to be honest I'd rather not have
to do it.

James

--
James Aylett
  Chief Technical Architect, Tangozebra
  t 020 7535 9850 f 020 7535 9900
  w http://tangozebra.com/


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