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

[Jared M. Spool]

I've often felt the same way about Tufte's condemnation of presentation slides.

While I've given presentations without slides that I was content with, I 
feel my best presentations include slides that provide an additional visual 
information stream to the audio stream I'm delivering.

I use a *lot* of slides in a presentation. A typical 60 minute talk will 
have 75-85 slides in it. Most of them will be images of some sort. I use a 
lot of highlighting techniques to focus the audience member on the specific 
part of the image I'm interested in. Nobody ever seems to complain that 
I've put too much information into the visual stream.

I use bullets to make the points I want the audience member to take home. 
Interestingly enough, I started ensuring I *always* did this after hearing 
Tufte rail on Powerpoint, but then condemn the practice of forcing audience 
members to take notes instead of paying attention. If I've done my job well 
(which is probably *rarely*), someone can pick up the handout of my talk 
and remember all the important parts of what I was trying to say.

So, my opinion is similar to Don's. Crafting a quality presentation is 
indeed a learned skill that many presenters do not display. The tool 
shouldn't be condemned as much as the skills of the people using it.

That being said, it should be noted that at UIE, we don't use Powerpoint. 
We use a Lotus Freelance[1]. This started way back in the mid-90's when we 
did a competitive study between the two office suites and found that 
creating presentations in Freelance was far simpler and more function-rich 
than creating them in Powerpoint. (Before that, we used an Aldus product, 
whose name I've long since forgotten.)

Three times in the last 10 years, we've tried a whole-scale switch to 
Powerpoint. (This is actually a complex process, as we have hundreds of 
presentation files to convert over.) In every instance, we quickly became 
so frustrated with how complicated it is to do simple things in Powerpoint, 
that we actually abandoned the conversion and switched back.

The version of Freelance we're using hasn't been updated since 1997. (There 
are more recent upgrades, but they don't offer any better features and I'm 
afraid they'll break our gigabytes of existing presentation files, which 
would be completely unacceptable.) So, we're looking for a new tool, but 
nothing has come about. (We're not a Mac shop, but Keynote feels like the 
best thing going right now.) With every new Windows upgrade, Freelance gets 
finickier and finickier, so I feel like our days are numbered for this tool.

[1] http://lotus.com/products/product2.nsf/wdocs/freelance

Jared

Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
http://www.uie.com    jspool at uie.com

UI10 Spotlight Presenter: Flow author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
See details at http://www.uiconf.com