Slide:ology - Presentation predictions

Nancy Duarte over at Slide:ology has come up with some predictions that she believes will happen in the Presentation world 2009:


1. The rise of new visual benchmarks for solving complex communication problems

Large photos and sparse text are quickly being adopted, which is great. But they only work for keynotes and marketing. So what about the physicians, scientists, and engineers? Best practices for these folks should arrive on the scene in 2009.

2. Presenters will feel the pressure: Status quo isn’t good anymore

Presenters will begin to feel audiences demand quality communication. There’ll be heckling and protesting from the audience when the presenter doesn’t design their visuals well or rehearse their material.

3. PowerPoint will become a rich multimedia environment

This one’s a bit of a crap shoot, but wouldn’t it be great if PowerPoint could provide a simple media-editing and management system that had nice playback and actually worked each time?

4. PowerPoint will be used by the President of the USA

Obama seems to embrace technology, so he just might embrace PowerPoint. If he does, he’s smart enough to do it right. Oh dread the day we take a big step backwards by having politicians confuse us even more by utilizing this medium.

5. Corporations that replace bad PowerPoint with designed stories will will see their stock price increase

This is the year where we’ll start to see some companies hit a tipping point. The ratio of good to bad PowerPoint will tip towards good and their company value will be clearly seen by customers, employees, and investors.

Based on my experience I think some of Nancy's predictions are pretty ambitious. In my own organisation, which is pretty progressive in some respects, getting our people to understand that they have to rehearse and that one size does not fit all is an everyday challenge faced by my team me. We shall see!