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Control
How Can I Control My Nerves When Presenting?
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How Do Successful Designers and Pros Prepare and Practice Their Presentations?
01
Boil it down to a couple of key things
Know the end before the beginning
Take notes and organize
02
Jot down a bunch of things
Bring it down to three or four points
Create
a flow of words
I think you have to know the end before the beginning. So, you have to know what point you are going to make, that big point that you are going to drive home at the end. Then I work backwards to that point. What else is my process? Usually, as part of the design process and as part of the ideation process you do a lot of research and you come up with a lot of notes. When you’ve been doing it for awhile, while you are designing and while you’re doing the research, you are kind of already starting to know what’s going to go in that presentation. So, keeping those good notes and starting to organize those thoughts in your mind before it’s even close to be time for presentation is definitely something that I’ve done. When you ask the question of how do I do the process… It starts really early. It starts while I’m still thinking about things and still designing things. If I’m going to do a lot of research on my audience, I’m going to boil it down to a couple of key things. Then once I have a whole bunch of stuff there, again, I know what the end result is and I can go back and take out stuff that has nothing to do with the conclusion I’m trying to make.
—Andrea Pimental, Co-Director of School of Advertising and School of
Web Design & New Media at Academy of Art University
A lot of times if you don’t have any presentation skills or don’t know much about it you will end up just kind of word vomiting a bunch of ideas and thoughts and be like, “Did you get it?” What I do, big presentations, small presentations, on a piece of paper I’ll jot down a bunch of things I want to say in any order. Then I’ll try and bring it down to three or four points. If this is a presentation, like a five minute presentation, on one thing, I’ll have those three bullet points. Maybe I’ll have the piece of paper with me, maybe not. You create a flow of words around those three bullet points. That’s inherently your story. The start, middle, and end. Or version one, version two, version three. I find that if you can stick to those three bullets you can generally free form the rest of it. If there are other words that you really want to use, the three bullets (which are like a short sentence or a word)… If there are any other words you want to use you’ll be like, “I just want to touch on the fact this is extra-personlized.” So, you just include that in the bullets. I find that ends up working and then you don’t have to remember a whole speech. You’re remembering three things. Get to those three things and then, hopefully, you won’t have missed anything.
—Donna Roggi, Creative Director at Credit Karma
03
Start with an outline
State the problem
Summarize the process
04
Know
your
audience
Practice
Get feedback
Knowing the audience is the first thing that I would do. I would then create the content, once I know who the audience is, I would create the content from there, trying to add in there some personal stories, some of my own authentic experience within that subject. There’s a lot of different ways to do that and create some structure in your presentation. Set context; open and close well. Then I would practice. I would practice. Literally, if it’s a new presentation, I’m gonna turn the camera on and I’m gonna practice and I’m going to see myself and see what ways I can improve and what’s showing up in that presentation. Is it clear? Is it concise? Is it personal; is it authentic to me? See if there’s ways I can change that. Sometimes I’ll get feedback, too. I’ll ask a colleague to give me some feedback. There’s an awareness, a practice aspect, and the feedback aspect.
—Jared Dickson, Communications Trainer, Founder and CEO of
JD Communication Strategies
I’ll start with an outline. Just like when we design a book we have chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, then what to talk about in each chapter. What I usually do is have the outline just like when we are designing a book, I’ll have chapter one or intro: what I’m going to talk about; intro: then a couple of bullet points, then I’ll write down what the bullet points are. Ok, chapter 2: the problem; I’ll say what the problem is. chapter 3, the process; I’ll say what the process is, what research I have done, what kind of interviews I have conducted; then I’ll summarize that. Then I’ll have my solution: an a) solution, b) solution, which one is better. Then summarize everything. So, just have an outline of everything you want to say then just organize it.
—Shihwen Wang, UX Lead at Huge