
Screensharing your talk slides is skeuomorphic - weinzierl
https://blog.plover.com/talk/slide-download.html
======
ChuckMcM
I stopped reading after "sent out slides before my talk." As if my
presentation is ever ready to be sent out before I start presenting :-)

More seriously, the author makes their point, but it read like they were
impeaching skeumorphic as "bad". The counter argument is that "slides" (what
ever you want to call them) are a visual summary of the conversation at the
current moment. This lets you get both your eyes and your ears into the talk,
and for visual topics can be a real help for the mentally visually
challenged[1].

The challenge with having the listener manage their own visual aids is that
now you have part of their brain working on "what window was that in? What
slide/page? up arrow or down arrow? ..." and that can make it hard to listen
thoughtfully while they are thinking about how to operate the visual display
tool.

[1] Amazing as it seems to me sometimes I have known people who cannot
construct and then "see" a 2D or 3D representation of what you are describing
in their head while you are talking. These illustrations are critical for them
to follow along, and even for folks who have this skill it avoids a mismatch
of what you think you have described versus what they have heard you describe.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I personally prefer when slides show what is being talked about, instead of
just summarizing the speaker's points. My problem is, I can't read the text on
the slides and listen to the speaker talking at the same time.

The way I try to do it is to use slides for code examples or charts, and then
discuss them as they're shown, highlighting the relevant areas. I try to
include _pauses_ there, so that people have time to focus on the image without
me talking. When audience size is small enough and isn't transient (e.g. a
small lecture, not a conference), I give out handouts with the code & charts
from slides printed on real paper - paper is much higher resolution than the
screen, and it helps the people further out in the room to stay engaged.

~~~
closeparen
Any time I build a high-stakes presentation that uses slides only for visuals,
higher-ups coach me into putting the text back in. They frame this feedback in
two ways:

a) The listener may zone out and lose track of what you're saying. The slides
should be there to pull them back in. Otherwise you risk losing them
completely.

b) The slide deck as a standalone artifact is expected to communicate the
substance of the talk. No one is going to watch the video. But my skip lead,
your promotion committee reviewers, etc. will probably flip through the
slides. If it's a mystery what they're looking at, that's not good.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _The slide deck as a standalone artifact is expected to communicate the
> substance of the talk._

Curiously, this is the exact opposite of most advice for delivering public
speeches (then again, most of that advice is for sales talks, not informative
talks, so one has to filter it anyway). Slides aren't suited for effectively
communicating a message outside of the context of a talk; at that point, it's
better to just write a document. But I imagine the "principle of least effort"
is what leads to slides being used the way you described in b).

~~~
watwut
Public speeches are about making listeners feel good about your speech so you
get hired to speak again. They are not meant to convince or teach and no part
of it matters for the future.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I would think people become less susceptible to such parasites over time. I
mean, I've outgrown listening to TED talks years ago. At some point you have
to realize that the speaker only making you feel good is just wasting your
time.

------
wilg
Off-topic HN rant: I think this is an unfortunate definition of skeuomorphism:
"an incidental feature of an object that persists even in a new medium where
the incidental feature no longer makes sense".

It is good to understand the origins of features, but it's not a good idea to
apply a value judgement to it based on their origin.

The "official" (i.e. trivially googlable) definition doesn't have this value
judgement: "an object or feature which imitates the design of a similar
artifact made from another material" and "an element of a graphical user
interface which mimics a physical object".

I would encourage people to more clearly separate the idea of porting ideas
from other mediums and the concept of a "vestigial property" of some feature.

That said, I think these are valid usability concerns for presentations, but
depending on the context of a presentation, you may want to more tightly
control the flow.

I've worked with executives who insisted the slides get sent out before the
presentation, which IMHO is an antipattern because it takes away your tools
for clearly presenting the information and encourages bikeshedding. (The other
antipattern is making slide decks for executives.)

It might be cool to have presentation software that isn't "slide" based
exactly, but still lets you go BACK but not FORWARD, and also adjust the text
size and other aspects of the presentation. Ideally also you'd limit the
"creativity" available in the presentation format to make it so people cannot
make terrible slide decks.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _slides get sent out before the presentation, which IMHO is an antipattern
> because it takes away your tools for clearly presenting the information_

I sort of disagree with this. I'd argue that having complete control over
information transfer is desirable only if you're trying to manipulate someone,
not when you're trying to inform them. I.e. when you're a salesman, not a
scholar. Having slides available beforehand lets one prepare, keeping a cache
of points of interest their head. Having slides available for random access
lets one focus better and catch up in case the speaker went too fast past a
slide. Having slides available after the talk is essential to not forgetting
everything 5 minutes after the talk ends.

~~~
wilg
I understand your point, but I don't think it changes the manipulability – you
could just manipulate the messaging on the slides. But the problem is that the
slides aren't necessarily perfectly formatted so as to be consumable on their
own.

For example, perhaps important context was forgotten about a chart, but
someone reading it ahead of time without the author present will get the wrong
idea and focus the whole meeting on that. Or you increase the workload of
preparing the deck because now you're trying to make it suit two purposes.

So I think the author should present the information the way they intended,
have follow-up in realtime or shortly after, and make the slides available
during or afterward for reference.

------
klyrs
> It didn't take me long to get in the habit of saying “Next slide, #18” or
> whatever as I moved through the talk. If you try this, be sure to put
> numbers on the slides!

Slide numbers are an atrocious skeumorphism. I've given several presentations
where I click several times to advance the state of a conceptual "slide,"
before it eventually moves to the next conceptual slide.

Some examples:

1\. First show a misconception, discuss it, _click_ strike out the
misconception and show the truth.

2\. Freeze-frames in an animation: each click advances to the next portion.
Sometimes you'll want to breeze through on the first pass, and then jump
around to highlight different features.

3\. Slides with complex information. Gray out the whole thing but for one
piece. each click grays out the previous focus and brings the next section
into focus. Finally, show the entire slide in its full glory.

4\. This one's big. Sometimes I share my _screen_ , not some dinky slides, to
show off an interactive interface.

The author suggests that humans should communicate through external channels,
reduplicating the effort of transmitting presentation materials. Furthermore,
this wastes valuable speaker time and effort on communicating slide numbers,
and similarly, distracts audience members as they fidget with their interface
to stay in sync. To what end?

> The audience can see the speaker.

Yeah, okay. That's legit. But, for example, Zoom allows the audience to change
their view. If they dislike the disembodied voice, they can arrange their
views to make the speaker's face visible in addition to the shared screen. If
they want to be immersed in your slides, they can do that, too. Other tools
allow for a picture-in-picture mode (which might require you to tweak your
presentation; annoying IMO).

------
alistairSH
A few counter points... Screen-sharing the slides facilitates recording. For
my team's presentations, we typically have as many people watching the
recording after the fact as attending live. Yes, I could record just the voice
and make them download the slide deck separately, but I'm not sure that's any
easier - my goal is to get information about our work out to our consultants,
support staff, and sales team quickly (respecting their time).

Zoom displays the speaker and shared content at the same time, so no
disembodied voice. I do agree that I like to see the speaker - I'm not a fan
of people who disable their webcams. But, I also know people who are the
opposite - they don't care about seeing the speaker at all.

The author is correct about point #1 - if each attendee controls their own
copy, screen resolution is not longer a problem. That said, I don't run into
that as a problem very often. Sometimes, early in a meeting, somebody will ask
the presenter to zoom a bit, which they do, and we move on.

~~~
cassianoleal
> Zoom displays the speaker and shared content at the same time, so no
> disembodied voice.

So does Jitsi, which the author used for his talk.

------
blunte
If you're presenting slides, you want your audience to see which slide you are
on - you don't want to hope that they manage to navigate to the right place in
their copy of your slides.

Secondly, skeumorphism isn't a dirty word. Sure, the flat-ui crowd have tried
to make it dirty, but it has value. Even though it is by design an artificial
representation of a real world thing, that doesn't mean there is no value in
helping the viewer auto-associate it with the real world thing. Although it is
out of style, I daresay it is more effective than the current UI situation we
are in these days.

Minimalist (and but not necessarily flat) UIs often give the viewer almost
nothing to go on. The skeumorphic designs of the 2000s at least helped the
user have a clue what the thing was about.

~~~
JadeNB
> If you're presenting slides, you want your audience to see which slide you
> are on - you don't want to hope that they manage to navigate to the right
> place in their copy of your slides.

Isn't this addressed by the following?

> Some co-workers suggested the drawback that it might be annoying to try to
> stay synchronized with the speaker. It didn't take me long to get in the
> habit of saying “Next slide, #18” or whatever as I moved through the talk.
> If you try this, be sure to put numbers on the slides! (This is a good
> practice anyway, I have found.) I don't know if my audience found it
> annoying.

~~~
blunte
It may depend somewhat on the speaker as well as the audience, but in my
experience audience members zone in and out during meetings.

The mostly-passive attendee may have little interest, but if the slides are
changing automatically (by your action), then it's possible a new slide my
grab their attention.

If you leave it up to them, some of them will never flip past the first slide
on their own.

------
PeterStuer
I understand the author's preference, but as a seasoned presenter and veteran
audience member I must say I do not share his opinion.

Sharing slides before a talk _can_ be useful, but only if the slides are
mostly bullet points and diagrams. If otoh you use a more empathic/media
journey style of presentation materials, there is little point in doing this
or even negative value.

The most boring form of video presentation I can imagine is a talking head.
Trust me, you are not that pretty, nor do you have the facial gymnastic
entertainment level that I want to look at you for half an hour in closeup
while you command me to turn pages. Show me something interesting on the
screen, maybe cutting to you for 10-30 seconds when you want to emphasise
something.

Get a greenscreen and OBS if you want to go a bit further. Overlay yourself on
the presentation if you want.

If you are presenting, you are not just 'relaying information', just write up
a briefing/memo/paper or email if that is your goal.

In a presentation you have to capture your audience, entertain, and yes,
inform.

~~~
logicallee
>Get a greenscreen and OBS if you want to go a bit further. Overlay yourself
on the presentation if you want.

Is this just an idea or have you done it? How hard was it?

I see there are greenscreen tutorials for OBS and this seems pretty exciting.

~~~
JCharante
For $40 you can buy software that eliminates the need for a greenscreen
[https://www.xsplit.com/vcam](https://www.xsplit.com/vcam)

(xsplit is a competitor to OBS and used to be very popular (as a step up from
fraps))

------
jonhohle
> I don't know if my audience found it annoying.

No user feedback…

> If you're giving a talk over videoconference, > consider trying this
> technique.

but want others to follow course.

As I read through I thought, as an audience member, I would not like this
approach and other tools (e.g. Zoom) allow feeds of both the presenter and
their slides/screen. I frequently flip back and forth depending on the
context. I often like a printed slide deck to write notes on during a talk,
but for virtual talks, screenshots allow me to capture a slide I might want to
come back to.

~~~
cassianoleal
> other tools (e.g. Zoom) allow feeds of both the presenter and their
> slides/screen

So does Jitsi, which the author used for this particular talk.

It just sounds like he has a personal preference for how he prefers to attend
video conferences and decided to use his own experience to push others into
following it, even though, as you correctly pointed out, he has no idea
whether the audience actually prefers it.

------
remram
Are there JavaScript libraries that can keep the presentation in sync with the
presenter? (or show some indication of the current slide)

At a high level, if we assume a majority of people are following along and you
chose a font size that works for them, having to turn the pages seems like a
net negative, a return to printed presentations before video projectors were
common in conference rooms.

~~~
lrizzo
Almost 10 years ago I wrote sttp

[http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/sttp/](http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/sttp/)

plain javascript + markdown variation, allows receivers to sync with the
presenter using AJAX (that was the name, at the time ?) long polls.

20 years ago I extended Magicpoint to send (and receive) content and commands
over RTP

30 years ago... I still used a overhead projector.

I realize it's been 10 year since I last worked on the subject, and this days
I use a mix of high tech and low tech solutions

[http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/document-
camera/](http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/document-camera/)

------
jccalhoun
I teach public speaking and I agree with him to a degree. I think there is
room for a slide presentation platform that is responsive like a web site so
that each slide would take advantage of the user's screen. I also think there
is room for something less linear and more interactive than powerpoint. Prezi
pitched itself as something like that but it ended up being all about swooping
in and out. I haven't tried Prezi in years but it was also time consuming to
make all that swooping in and out happen.

However, I disagree with handing the slides out ahead of time because that
means that it is easier for the audience to ignore the speaker and just flip
through the slides at their own pace. Now, that isn't inherently a bad thing
but that isn't a speech.

He wrote: >With the screenshare, everyone is stuck with whatever I have
chosen. If my font is too small for one person to read, they are out of luck.

If your font is too small for someone to read then your font is too small.
Except in rare situations you should make your fonts as large as possible.

>The audience can see the speaker.

That is a disadvantage but there can be things like picture-in-picture.

>Haven't you had the experience of having the presenter skip ahead to the next
slide before you had finished reading the one you were looking at?

If you have too much for your audience to read before you go on to the next
slide you have too much text on your slide. Less text is better.

------
freepor
Microsoft and Google both offer a feature where the audience can follow along
on their device. I've only used the Microsoft version personally... you can
watch the slides on your screen, get a translation into the language of your
choice, and go backwards in the presentation if you missed something (but not
ahead of where the speaker is). If you go backwards and want to get back to
where the speaker is, there's a button for that. Seems like the author just
needs to RTFM.

------
astrea
I feel as though screensharing the slides keeps everything in one neat
location. If I have to load your presentation slides separately, I have to
look back and forth between the slides and your video. Additionally, if I
don't have a second monitor I now can't see either very well. Finally, despite
his argument to the contrary, the synchronization is annoying. Having to say
"next slide, #18" after each slide just breaks the flow.

~~~
dllthomas
It seems like it would be ideal to synchronize with tech. Have an official
"slide we're on" that the presenter advances, but also allowing people to
navigate independently of that when they care to.

"Could you go back three slides?" also breaks the flow.

------
pornel
If slides are on a website, the site site can advance slides automatically for
everyone based on a signal from the server (e.g. via server-sent events).

------
wrnr
I find that a lecture given on a blackboard, where the speaker writes symbols
and draws pictures while telling a story, is often a better way of explaining
maths and physics. There is something about the visual and audio being "in-
sync" that really helps listener to understand.

~~~
upofadown
I once worked at a company where the bulb in the projector burnt out. For some
reason that bulb became a weird symbol of thrift so the bulb was never
replaced.

The company would do a summary of the financials for the year for the
employees. Since there was no projector the president rounded up all the
whiteboards, uncapped a marker and just started writing. Since he was
intimately familiar with the numbers he could talk as he wrote about what what
they meant with respect to what was happening both inside the company and in
the external business environment the company existed in. It was the best
presentation of that type I had ever experienced.

So not just maths and physics...

~~~
qznc
Matthias Poehm essentially made this his personal brand: [http://www.anti-
powerpoint-party.com/](http://www.anti-powerpoint-party.com/)

------
hodgesrm
Good presenters weave speech, gestures, emotions, and--last but not least--
visual props into a cohesive experience. If the slides are fundamental to your
talk you need to control the flow to avoid disruption.

If they aren't, why do you have slides in the first place?

------
robbiep
If you have enough text on your slides that your audience needs to adjust the
text size... they aren’t listening to you and you’re writing a textbook not
giving a presentation

------
MR4D
John Madden was the best screensharing presenter of all time.

He did it in real time, and every week during football season. He was
incredibly good at explaining _why_ a play worked or did not work.

In my view, more people should present like that instead of having tons of
words on their slides. It has _nothing_ to do with having control of the slide
deck.

I mean, imagine if Steve Jobs sent his presentation out before his WWDC
events. Not. A. Chance.

------
vincentmarle
Why not do both? Do the screenshare so it's easier to follow along _and_ share
the presentation beforehand.

------
david-cako
I prefer slides-only to watching a talk, but the spoken content often
supplements and extends what is on screen with detail and examples. People who
like the spoken content will gain “new features” by having it skeuomorphicized
(i.e, “made more familiar”).

------
docandrew
By his definition, isn't a "talk" skeuomorphic as well?

------
gcatalfamo
I am not sure how to say this: the article is not wrong, but the argument as a
whole is kinda pointless.

------
spekcular
[deleted]

~~~
shric
Bottom of first paragraph: "That is a skeuomorph: it's an incidental feature
of an object that persists even in a new medium where the incidental feature
no longer makes sense."

