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Technical Presentations for a Non-technical Audience

Published on Nov 24, 2015

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PRESENTATION OUTLINE

Technical Presentations for a Non-technical Audience

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Contents

  • preparation
  • organisation
  • visualization
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Know your audience

Before you create a presentation, take some time to find out as much as you can about your audience.

For a technical presentation you need to determine :
a. what they know about the topic
b. what is their level of expertise
c. their age range

You also need to think about what they expect to hear in your presentation.

So how can you find out what they know or what their expectations are? You need to ask them
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Know your purpose

Does your presentation aim to inform, persuade, or entertain?
Knowing what you aim at determines the tools you use.

If you intend to inform and you have an idea of the level of knowledge the audience has on your topic, you can start by introducing key concepts and then explaining the relations between them.

If you intend to persuade, then you can start by stating out the problem, then continue with solutions A, B, C and their benefits and drawbacks.

Facilitate understanding

When you give a presentation, you should think about making your audience understand your points or arguments. If we think about technical presentations, the first thing you have to consider is to simplify your language and use as few terms as possible. (own experience examples)
In other words,

1. Minimize jargon as it complicates understanding. You can think of technical terms as a foreign language or hieroglyphics. To make sense, use a few.

2. Filter you info. You may know a great deal about network configurations. How much of all of that does your non-technical client need to know? What does your client need to know? For example he/she needs to know how to update content on the company webpage.
It is like going from Turku to Helsinki by train. You want to know how to go there but you are not necessarily interested in how trains move and their mechanics.

3. Build your points in logical order. Even better, address one FAQ per slide and use this question as the title of your slide

4. Talk about benefits rather than features.

Benefits of facilitating understanding
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Make concepts concrete

1. Illustrate your points. Are you planning to use the word "interface"? Show a picture of it. Interfaces also look different for different users as well as for different machines.

2. Use analogies. Do you want to talk about "bandwidth"? You can describe bandwidth as "water flowing into a pipe". An analogy for a static IP address could be "an apartment" whereas as a dynamic IP would be described as a "hotel"

3. Use service prototypes and customer journeys

Use visual aids ... but use common sense, too

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Visual aids checklist

  • Will it add to my presentation
  • Does it relate to my talk ?
  • Is the graphic quality acceptable?
  • Is the main idea clearly illustrated?
  • Is is visible from the back of the room?

For complex visuals, remember

  • to build them up gradually  using animation
  • to use colour as more information is added
  • complex information takes time to absorb
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