Presenting for Geeks 1

The world is binary for geeks, full of computer-based 1s and 0s.  And in the real world too, there’s a modicum of binary-ness too. The world is full of people who care very much indeed how something works and those who don’t care at all, so long as it does.

Think of it this way – most people don’t know and don’t care about how their car works.  If pressed they could probably mutter something about “internal combustion engine” but that would be about it.  But they’re passionate about the fact that it must start in the morning to get them to work.

Or think of their computer.  Most people wouldn’t even know what an OS was, let alone be able to have conversations about which is most suited for purpose.  How about a camera or a phone or…. well just about any gadget – Joe Public doesn’t really care about how they work.  They just need to know that when the turn them on, they will work.  Few people care about anything to do with the inside of Windows until they see the Blue Screen of Death.

Life is complicated enough without making it more so by trying to understand everything.

Even for geeks, we do the same thing.  We take Pythagoras for granted, for example, without testing his hypothesis for validity every time we need to calculate the shortest straight-line distance between two points…..

So why is it that almost every time I see a presentation by a Geek (maybe it could even be one of the defining elements of Geek-dom!) the mainstay of the presentation is how something works – paying particular attention to the difficult bits, because they’re most important… after all, they’re the bits you’re most proud of, aren’t they! :)

Sorry folks, no one cares!  (Well, fellow geeks might, to be honest, but not “real people”! :)  )

What people (that is, your audience) care about is “Does the product/service/website work?”.  And by “work” what they mean is “Does it take away my problem?”.  You might think it’s the best bit of CSS you’ve ever written – what they see are rounded corners to a box.  You might think it’s the most elegant bit of add-on integration with joomla that you heard of – what other people see is a slightly faster e-commerce site.

Get the idea?

Try adding the words “Which means that…” to almost everything you say, to help your audience “get” why something’s cool.

• It’s got 12 USB ports which means that you can run shedloads of peripherals.
• It’s fully HTML-strict compliant which means that it’ll work on any browser

Actually, I know the last one’s rubbish, ‘cos being fully compliant and working on some versions of IE are mutually exclusive ideals, but you know what I mean! :)