After a presentation, I never know how it went. I know how I feel after the presentation, which is a mix of still-lingering stage fright and relief that the presentation is over. There’s also that annoying awareness and self-consciousness that I forgot a point1, which bothers me because I practiced and practiced and still it got lost somewhere in between making sure that the presentation clicker actually worked and that I’m on the slide that I’m intending to be on and making sure that I’m making eye contact with my audience and all of the million other things that are going on in my head when I’m presenting.
As I was driving home after my AltConf talk today, it struck me that this is a lot like what we go through in user experience (and, for that matter, in software engineering). We remember that awesome thing that we designed back at the very beginning of our project. And during the project, as we had to make hard decisions about what would stay and what would go, that awesome thing that we designed could become slightly less awesome. We intended to deliver a whole new world, and the reality of software development is that we don’t always get to deliver that whole new world. Sometimes we only get to deliver a part of that whole new world. We measure what we actually delivered versus our perception of what we had planned to deliver, back before we found out that something would be a lot more difficult than we thought it would be or before a key member of the team had a family emergency that set development back six weeks. We don’t measure what we actually delivered versus our user’s perception of what is available today. Our users compare our new shiny thing to the old version. We compare our new shiny thing to the much more shiny thing that only ever existed in our heads and perhaps on an early schedule.
A presentation is the same. The audience doesn’t know what you intended to say. It doesn’t know about that fantastically funny anecdote that you intended to include. It doesn’t know about that quote that perfectly illustrates the point that you wanted to make. It doesn’t know that you had fantastic bridges from one section to the next constructed. Your audience only knows what you actually presented in your time on stage, and whether what you presented gave them something new to think about.
I hope that, some day, I’ll be able to divorce my own feelings about a presentation from the presentation itself. As I said to someone today, watching video of yourself give a presentation is one of the worst forms of torture available. You can see exactly when you stumbled or stuttered, you can see that point where you skipped that fantastically funny anecdote. You get to watch yourself make mistakes, and you are watching for an external sign that you made a mistake. If you’ve done a great job, the audience is never aware of the stumble. If you’ve done a really good job, they might notice the stumble at the time, but forget it instantly because the presentation continues and they get something out of the presentation. If you’ve done a good job, they might notice the stumble and even remember it, and they forgive you because you’re human and they know that giving a presentation is hard.
If you attended or watched my AltConf talk today, this is a great example of confirmation bias. My belief is that I’m not good at giving presentations. When I watch a video of myself giving a presentation, I see all of the mistakes that I made, or I imagine that I see mistakes. I notice the mistakes, and I remember them, and it confirms my belief that I’m not good at giving presentations. I’m not at the point where I can see past my self-consciousness.
To be clear: I’m not fishing for compliments. I won’t believe you anyway, because you’re not confirming my strongly-held bias.
Slides forthcoming, possibly tomorrow. The video is available now.
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