(Credit:
The Tech Herald)
Is it a presentation tool? Or a visual storytelling tool? Visualization software? Or a zooming editor? Budapest-based Adam Somlei-Fischer, founder and lead designer of Prezi, and Peter Halacsy, founder and CTO of Prezi, were interested in soliciting feedback on their product’s category when they visited frog design’s San Francisco studio last week and demoed their tool. Having marketed mind-mapping software previously in my career, I felt sympathetic: At the time, we went through a similar exercise, and after endless discussions and focus groups we ended up with a label only a committee could come up with: “enterprise productivity software.” Yawn. One must not be concerned that the Prezi guys will get trapped by the lowest common denominator – they’re too smart, too opinionated, and too small (ten people).
Suppose, though, Prezi is a presentation tool – as the name (and Techcrunch’s praise: “the coolest online presentation tool”) may well imply – then of course it faces a mighty contender: PowerPoint is the dinosaur in the room. Microsoft's program has been around for 25 years, and by some estimates 30 million PowerPoint presentations are created every day. You’ll be hard-pressed to find any major company that completely foregoes using it, despite its disputed benefits and “Death by PowerPoint” claims that accuse the software of being an all-too-convenient prop for poor speakers. Edward Tufte, one of the most vocal PowerPoint critics, in a famously agitated essay (“The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”) even drew a causal relationship between NASA’s PowerPoint slides and the Challenger crash in 1986.
For PowerPoint haters, Prezi surely offers hope. Unlike Keynote, which is highly popular among designers because it offers higher visual fidelity and a better user experience, Prezi differs radically from PowerPoint in that it requires an alternative mental model: Information is displayed in a non-linear fashion. That’s also true for mind-mapping, but Prezi offers additional linear paths, knowing that “time is linear” when you present, as Adam Somlai-Fischer put it. Users can jump in and out of these paths and are thus given enormous flexibility in storing and presenting information.
This very flexibility, however, presents a serious adoption barrier: Many first-time users, as the two Prezi founders would readily admit, struggle with the challenge of filling a “blank canvas,” as they can become overwhelmed by the freedom (and pressure) created by a level of user empowerment they’re not used to within the strict confines of PowerPoint templates. Prezi is asking you to literally think outside the box, but there is a real danger that the brilliance of the tool can get in the way of your content. I saw several conference speakers rely on Prezi this year, and while some of them used it so masterfully that I didn’t even notice the software, some were deliriously inundated by Prezi’s rich possibilities and went gaga with dizzying “jump cuts” from topic to topic, disrupting their presentation and confusing the audience. At the end of the day, you still have a story to tell, and Prezi’s simple way of putting information anywhere you like can ironically lead to the very information overload it aims to avoid – it is just too tempting to create mega-maps and add more and more data to them. But that’s just a minor concern, and some training and (self-imposed content discipline) will make you easily forget about PowerPoint.
Prezi has a lot going for it. Backed by TED and solid VC-funding, with a soon-to-open new office in San Francisco, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey as advisor, and a ton of media buzz, the company is poised to aggressively grow adoption in the mainstream corporate world. Power to Prezi!
(Credit:
23f)
Matt Webb pointed out in his LIFT presentation today that humans “take pleasure in watching things unfold.” True – even if the events are a quasi-authentic account of something that has already happened.
Coincidentally, the Spanish site Per Soitu reports about a fascinating example of “fake authenticity” and the emerging trend of using Twitter for storytelling. On February 23, 2009, exactly 28 years after about 200 soldiers and paramilitary members of the Spanish Civil Guard toppled remnants of General Franco's dictatorship, a group of Spanish Twitterers revived minute by minute the historical coup d'etat that occurred on February 23, 1981. During Franco's fascist government all cultural activities were subject to censorship, and many were plainly forbidden on various grounds (political or moral).
We’ll see more of this "instant" rewriting and reliving of history. Twitter is perfectly suited to translate historical narratives into the realm of social real-time presence.
(Credit:
Scott McCloud/Google)
Google's new Chrome browser is an interesting entry into the revitalized "browser wars." Given Google's Apps and Gears, the browser has essentially become the "OS" that contains them, so it makes perfect sense that Google would want to extend into that area to give it more control, and provide custom functionality that could not be accomplished with other browsers that it does not control.
But what is also interesting is how Google chose to describe some of its capabilities and intentions to the world: with comics.
The comics form has a number of benefits, the most obvious being that it does a better job of explaining technical features of Chrome better than a dry spec sheet would have.
For example, what if Google had said this in a features section of a page describing Chrome: "Multi-process rendering engine eliminates browser hangs due to single-threaded JavaScript executions."
I would have thought, "Gee, that sounds great, but I don't really know what it means." Well, the comics form allows the company to explain that in a non-intimidating way. It's still not exactly lay-person speak. (It is more geared toward journalists and bloggers who will be more familiar with the jargon than the general public.) But many more people will now understand what's going on under the hood and, more importantly, the resulting benefits.
A nice side benefit for Google is that because the team of people who worked on it are brought to life through the comic (rather than stultified by press-release lingo), it humanizes Google at a time when it is starting to get a bit of a big-bad-wolf-Microsoft reputation due to its size and clout. By focusing on the individuals, it takes the mega corporation out of the picture (literally and figuratively).
The comic itself was created by well-known online comics artist Scott McCloud, after doing many interviews with Google engineers. It's a great example of using someone outside the nitty-gritty of the product development process, with a knack for story-telling, to craft the narrative of the product. Too many good products fall by the wayside because not enough attention has been paid to the narrative--in other words, telling the value proposition in a way that the audience can relate to.
McCloud also wrote the mini-classic book Understanding Comics, which is a must-read for anyone who makes use of storyboards or scenarios to describe how a yet-to-be-made product will be used. Back when I was teaching industrial design I would get all my students to buy it.
Unfortunately, navigation of the Chrome comic itself is a bit clunky. There are just back and forward links at the bottom, which look pretty old-school considering how advanced the product they are talking about is supposed to be. There's also no sense of where you are in the "book." Is page 8 still early at the beginning, and do I need to get comfortable for the long haul, or am I almost done? (It's 38 pages long, so, yes, it takes awhile.) It's been treated more like a series of static pages than a slide show, and slide shows can be done much better and dynamically than this (in fact McCloud has some interesting uses of dynamic navigation on his own site).
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