I had an amazing experience at Design Thinking last night. I really want to thank Stephen and Paula Thornton for inviting me to present.

As usual, Stephen’s presentation on “Hidden Entrances” was amazing, provocative, and eye opening. I’m hoping he’ll post the slides. It was also great to catch up with all of the familiar faces, it’s amazing how small the DFW Design community is after only a few years of living in the area.

I’ve posted my slides on Slideshare, but a few of the slides didn’t translate well. The downloadable PDF version is fine though.

The ability to craft (and deliver) a good presentation should be in the quiver of every designer, right along side their Moleskine and Micron pens (Garrett prefers Sharpies and a Dot Grid Book).

I use presentations to unravel a vague idea or requirement to be sure I completely understand all of the facets and details. If I can’t clearly explain a topic or idea then I need to go back to the project stakeholder and regroup. In some cases this will uncover holes that need to be address even before I start sketching out a wire frame.

I’ll be presenting Influencing Change Through Presentations at Design Thinking Dallas on Friday October 19th. Officially:

Have you ever sat through a bad presentation? Me too! In this session we’ll see how a well designed presentation can be an invaluable tool for telling your story, incubating ideas, and making change in your organization.

Design Thinking will be an all day session about “thinking different” and will feature a keynote from Chris Bernard and many other Dallas superstars. This all day event it only $40 dollars if you register in advance, $50 at the door.

If you are a designer, you’ve heard that a million times before. It’s so very true.

Here is an example I snapped today while redeeming a gift certificate:

The system is telling the user to click here for their receipt (click here and do what?), but then says, “oh, you might want to wait a second, it might not be ready yet, but I have no idea.”

I find it hard to believe that the system doesn’t know when it had finished generating the receipt. The reality is the developer carelessly (or thoughtlessly as Stephen would say) glossed over this contradictory interaction.

Here is an idea:

Provide the customer with some status about what’s happening. If the system says, “wait, I’m still working on that,” we’ll wait for it. No questions.

Next, the system should politely tell the customer when it’s finished:

And just to be nice, how about a more descriptive verb. “Click here to view“ doesn’t tell me much. The end result is to most likely print.

“Developers watch, Designers see.”

An interesting perspective from my developer colleague Jarek.