Burning in Your Presentation

Creating Passionate Users has multiple bloggers who post on innovative business approaches in a whimsical yet thoughtful way. A recent post by Kathy Sierra provides a checklist to help determine if your product, presentation or other creation will be memorable to your consumer.

Kathy analyzes this issue from a cognitive perspective and nicely summarizes neural mechanisms that determine what gets sent to long-term memory and what doesn’t make it through the gate. Since we can’t exactly mix CREB-2 inhibitors into our audience’s coffee, following Kathy’s advice on how to “burn in” something into memory is a reasonable step to enhance the memorableness of a presentation, and her ideas are consistent with the cognitive approach and visual style prescribed by Cliff Atkinson. She even describes how the brain “tags” information for retrieval—I knew it, Web 2.0 is a metaphor for the brain!

Here are a few items from her checklist of characteristics that will make your presentation memorable:

• Surprise, novelty, the unexpected
• Counterintuitive failures or mistakes
• Varying visuals