Part 1
The benefits of zooming presentations
You might not think it, but the presentation space has come a long way in the last 10 years. Hard to believe I know when you’re looking at yet another boring and badly designed PowerPoint deck in your next Zoom or Teams call, but it’s true!
The two big players in the presentation design space are of course PowerPoint and Prezi. But it has to be said that without Prezi arriving on the scene back in 2009, there probably wouldn’t have been as much urgency from Microsoft to innovate and introduce so many great new features.
The introduction of Prezi
When Prezi was first unveiled in 2009 it completely changed the game. Founder of Prezi, Adam Somlai-Fischer asked himself a simple question ‘What if there were no slides?’. From this question we saw the birth of what Prezi calls it’s ZUI (Zoomable User Interface), which in simple terms means that you can zoom in and out of your presentation content rather than travel through a series of slides in a linear format (the old Ppt way).
Many people thought that zooming was just a fad and wouldn’t last long, but now with over 100 million users worldwide and the Prezi team growing in Budapest and San Francisco, it’s obvious to see that there is much more to this zoom feature than many first thought. In fact the ability to zoom in to different areas of your content is so effective that even Microsoft has copied this functionality and now made it available to all users of MS Office 365.
How zooming can help you present
Here at The Prezenter we have always realised the power of being able to zoom into content. So much so that we are one of the only agencies globally awarded with official Prezi expert status.
Our company founder Russell was presenting to audiences with PowerPoint for nearly 10 years before Prezi came onto the scene. With a background in design he could make his slides look great, but he always felt like something was missing. It was still hard to get full audience engagement even with great looking slides and a good level of presentation skills. And then he found Prezi and never looked back!
What Russell realised from his very first use of Prezi in 2009 was that the ability to zoom in to content and back out again didn’t just look good, it actually helped him engage his audience more by removing the need to present in a linear way. He very quickly shifted his whole presentation style into what we call today ‘conversational presenting’.
Conversational presenting means that a presenter can start by showing their audience all of the main topics that are up for discussion. They can then ask the audience a powerful question…’Where would you like to start?’. Depending on the response, a presenter can simply click into the relevant area and deliver that content before returning back to the overview. A simple example is shown below:
Summary
To summarise, the zooming functionality helps presenters because they no longer have to try and win audience attention with cheesy ice breakers or complicated animations. They can have 100% engagement by asking their audience to decide on the order and flow of the content. A huge game-changer in our opinion.
Part 2 - How zooming helps your audience
In part 2 of this series we explain how zooming presentations can help your audience remember more. Click here to read part 2 now.
