Lecture: How to Give a Great Demo

Goals

• Convey features of your system and show their positive aspects
• Clear
• Engaging
• Well motivated

Problems

• Audience gets lost, confused, or cognitively overloaded.
  • Undefined terms unfamiliar to the audience
  • Forcing the audience to memorize a lot of new terms
  • (Implicitly?) Assuming the audience is familiar with something they are not, like the problem, like the system, etc.
  • Audience is unclear where demo is going or why they’re being shown the features they’re being shown
  • Going too fast
  • Forcing audience to process both something that is visually complex and to listen to you talk at essentially the same time
• Audience doesn’t care or is actively annoyed
  • Audience doesn’t know why they should care
  • Over-focus on button clicks and not on users’ motivations/goals
  • Demo doesn’t flow well, presenter gets lost, forgets to say things

• Running out of time (pacing)

• Technical failure
  • Common cause is last minute changes

Solutions

Process solutions

• Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse
  • Logistics: Allow time prior to demo to present
  • Neural: Start at least the day before. Make it the last thing you do before bed.
  • Neural: Repetition!!
  • Rehearse with the actual artifacts to be presented
  • Rehearse with a practice audience(s) to get feedback for different perspectives

• Code freeze to restrict changes, so the presenter can rehearse and discover any problems

• Backup (online) any files that you need for the demo

• Reduce possible points of failure by simplifying demo setup (fewer machines, supporting apps, etc.)

• Map out the demo
  • Draw up an outline
  • Time the different parts and adjust content to get the emphasis right

Demo design solutions

• Introduction
  • Assume the viewer has no knowledge of your system and is just an average squirrel
  • Keep it tight
  • High-level rationale for the system
    • What’s the problem and why is it interesting?
  • Gentle introduction to background concepts if necessary – but keep it well motivated!!
  • Visual aid? Like simple slide or image or the running app?

• Anticipate questions and when they will arise, and build in answers

• Carefully direct the audiences attention when dealing with a complex visual

• Demo from the perspective of a user and their tasks and goals
  • Lead with what the user wants (this naturally forms the motivation)
  • Make sure that you have always made clear what the user’s goal is before demoing a feature
  • Tell about the user’s relevant background.
  • Plan it – don’t try to wing it!
  • Include the user intro, background, and motivation in your outline
  • Use realistic data

One way to introduce your example user (unnamed in this case):

A typical user of our system wants to blah.

Another way would be as follows for a named user:

Imagine a typical user of our system named Alice who want to blah.