The Importance of Conveying Ideas With ‘Human’ Presentations

During my final project ‘Webit’ at Ravensbourne I learned the difficulty and value of adequately presenting ideas in a way that is easy to understand for the masses.

The initial  presentation idea was to have a super-real representation in a real-world scenario and show how Webit would be used. Sounds perfect until I tried to show that in an interim presentation with the feedback being “I don’t know what I’m looking at” and “I don’t get it”.

I realised I was trying to hard to show how the thing would actually work rather than what I should have been doing which was trying to present the idea. With realistic graphics and real-world scenarios there is the danger that whoever is looking at the presentation will be focussed more on the aesthetics of the presentation rather than the general idea. The idea is the most important part after all, everything else is just a means to make that idea more accessible and usable.

“Make it more human”

A great example of this is an OpenID video that uses a rough-around-the-edges approach to make you focus on what it is rather than what it looks like and the implementation.

Using this as a base, the character of Webit was created to showcase the idea for my final project. Webit is a small animated frog who helps you find things on the internet. In the scenario there is a stick man, Rob (voiced by Rob Strode), who is browsing the internet. Webit is introduced as a friend and shows Rob what else is on the internet.

The fact the the characters are roughly coloured and animated means there isn’t a glossy finish to them, making them more accessible.

The end result of this is an interview with .Net magazine and a featured podcast available to download from iTunes here or via RSS here.

• .Net
• FMP
• Google
• Innovation
• Internet
• Interview
• New Designers
• Project
• Search
• Webit