Prezi.com Homepage
Prezi is unbelievably easy to use. That’s one of the reasons I love it. (By the way, if you haven’t seen a presentation using Prezi, check this out.) Unlike most presentation tools, it’s not riddled with “transition effects” and “layout options.” It’s brilliantly elementary. It’s devoid of constraints. For me, this is a blessing. For many, it’s a curse.
The Search for Structure
One of the most elusive concepts I find in most Prezi presentations is navigational structure – it’s lacking; people wildly zoom around a presentation. While this may make sense to the presenter, it is a completely disorienting experience for the audience and can certainly induce motion sickness.
Try this presentation, for example:
Make sure you use the forward navigation to step through the presentation – even 10 or 15 steps. While the presentation appears well organized, it lacks the navigational ‘beats’ that help me stay oriented. Every few moves, I’m zoomed past things that mentally I cannot register. This is one thing that’s really easy to fix in Prezi.
Keep Me Oriented
All you have to do is make sure the viewer always knows where they are in reference to elements you’ve already displayed. That means if you zoom in, then move around on the elements you’ve zoomed in to, and then make sure you zoom out to the parent element before you move on to something else. Make sense?
Prezi Basics
I started creating a series of short videos to help cover some of the Prezi Basics that will really help you create better presentations using Prezi. Here’s one of the first ones:
My Prezi Workshop in Seattle
The Prezi Workshop will be held just outside of Seattle at the Langley Center for New Media
There are hundreds of things that I’ve learned over the last 20 months using Prezi that I’ll be sharing at a Prezi workshop in the Seattle area next week. Hope to see you there!
[...] Prezi Paths: Linear Storytelling in an Infinite Landscape (tippingpointlabs.com) [...]