Last week I gave a talk at UX Lisbon. This talk meant a lot to me, not only due to the prestigiousness of the event but because I decided to radically change how I would create, prepare and deliver my talks. This is the story of how this came about.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Over the past few years I’ve had the privilege to speak at several conferences. My talks had usually to do with UX in some way or another. When I started they were really not more than bullet point slides that I would go through. Not really engaging from a UX point of view, but a start nonetheless. With time the presentations became more elaborate but mainly on a level of matter, not necessarily in terms of performance. And although I felt that they were increasingly engaging, close friends would give me feedback like “It was interesting – but man, you are really spelling things out.” or “You’re listing facts instead of telling stories”.<\/p>\n
This really bugged me. I knew they were totally right: from a performance point of view they sucked. Sure – I always knew what I wanted to bring across, but just having keywords to guide me through the talk would result in an avalanche of “ehrm”s and *a lot* of sentences being repeated or rephrased.<\/p>\n
Then earlier this year, out of the blue, two almost magic moments occurred: First I saw Ian Fenn<\/a> speak at a local UX event in Switzerland.\u00a0Frankly his talk didn’t really blow my socks off, content-wise. It did though on a story-telling level. It had narration, it had rhythm and structure. In addition Ian had the ability to perform this in a well pronounced and perfectly emphasized way. After the talk I checked out the slides and there it was: while the slides he had presented were mostly images with sprinkles of text, he had uploaded the slides complete with notes which revealed the full script of his talk.<\/p>\n The second revelation was learning about\u00a0how\u00a0Karen McGrane<\/a>\u00a0prepares her talks,\u00a0about how much effort she puts into preparing her public appearances: 40 or so hours spent on rehearsing each talk before its first presentation, taking lessons with a speech coach – stunning. I always felt that she was something like the Meryl Streep of UX and this insight made her fully earn that title.<\/p>\n This boiled down to one simple idea: Having a script like Ian would allow me to practice like Karen. Little did I know what I was in for – in the good and the bad sense. This was the moment I realized that mimicking the process of film making would be an awesome way to go – and having some experience in film making it also would be something quite natural.<\/p>\n Having a first version of the script I started practicing it’s parts, harshly becoming aware of one of scriptwriting’s most prominent rules:<\/p>\n While speaking aloud the words that sounded so great on paper I realized that I could not utter them, that the sentences were too complex and unnatural. This meant rephrasing everything: ALOUD. Most importantly I became aware that I really wanted to have a very distinct pronunciation, a natural accent and not my unspecific american-tv-series-with-swiss-colouring pronunciation. And so my brain unearthed my once well-trained “received pronunciation” a standard British pronunciation I was taught at university. (That was back in the early 90ies, before the web came along and bereaved me of any ambition to become an English teacher\u2026) I really felt at ease and I believe that I’ve finally found my stage voice.<\/p>\n Again I realized how similar this was to film making: While filming, actors have to get into character, they have to be able to switch on this personality they represent. So would I have to: after a while of practicing I didn’t have to focus on memorizing and rendering the words any more but could start to shape the rhythm of speech, body language, the synch of speech and slides.<\/p>\n With the script in place storyboarding was a breeze. I just found the images I wanted, those that I didn’t find on Flickr I shot myself. While I spent a lot of time composing the slides I was always clear about what their content would be.<\/p>\n Shortly before the event, in the midst of all practicing I started to clock my runs through the script and as you would do in film making started to trim the fat: This I don’t need, that is a repetition. I did this until I had my talk down to 15 minutes. Yet again: film making as a blueprint.<\/p>\n On the big day I was much more nervous than usual. I’m always excited to speak but never really nervous. Now I could have thrown up all morning before my gig. Despite having been prepared like never before. If you speak publicly or are planning to do so: do yourself a favor and write a script before you do the slides. And practice. A lot. I would like to thank Ian Fenn and Karen McGrane for sparking this. Even if you don’t know this, you rewired my brain – in a very pleasant way. Last week I gave a talk at UX Lisbon. This talk meant a lot to me, not only due to the prestigiousness of the event but because I decided to radically change how I would create, prepare and deliver my talks. This is the story of how this came about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-learning-and-growing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lessamess.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lessamess.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lessamess.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lessamess.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lessamess.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lessamess.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":107,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lessamess.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions\/107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lessamess.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lessamess.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lessamess.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Piecing it together<\/h2>\n
\nSo I started to prepare my talk for UX Lisbon by writing a script. A script? Yes, like the ones I had done in filmschool, where I would have a narration first and visualize on a very basic level. Something like this:<\/p>\n[Tokio at night]\r\nJust imagine you are in a hotel room in Tokio, it is Summer. It's hot and humid. Luckily your room has Air conditioning.<\/pre>\n
Writing is rewriting<\/strong><\/pre>\n
Getting ready<\/h2>\n
The big moment<\/h2>\n
\nThe talk went well, I guess – those that new me were really surprised about the accent, the others didn’t notice.
\nI also felt great during the talk. No stumbling through what I wanted to say, just delivery, concise and well planned. Plus I never had to actually look at the slides to find out what I had to say.<\/p>\nSo:<\/h2>\n
\nIT IS WORTH IT!<\/p>\nThank yous<\/h2>\n
\nA big shout out to UX Lisbon<\/a> for letting me do this, thanks Bruno<\/a>\u00a0for your awesome input on the script!
\nI also would like to thank Zahida Huber<\/a>, Simon Farine<\/a> and Yann Ringgenberg<\/a> for their mean and awesome and supporting feedback on my earlier gigs. You make me go where no Memi has gone before.
\nA special thank you to \u00dcbersuper Se\u00f1or Sicher<\/a> for lending me his awesome picture. Thanks man!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"