# The Art of Talk Design {% embed url="" %} Video {% endembed %} ## Summary: * **5 Phases of Design thinking** * Empathise * Define * Ideate * Prototype * Test * **Empathise** * Understand who our users are and what our user needs are. * **Define** * Observations that we’ve made so far and defining core issues * **Ideate** * Generating as many ideas as possible. * **Prototype** * Creating a scaled-down version of the end products. * **Test** * Getting deliberate feedback about your product and then making sure that you ask the right questions ## Scribble: * ***Designing an effective talk, it’s the same process as designing an effective product.*** * Company launches a product after doing the research of figuring out whether it’s a product that people want, yet, it’s something that happens all the time in our talks. * Apply ***design thinking*** when creating a new talk? * Design thinking is a way of thinking deliberately about what you’re creating and constantly reacting and reflecting on that.‌ ### 5 Phases of Design thinking * Empathise * Define * Ideate * Prototype * Test ### Empathise * When building a product, we first try to understand who our users are and what our user needs are. * It’s all about doing the research beforehand * Researching our users, who will be listening to it, who is the target audience? #### Audience * Know about the events, the ***organizers*** and most importantly, the ***attendees***. * What the background is, what prior knowledge they already might have. * Figure out what other speakers there are and also what they are talking about because that also influences people’s prior knowledge. #### Format * Understand what the logistical constraints are. * How long is your time slot? * What time will you be speaking at? * What type of stage are you speaking on? * Whether you’ll have access to Wi-Fi or audio? #### Topic * Write down what you already know about the content of your talk. * What’s the title, the abstract, the key takeaways? ### Define * Analyze all the observations that we’ve made so far and define what our core issues are. * So what are the problems that we’re trying to address with this new product? * it will always be about convincing the audience of whatever message you’re trying to get across but the angle of that message can be quite different. * It might be about teaching a new skill, it might be to convince people to use a specific product, * it might be to inspire or motivate or frighten people to do or change something. #### Think, Feel and Do * Filling up columns of as many ideas as possible with the following questions. * **Think** * What do you want your audience thinking about? * What mindset do you want to change? * What will the audience learn’ * **Feel** * How do you want the audience to feel? * Inspired, motivated, scared? * **Do** * What actions do you want the audience to take? * What should they do after the talk? ### Ideate * About generating as many ideas as possible and then limiting and choosing. * **Diverge** * Try to generate as many ideas as possible while keeping the goals and the audience outcomes in the back of your mind. * Write down all the possible ideas that will help achieve those goals and those outcomes. * **Converge** * Distilling all that information into something more usable. * Three techniques - prioritize, filter and cluster. * ***Prioritize*** * Putting the ideas that you have in order of importance, highlighting which ideas are the most important ones. * Makes it easier to see which ones you might need to drop if you need to. * ***Filtering*** * Dropping off the talk, so which ones just don’t fit in, or things that aren’t as important as the rest, or that you know that you won’t get around to. * ***Clustering*** * Which ideas go naturally together? * Can help you identify maybe the three topics that you can cover in a 20-minute talk and maybe you can know from…you can find out from it which topics you might need to ask for a 50-minute talk. ### Prototyping * Creating a scaled-down version of the end products, which you can then put in front of users and test with. * It’s about creating the bare minimum that will get you useful and valuable feedback without really wasting too much time. * **Prototype your talk structure.‌** * Before even creating any slides-- Create an outline first. * **Beginning, middle, and end.** * ***Beginning*** * Start of the talk will be in that “what is” phase. * ***The Hook*** * Grad their attention. * ***The Goal*** * Convince them why they should listen. * ***Middle*** * Everything in b/w “what is” and “what could be”. * The Main Ideas & Journey * Focus on what will bring the audience close to your goal. * ***End*** * “What could be” phase. * ***The Summary*** * Recap the main ideas * ***The Kick*** * Give them something to remember ### Testing * The testing phase is all about getting deliberate feedback about your product and then making sure that you ask the right questions to get that feedback. * ***Prepare your feedback givers.*** * **Prepare actual feedback questions.** * What areas do you want feedback on? * Is it about the timing of your talk, specific sections that you don’t feel are quite right? > ***“Good presentations, good blog posts, good documentation, they’re all about understanding your audience and building the right message for them.”*** \