Business Writing @ Purdue

After reading this article and thinking about the many other articles that we have read on the subject I am very confident in the material and development process that our group has chosen.  The material in our project is very clear and very concise, which allows for a stand-alone presentation.  This is very important because at the beginning of project three all of our group members were under the impression that we would be making a presentation.  This caused some altering of the material, mainly making the material be able to stand by itself and not need someone talking an audience through it.

In this article I found the part titled “Aspects of a Multimedia Design” the most helpful.  It laid out a very simple process of how to make sure that the presentation can be the best presentation possible.  This part of the article also asks many questions that will be good to think about when we are putting together the presentation.  Some of the most useful questions that I found were: how will the user get around inside your program, do navigational tools exist on every page?  This brought up many good points about navigation through the presentation, which may be easy for us but difficult for someone who did not design the presentation.  The article brought up a point which I had not really given much thought, aesthetic appeal.  I did not really think about this because I suppose I want the information given to me and I don’t really care what it looks like.  This is probably because I come from an engineering background.  The article in this reading was a very important thing to read for me because even though I may not care what the presentation looks like, most audiences will.

The article in the text book entitled “using visuals to inform and persuade” will be very helpful throughout the design process of the presentation.  It will give us somewhat of a guide set for how to choose the pictures or, in our case, screenshots that will maximize the information given to the audience in our presentation.  This is especially important in a presentation that will be given without any real presenting.  The images that we choose have to show the user exactly what we are talking about because we, as presenters, are not going to be there to clarify anything questions that the audience may have about the application being presented.

I personally found the “reading” assignment that was assigned for Thursday October 25 useful in what type of layout the Flickr presentation we are making.  Even though the “reading” showed mostly bad examples of presentations, I find this to be rather helpful because I need to be shown the wrong things before I can do the right one.  This “reading” helped a lot with not cluttering pages and teaching people who have not used powerpoint before the proper way to layout different slides in order to maximize the efficiency of the presentation.