The Webinar Blog

Negative User Views Of Web Conferencing

I saw a tweet today from @LeMadChef mentioning a podcast “opining about WebEx (and the horror of enterprise presentations).” Intrigued, I paid a visit to the Reconcilable Differences podcast on Relay.FM. Episode #98 was published today, February 21.

After listening to cohosts John Siracusa and Merlin Mann, I still can’t figure out the overall theme or premise of the podcast. Maybe it’s just “stuff we feel like talking about this week.” Part of the stuff in this episode is an unplanned rant about web conferencing.

It starts as a sidetrack at 1:44 with a brief mention of Zoom conferencing. From there, they branch off to discuss their experiences with Webex and GoToMeeting. What’s interesting to me is that these are not presentation experts nor conferencing specialists. They are just a couple of guys who use such tools as part of the work process. They don’t want to delve into operational details… They want the products to quietly let them accomplish their business tasks. And clearly they are not satisfied with how well they think web conferencing achieves that goal.

Merlin and John both generalize in their commentary. Readers of this blog will probably spot complaints where more product training and familiarity would allow the men to work around or eliminate some of their frustrations. But it’s the subjective impressions that are important here. Some of the complaints show where more work is needed in product design, or training and online help resources, or assistance with setup and moderation of a meeting.

Let’s take a look at a few specifics. I am necessarily summarizing and paraphrasing as I present these comments.

“I created a fancy slide presentation in Keynote on my Mac with transitions and animations to help make my points. My webinar host then told me at the last minute that my file had to be shown in PowerPoint on his Windows computer. I lost all my effects… in fact, we may have had to convert the entire presentation to a PDF in order to display it.”

>> This complaint is fortunately getting less common. I could not tell how long ago the anecdote took place. It remains true that web conferencing products that require an upload and conversion of slide content are notoriously PowerPoint-centric. A few still even require presenters to be on Windows computers. But that is now rare. More and more frequently, vendors are giving up on trying to chase PowerPoint’s constantly changing feature set, and are relying instead upon screen sharing to display whatever is on the presenter’s computer. In that case, it doesn’t matter whether you use PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi, or something else. But if the host insists on running the share screen from her or his computer, you can still run into the problem of having the originating software unavailable or incompatible. Hosts have a responsibility to clearly communicate the technical requirements up front before any design work starts.

“I couldn’t see my slide notes while presenting.”

>> This problem goes hand in hand with the shift we are seeing towards using screen sharing instead of slide upload/conversion. Products such as Adobe Connect or Webinato can upload PowerPoint slides and their associated notes. Presenters can see the notes while moving through the slides. But in a screen share scenario, the only practical way to see notes is to use a dual-monitor setup where the presenter view is on one screen, while the audience view is on a separate screen that is shared with attendees. If the webinar host or moderator runs the slide show on behalf of the presenters, they can never see the presenter view. The best solution is to print out notes pages and have them physically in hand. Unfortunately, that doesn’t look very good if the presenter appears on camera. Hosts and presenters should work out their preferred strategy during a tech run / rehearsal ahead of time.

“The technology is forcing presentation materials into a dumbed-down lowest common denominator approach. Put your text on the slides so you can read them without notes, and don’t use any interesting effects in case they are incompatible. It forces presenters into creating boring visual materials.”

>> I vehemently disagree with the literal reading of this statement. But I totally get how people could feel that way… Especially if invited to present on an unfamiliar system without sufficient familiarization and preparation. I have even fallen prey to advising guest presenters to simplify their presentations to avoid potential technical problems later. Take embedded video clips or audio clips on slides for instance. Those can create technical minefields. It’s often easiest to remove them rather than spending time testing and separating the multimedia assets for best playback.

“Web conferencing products keep covering up the visuals with controls, logos, presenter video, etc. If I show a slide, I need to see the ENTIRE slide, and so does my audience!”

>> Correct. Vendors, take note. Admittedly (and they come back to it later), a good part of the problem is lack of standardized, intuitive control icons and a lack of training. So there may be ways to hide, move, or resize elements that the presenter or attendees are unfamiliar with. Ever since ON24 introduced their Webcast Elite windowed GUI, I can’t believe any vendor takes a different approach. It’s completely intuitive to every attendee using a Windows or Mac windowed operating system. You open, resize, and move conferencing element windows just as you do with everything else on your computer. What could be more natural?

“I run into problems where I can’t share the proper screen in a dual-monitor setup. So the audience sees my presenter notes screen instead of the full screen view.”

>> This has to be a training issue. But I do recall having frustrations in the early days of using Zoom with just such an issue. Vendors, this HAS to be simple, intuitive, and bulletproof. Hosts/moderators… If your guest presenter is running their own share screen session, make sure you cover this operation in your familiarization session.

“Muting and unmuting attendees needs to be much more obvious and controllable. Hosts need to easily open and close lines so people can speak when appropriate and be muted otherwise. It’s often hard to tell whether you are currently muted or not.”

>> This is obvious, but they are right… Many products still need better UI refinement to overcome the inattentiveness of attendees and to make it easier to transition between one-way and two-way communications in a session. If your participants have a choice of phone or computer audio the integration of controls can be even trickier!

There are a few other digressions into physical room-based presentation problems that I won’t bother recapping here. The entire segment takes place in the first 20 minutes of the podcast before their first commercial break. It’s a nice window into how average users may be perceiving our industry.

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conferencing,web conference,web meeting,online meeting,online collaboration,web collaboration,Reconcilable Differences

Upvoting Webinar Questions

A few (very few!) web conferencing products include the ability for participants to upvote text submissions from other participants. But I haven’t yet seen a product that has implemented it in the way I would like.

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, the concept is simple… The web collaboration software lets attendees see things that other people have written and click a button akin to the Facebook “Like” indicator.

There are many potential uses: “Me too” indications of concerns that resonate with a large percentage of the audience. Polling on which topic or question people would like the host to address next. An easy way for people to respond with a “ditto” to someone else’s answer without filling up the chat log with redundant submissions. And so on.

I usually run into two key problems with the implementations I have seen… Privacy and practicality.

In collaborative web meetings or web conferences where everyone is participating on a peer basis and knows the other people in attendance, privacy is not a concern. But consider a public webinar with “moderated” or private question management:

The presenters/hosts see questions that are submitted, but participants do not see what other people have typed. Participants in these kinds of sessions usually do not see the names of other attendees (since they have not agreed to be publicly identified and because the hosts might not want to give an indication of the size of the audience they have managed to attract).

I want the ability as a presenter or host to select any submitted question and relay it out to the full audience for voting. When I do so, the software needs to strip the name of the original submitter to maintain their privacy.

From a practicality standpoint, I want the ability to clear current votes, clear the voting queue of all questions, delete individual questions from the voting queue, and resubmit questions into the queue for voting again.

The reason I need those choices is so that I can keep voting current and relevant. If the audience has upvoted a question to address, once I deal with it I want to remove that question from consideration to get a better idea of what I should deal with next. Similarly, once I have asked for responses and votes on a question I pose to everyone, I want to clear all those responses from the queue before asking for a response to a newly posed question.

Would any vendors like to make me happy by upgrading their upvoting functionality? Would you like to have such a feature available for your web meetings? If so, let your vendor know!

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing,web meeting,online meeting,web collaboration,online collaboration

Split PowerPoint Animations Into Separate Slides

I just found out about an add-in utility for PowerPoint called PPspliT (the capitalization is theirs). It’s been around for a while, and several people in the presentation community have referenced it, so I am a little late to the game.

The basic operation is very simple… Once you download and install the executable on your Windows-based computer (there is no Mac version), PowerPoint gets an additional entry on the main command bar:

Clicking the icon to “Split animations” creates new slides in your file. The utility attempts to show the visual state of the slide after each animation step (or after every click-triggered animation if you leave that default option checked in the command bar).

Slides are inserted directly into the source file, so it’s a good idea to do the operation on a copy of your PowerPoint file to make sure you have access to the original afterwards.

In my tests, I have been pleased by the simplicity, by the fact that it’s completely free and shows no popups or adware, and that it seems to have no other adverse interactions with other add-ins or commands.

Most reviewers have focused on the fact that the utility simplifies the task of creating a handout PDF from an animated slide deck. But there are two other uses specific to web conferencing. I haven’t seen anybody pointing out these advantages, so I wanted to highlight them here.

1) Upload/Convert Technologies: Several webinar/webcast products use an upload and convert step to preload a PowerPoint file. Then in the meeting, you display the prepared slide images. Several such web conferencing products discard animations (ReadyTalk and Webex come to mind as examples). So an animated slide deck may look messy in the web session, with overlaid elements blocking each other on the slides. Running PPspliT would be a good way to break up the slides before uploading so they make sense as a sequence of static images.

2) Screen Sharing Technologies: If your web conferencing product uses screen sharing to display images, you might not think there is any reason to discard animation effects. But there is a case where it can make sense. I often act as host and moderator for webinars featuring multiple presenters. Instead of passing presentation control from one person to the next and forcing each person to share their screen, it is easier for me to display the entire combined presentation on my second monitor and advance the slides for the speakers. It can sometimes be difficult to tell when there is another animation sequence lurking on the slide. If I separate the builds into distinct slides, it makes it easier to match sequential display of the visual information with the presenter’s vocal delivery. It’s also easier for the presenters to print out a reference hardcopy that shows all the build steps so they don’t forget to allow for the sequential elements.

My thanks go out to Massimo Rimondini for creating this handy piece of software, and to Tim Warner and other presentation specialists who alerted me to its presence. Tim also created a rather comprehensive YouTube primer covering details for installation and use of PPspliT.

Technorati Tags: PowerPoint,presentation design,slide design,webinar,web seminar,webcasting,webcast,web conference,web conferencing,web collaboration,online collaboration,web meeting

Presentation Advances Continue To Stress Webinar Technology

Last week I received an email from Microsoft informing me that my “Microsoft Office 365 subscription keeps getting better!” It highlighted several new enhancements that had been automatically added to products including PowerPoint.

Two upgrades particularly caught my eye: “Animated 3D Models” and “Zoom for PowerPoint.”

Animated 3D Models are basically clip art elements on steroids. Instead of just inserting a static graphic, Microsoft has created animated graphics that you can rotate on three axes. Many of the items have different “scenes” that you can select to change the repeated behavior of the element. So you can have your T-Rex running, or sniffing the air, or waiting and then pouncing. A flying saucer can spin in place, or dart back and forth, or emit a beam from beneath the craft.

They are very cute. I can see an OCCASIONAL use brightening up a presentation and giving the audience a laugh. But use them with care… I tried an experiment, creating a presentation with a single blank slide. Adding two 3D elements caused my PPTX file size to shoot up to 55MB!

Zoom for PowerPoint has several uses, but old hands can probably think of it most easily as the next evolution of the old “Custom Show” feature. You can easily create clickable elements on a slide that let you navigate out of sequence to any other desired slide or section of a presentation. One of my favorite uses for this kind of thing is to create several different sections covering distinct topics and then let your audience vote on which one they want you to talk about first, second, and so on. It really makes them feel like you are delivering a customized presentation for their interests.

If you decide to use either of these features in a presentation delivered via web conferencing, you need to go back and read the post I wrote in 2016 after Microsoft introduced “Morph” in PowerPoint. The same caveats apply… If your webinar technology uses an “upload and convert” process, you will almost certainly lose the functionality of these new features. If your software relies on screen sharing, you want to test it carefully to see how well it keeps up with rapid, continuous movements associated with animated behaviors. And remember that many people in your audience may be on slow wifi connections rather than your nice wired office broadband!

Technorati Tags: webinar,web seminar,web conference,web conferencing,webcasting,webcast,web collaboration,online collaboration,web meeting,PowerPoint