Figma Slides Is a Beautiful Disaster

PM at Figma here (for dev tools, not slides).

What happened to Allen here sucks. I've messaged the team so we can dig into this specific case. More generally, we know that Slides needs to be bulletproof when presenting, and nothing less than that is acceptable.

As an FYI, we _do_ use Figma Slides internally for pretty much everything, from internal meetings to major events. As a PM I use it every week, and our internal feedback channel for Slides is super active with folks like me requesting improvements. Figma is also a pretty unique place, where it's more likely our senior leadership request quality improvements than chase for deadlines - we know how critical the user experience is. We don't always get it right, but when we don't we're committed to fixing it.

In my experience, people also use slides as a document rather than an aide. In all my presentations I prefer to use slides as a companion to my planned speech. Then afterwards I'm completely surprised when people ask for my slides. I send them gladly but they're completely useless on their own.

So I have also experienced my managed pushing me to put all the information on the slide so that you can just read the slides and understand all the ideas, and the presenter is reduced to a voice over.

I've struck a tentative balance with the main one line messages being the slide titles, with other slide content buttressing the main point.

I can tell the audience to ignore the content and focus on the title for certain slides; or just repeat the slide title before and after for emphasis, etc... while also having access to all kinds of supporting evidence (as is often necessary for technical talks).

PS: Beware that stripped-down / minimalist presentations are suitable for the specific kind of communication / impressionism that Apple marketing is known for. But that's almost exactly the opposite of what is necessary in other situations. So that style is far from universally applicable; mustn't elevate form over function.

I always direct people to Beamer's (latex extension to make presentation decks) doc for their guide on presentation. https://texlive.mycozy.space/macros/latex/contrib/beamer/doc... (Getting Started > Guidelines for Creating Presentations)

Some excerpts:

  * Ideally, a table of contents should be understandable by itself. In particular, it should be comprehensible before someone has heard your talk.

  * A frame with too little on it is better than a frame with too much on it. A usual frame should have between 20 and 40 words. The maximum should be at about 80 words

  * Do not assume that everyone in the audience is an expert on the subject matter. Even if the people listening to you should be experts, they may last have heard about things you consider obvious several years ago. You should always have the time for a quick reminder of what exactly a “semantical complexity class” or an “ω-complete partial ordering” is.

  * Keep it simple. Typically, your audience will see a slide for less than 50 seconds. They will not have the time to puzzle through long sentences or complicated formulas

  * Do not use more than two levels of “subitemizing.” beamer supports three levels, but you should not use that third level. Mostly, you should not even use the second one. Use good graphics instead.

  * Never use footnotes. They needlessly disrupt the flow of reading. Either what is said in the footnote is important and should be put in the normal text; or it is not important and should be omitted (especially in a presentation).

  * Use short sentences.

  * Put (at least) one graphic on each slide, whenever possible. Visualizations help an audience enormously

  * Like text, you should explain everything that is shown on a graphic. Unexplained details make the audience puzzle whether this was something important that they have missed. Be careful when importing graphics from a paper or some other source. They usually have much more detail than you will be able to explain and should be radically simplified

  * Do not use animations just to attract the attention of your audience. This often distracts attention away from the main topic of the slide. No matter how cute a rotating, flying theorem seems to look and no matter how badly you feel your audience needs some action to keep it happy, most people in the audience will typically feel you are making fun of them

As others have noted, this comes from people expecting the slides to work as a document without the presenter. This is a bad idea (other document formats are better for that). But you can satisfy that desire in one of two ways:

1) Add lots of speaker notes, containing all the detail you presented, so that the combination of the presentation and speaker notes gives the self-contained information.

2) Write a separate self-contained document that contains all the information of the presentation, with slides containing a few words becoming section headings, and slides containing a useful image or chart becoming figures with captions. That'll be more useful than a corporate-style presentation deck would have been, but contain all the necessary information. Add a note to the top saying "This document contains all the information previously given in an X minute presentation. NAME is available to re-present this material on request."

The best presentation ever was at the time consoles pricing was around 350 and there was no console like the Playstation One and the Sony representative said: 299 and walks away, it does not matter the powerpoint software used, why a product is revolutionary is what matters. I don't care who was the Sony presenter.

You need two versions, the detailed one to share afterward and a stripped back one that you talk to.

There are several different types of slides, and understanding it's purpose is the key success and agreement. At the very least I coach my team to think are these presentation slides (fee bullets, some visuals, focus on the speaker), vs are they or will they become reference slides, which will be read by people not at your presentation or some time later. And there's my all time (/s) favourite, project management by slides.

I found it (eventually....) futile to rage against corporate culture of misuse of slides for purposes other than presentation. That's likely where your disconnect lies though. Hope you have better luck than I did long term!

there is a great difference between corporate presentations vs sales presentation

People on WWDC are there because they wanted to.

Most corporate presentations are not like that. Yes, I am sure HR is very excited about that new expense reimbursement process. And the UX team is super happy about website redesign. And the team members sitting on the front rows are really enjoying hearing about their work.

But most people who watch those don't really care. They only go to presentations because the other channels are insufficient - the team could not be figured out how to create concise docs that still have all the important details, so now everyone has suffer through another long presentation instead...

In this case, you don't want "one visual per slide", you want to have informative slides so someone who is watching your presentation while eating lunch, or on 2x speed, does not get lost. Ideally, slides would be self-standing and presenter would only be needed for those who don't want to read.

Listen to your management. They get it, you don't.

> The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like.

The underlying difference can not be fixed by software, because software can't make you care about or value things: Jobs saw presentations as performances.

I don't mean that in a dismissive way, I mean that Jobs treated presentations as plays and musicals. Few people are willing (let alone able) to block out days in order to rehearse and fine tune a presentation. Even less so days of multiple people in order to get feedback and suggestions. In real world settings.

Maybe controversial opinion, I'm not sure most people can learn much useful from Steve Jobs, and trying to emulate his presentations.

He had a huge support team to help him polish, and was very skilled. It feels like someone who has never driven a car trying to learn by watching Formula 1. Yes their drivers are amazing at drivers, but you can't really complain when your delivery drivers can't hit F1 speeds.

Having worked on presentation software, it's more complicated than what it looks like in its surface.

First, considering the base/generic case, you can't really beat Powerpoint, Keynote and Google Slides, they are somewhat free/included in basic accounts, they will get the job done, people are used to Powerpoint, and it's not the core product of any of these companies, there's very little incentive for them to improve that.

Second, because you can't compete on base case, a company needs to target those who will willingly pay for presentation software, that's sales and marketing, they don't care about beautiful software, they care about conversion and data.

And lastly, most presentations are bland, the more you invest in a great creation and editing experience, the more complicated it gets and makes it less likely that people who just want to create basic presentations actually do it, doesn't matter if you have tutorials or templates, they will make crappy presentations to get the job done, if they try to do add a little touch to it they will likely overuse animations or similar features and make it even crappier.

In the end there are very few people who put effort into creating actual presentation decks, the actual content being presented is far more important or a presentation is often a hurdle to get over with, such as doing internal presentations or presenting your school assignments.

Even in conferences you still get really bad presentations, the better ones are mostly remembered not because of the quality of the slides, but the contents and the skills of the presenter.

It's really too bad nobody has been able to step into the role Steve had for the industry. We lack the ability to effectivly communicate what's new and exciting to people and it's effecting the moral across the board.

Now it's hypemen with teams of engineers pushing their solutions more and more.

I'm not saying Steve didn't contribute to hype, but somehow he made it feel natural and welcome.

> The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like.

Could be that presenters that have some mojo are a small minority, a niche. Really, almost nobody on the world cares about presentations.

It was hard work, tons of rehearsals and many writers that formed these presentations.

It’s not a concept that you can just adhere to and your ugly disorganized presentation becomes beautiful and engaging.

I am curious what is so different about Keynote? I tried using it once for a few minutes in a computer lab years ago and while I remember some of the ways of doing things were different, I don't remember it being different. I was never that impressed with the quality of Steve Jobs' slides so maybe I'm missing something.

> The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like

Bullshit. His style of presentation was suited for a very specific kind of communication that Apple marketing is now known for.

Slides are used in a far wider range of settings -- from classrooms to boardrooms -- where the effect of the Apple style would range between ineffective and detrimental.

I'm willing to bet Steve Jobs would have flayed the presenter if they had tried to present some internal technical presentation at Apple in that kind of style.

Let's not elevate form over function. Not all human communication is about tickling the cave brain and getting someone to buy a product.

I tried out reveal.js (and then slides.com) for a time. But it felt pretty limiting. And then the company I was with pretty much adopted Google Slides and, especially at the time, I was doing a lot of co-presenting and the collaboration features were really useful.

Replying to add Deckset (https://www.deckset.com/) as a (non-FOSS) option. Deckset and other content-based approaches with automatic layout always seemed like a good way to orient slides around the content instead of futzing with slide transitions for hours.

I've also heard good things about marp [0], and it gets bonus points for being FOSS

0: https://marp.app/

Seems like great software, but the website is unfortunately obnoxious. I feel like the overlap between people who would like to create slides in Markdown, and those who would prefer this website over a much simpler alternative, is rather small.

I love iAPresenter. It definitely has lists and bullets if you want them. I (mis)use it to create proposal PDFs to send to clients. Even though it’s primarily aimed as presentations, it’s a great way to put together quick documents too.

"IA" sounds like the name of an ironically backwards company trying not to get VC funding in the current year.

It's really too bad things like Electron aren't better, because making cross platform applications is kind of daunting and so a lot of places just put it on the web.

Figma’s core product works fine offline. The Slides product was supposed to work fine offline. It just didn’t because it was completely broken.

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If you are presenting over zoom, you ideally want to put your full screen presentation on one screen (which is shared), and put the zoom screen on the other. So you know who is talking. Maybe look at chat.

Keynote, on a dual monitor setup, will takeover both screens, and will not allow something like the above. No options to disable dual screen usage. 5 years post-pandemic, after millions of presentations given over zoom, probably thousands given by Apple's own engineers, this is still not fixed.

Even if I make a presentation in keynote, I export to PDF.

I’m a Mac developer and when asked always say that my favorite app of all time is Keynote. It’s just so, so well done, and the epitome of a great Mac app. Would that all software had so much care for UX put into it.

I mean it's nice and all but it takes me forever to make presentations in it

This has been my approach to presentations. If it was originally a google slides document, I download it locally before the presentation time, and even for local .pptx/.odp files I always make sure to export an extra copy in PDF format, just in case.

Sometimes, for especially important talks, I even bring two laptops pre-provisioned with the slides just in case one has technical issues for some reason or another.

Its not that much extra work, and should the preparations pay off even once makes every bit of the toil well worth it. Nothing worse than embarrassing yourself in a room full of your colleagues, even moreso if the talk will be recorded and posted online for others to witness in perpetuity.

I use Google Slides but I always create a local PDF. I actually find Google Slides has mostly everything I need and not a lot of the chrome that I don't. (Feel the same about Google Docs.) I don't use builds or animations anyway 99% of the time.

> I also try to avoid cloud first. If servers are slow or down or you're locked out for whatever reason, you won't have access to your own files.

I still use Sketch instead of Figma for projects that are solo and where collaboration doesn’t require that the other participants have edit capabilities for this reason (among others).

Not only is it weird that with Figma you don’t get to keep a local file if you don’t constantly export to keep your local copy up to date, it means that your full fidelity work is locked up in a proprietary format that’s subject to sudden change at the company’s whims, breaking any tools reverse engineered for the purpose of liberating users’ work.

By contrast, while Sketch has a cloud mode it can also be local-first and its maker publishes an open spec for its file format. That’s the right way to do things.

What the article describes about Slides, last year’s big new Figma feature, doesn’t inspire confidence in the half-dozen new features from this year.

I think the founders of these startups and the users who use their products just don’t care about or notice details. They press a button, see some slides that look nice at a glance, and ship it. They’re vibe working.

That sounds like a good, easy to spot indicator that these people do not care about quality. :)

In my opinion, it's a matter of mental framework. Presentations are not meant for a reader, they're meant for an audience, and if you try to make them readable, self contained, you're bound to fail. Presentations work best, or only, really, if they accompany a presenter, not the other way around.