In this series, we analyse a videos of presentations or speeches and highlight the ways they do and don’t follow our Fit, Focus and Flair presentation framework. This will help you to think in terms of Fit, Focus and Flair, and uncover hidden potentials for improving mediocre, good and even great speeches.
Today’s presentation is a video made by OnlineMBA, who have a video series called One Minute MBA videos. This one explores How to Design like Apple.
Fit
The purpose of the video is to catch the attention of potential online MBA students. For those students, the topic of the presentation is spot on. Everybody has an opinion on Apple, and is intrigued by their incredible success and popularity. We all know that much of their success is to do with their product design, so would be interested in finding out exactly what it is about their design which has made them so successful.
Potential MBA students need to have an interest in the success of companies like Apple – they’re likely to take a minute to watch the video and consider the lessons we can all learn from Jobs and co.
When they hit Play, they’re likely to have the following questions:
– What is Apple’s design philosophy?
– Why are Apple’s products so popular?
– How much do Apple care about their product design?
– What do Apple’s designers do and think about?
The presentation answers all of these questions, so fits the audience’s needs.
Focus
The remit for the presentation is exploring how Apple design their products. The whole thing is dedicated entirely to that one purpose, and never gets distracted by other ideas.
Because they only have two minutes to deliver enough information to make the video worthwhile, the structure of the presentation is very focused on following a pattern of: identifying a rule, using quotes from key Apple members to prove the lesson comes from them, and communicating the lesson in a way to make it relevant to all designers.
The focus of the visuals isn’t as good. As the presentation has five key messages – five rules for designing like Apple, I would expect the visuals to focus on highlighting those five rules. Instead, they try to offer a visual interpretation of everything the speaker says.
This makes the visuals lose their focus, and means the five rules get lost among all of the other information.
Flair
It’s difficult to create an online video which grabs and keeps attention, so the presentation’s visuals do well to add Flair which keeps the audience’s attention. Sound effects are also used to add an extra element to the experience.
Quotes are used, which make the presentation feel varied – it’s not just one person talking, they’re communicating messages from others. There aren’t many other techniques used to add flair to the speech, but in the short time allocated that might be for the best.
Fit, Focus and Flair Summary
Overall, the presentation structure and speech has Fit, Focus and Flair. The visuals have flair, but lack some focus, meaning they aren’t a true fit to the needs of the audience.
