User Friendly Presentations - Intro

Today's podcast: 03-17-12_Intro.mp3 - Introduction to Erik and User Friendly Presentations (background soundtrack, "Ocean Blues" by Jeff Nix and Jeff Mahoney, permission pending)

TRANSCRIPT: Well hello! I am Erik Olsen and this is my first podcast to tell you about me and about User Friendly Presentations.

I took my first public speaking class 25 years ago and then changed my major to Speech Communication because I saw the improvement I made during that semester. Since then I've given hundreds of presentations and prepared slides for meetings and conferences and for fellow staff members.

Now for the User Friendly part of my cause - I received my PhD in ergonomics which is the study of people and how they work with equipment, technology, and various systems. The idea behind ergonomics is to design things that are easy to use or user friendly.

My idea for User Friendly Presentations is just that - to help people make easy-to-follow presentations that clearly express their idea to an audience. The audience could be a person you met who asks you what you do; the audience could be a group of business people you are presenting your pitch to for funding of your new idea; the audience could be people hearing your talk at a conference, at work, or another organization.

Erik's poster presentation in 2002

I've had the idea to develop User Friendly Presentations for a long time - and I am now working on a draft to articulate my plan. But the idea was kicked off again by a presentation I recently heard, where the presenter was struggling to communicate. The slides being used were hard to understand and overly complex - they were definitely not user friendly. 


My mission is to assist people in making user friendly presentations so they can clearly communicate the ideas they have so that the audience can follow along easily. Then the audience will leave with a clear understanding of the main points of the presentation.