Discovering PechaKucha

When I accepted the challenge to join in on the Intranets2014 PechaKucha session I didn’t fully appreciate the challenge I had set myself up for. With around a week to prepare I had to pull together 20 slides on the topic of Intranets that rock to present in Sydney.

What to present? How to translate the theme? I immediately thought that surely someone else would go with the rock and roll theme (I was right, Jo McBain executed it beautifully) so I chose to go for a rock and stone theme. Rock solid intranets, ensuring that your intranet is on a rock solid foundation. How do we as intranet teams make sure our intranet is on a rock solid foundation? Well by this point the answer was clear, with user experience design!

Having presented a 10 minute talk at UXAustralia last year, I already knew that shorter presentations are deceptively more challenging. You need to be concise and to the point. Time is at a premium and generally there is not time for questions. Added to that the PechaKucha format. 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide (advancing automatically) and the slides are to be mostly visual with limited text.

I pulled together my structure based on the main elements of user experience design, reflecting on the tasks that we have undertaken in our intranet project. Once I had my slide titles in order the hard part began. Finding an appropriate rock or stone image to illustrate each of the elements I am highlighting on the slides. Thank goodness for Flickr and people who release fantastic images under creative commons.

My presentation was complete. The nerves of presenting and technolongy hiccups aside I was very happy with the finished result.

Here it is, my first PechaKucha, and perhaps not my last. How to make the intranet rock, with user experience design.