Thursday, May 29, 2008

Move and Stop, Move and Stop

Ken Molay, a web presentation expert, suggests the idea of “move and stop, move and stop” when delivering demos over the web. Specifically, he recommends using your mouse to deliberately move to a location and then stop and leave the mouse still while you offer a brief verbal description; then move and stop again.

This practice gives the audience sufficient time to follow the mouse movements, particularly if there is a delay or latency in the web session. It also provides the audience with a brief respite from an otherwise constantly moving mouse!

While Ken makes this suggestion with regards to Remote Demos, the same principle can certainly be applied to face-to-face sessions.

More on Ken and his thoughts can be found at http://www.wsuccess.com/.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I completely agree with and follow this rule, especially so on demos delivered over the web.
I find that it's best to never hold a mouse while talking and explaining a point. Only touch it when you need to move the pointer as this prevents the urge to keep moving things and add extra clicks.

Anything that makes you focus and cut down on the number of motions/clicks required to show a feature is a good thing.