Why Structure Demos Like a News Article?

 

Part 1: The Menu Approach!

 

Remember newspapers, the analog version of web-delivered news? We can take an extremely valuable page from their playbook and apply it to our demos…

 

Structure your demonstrations like a news article!

 

News organizations have been presenting information for several hundreds of years, in print and for the past three decades via the web, and they have learned some highly effective practices that we can employ in demonstrating software.

 

Think about the news articles you read and consider:

 

1.   How you select which articles to read

2.   How the articles are written

3.   How much you consume of each article

 

Imagine you’ve just browsed to your favorite web news site (or, for those who are still killing forests, you just picked up today’s newspaper). From their home page (or newspaper front page), what is presented to you and what do you explore? How much do you explore?

 

You are shown perhaps ten to twenty headlines, many of which are paired with images (think Great Demo! Illustrations). You scan these for stories of interest to you.

 

You browse some headlines but never click into the articles. For others you read the headline, click into the article, and consume a paragraph or two and then exit. And for a few intriguing articles, you read most or even the entire story!

 

In this method of communication, you are enjoying two highly effective strategies:

 

1.     The Menu Approach.

2.     Inverted Pyramid.

 

The Menu Approach is applied as you scan the headlines and images, seeking stories of interest to you. It works (literally!) like a restaurant menu: It shows you what’s available and lets you choose which items you’d like to pursue.

 

News websites (and newspapers) organize information in a hierarchy of consumable components that can be accessed rapidly, explored as deeply as desired, and then exited at any point to move to the next topic of interest. The top level of the news hierarchy is the home page, followed by the list (another Menu!) of sections: sports, finance, international, entertainment, technology, health, comics (my first-thing-in-the-morning favorite!), weather, etc. 

 

The homepage and each section’s start page are beautiful examples of the Menu Approach in action.

 

Part two tomorrow: Inverted Pyramid!

 

For more on the Menu Approach see this article:

https://greatdemo.com/the-menu-approach-a-truly-terrific-demo-self-rescue-technique-3/