Prezi Presentation Tool

At first I thought I had finally found presentation nirvana.  Prezi is a relatively new entrant to the presentation tools market.  Their interface is revolutionary.  Rather than create my own elevator overview, here is one from Jay Ball,

In a nutshell, Prezi is a Flash-based presentation system that allows users to create incredibly dynamic presentations. Presentations where you can zoom in and out across a large area (no slides), create motion paths, embed images and video and do things that previously needed a pretty competent Flash developer and a whole chunk of time. It kicks traditional slideware way into touch.

I like to play with tools a bit before I lock in my initial opinion so play I did.  It was fairly quick to figure out how to use the completely novel admin interface.

Up to this weekend, I spent my whole career working out ways to present ideas in a clear linear fashion with sections, slides, pictures, bullets, and sub-bullets, tieing together my ideas, questions, and calls to action.  Now with Prezi, all of a sudden I am faced with a completely blank canvas and some tools to populate and navigate that canvas.  Of course, I could put up a series of slides, but that would defeat the purpose.  I was hungry for the full experience.

I used my December MPI online column as a test subject for building a presentation and learned a great deal about both the tool and myself in the process. (Note: can’t include prezi draft here because I am contractually bound to release my columns on MPI before they are shown elsewhere.  Once it is published, I will embed the prezi here).

The Good:

• Forces you to think about the relationship between the ideas you intend to present
• Very flexible in what/how you can present.  Good with both pre-planned paths, on-the-fly path changes, and even a combination of both
• End product presentation is sure to have WAY more of an impact than powerpoint or keynote

The Bad:

• Challenging learning curve to think differently
• New interface takes a little while to learn and even longer to become proficient
• Limited functionality
  • very little text manipulation: no fonts, no colors
  • line tools are very limited
  • no shape tools
• Takes a LONG time to get presentation set-up exactly the way you want it.
• Admin frames that help with zooming are displayed to the end user and so confuse the interface

The Bottom Line:

• Just practicing with Prezi will improve the way you use your current presentation tool
• Best for presentations where
  • spending significantly more time is a good trade-off in return for more impact
  • you are going to continuously re-use the same presentation with minor changes
• Needs a bit more work in order to have a good chance at mainstream adoption

Have you tried it?  What do you think?

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