With any type of presentation, you need to connect with your audience, between the words you speak and those on the slides. So, if you are presenting a technical topic, it’s important to use terms and visuals that your audience understands.
Here are eight tips and suggestions for presenting technical information to a non-technical audience.
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Know your audience
Before you present to your audience, it’s crucial to understand their level of technical knowledge.
Are you presenting to a middle school class, group of professionals, or new employees? Each of these types of audiences have varying levels of technical knowledge, skills, and backgrounds.
By understanding your audience ahead of time, you can tailor your presentation to best match the audience’s experience.
Simplify complex concepts
Another key to presenting technical concepts is to simplify them using clear language and digestible chunks with examples and analogies.
Comparing concepts to common situations can help the audience better understand those concepts. For example, you might describe a computer file system by comparing it to a physical file cabinet.
Tip: Check out these tips for giving a great presentation.
Avoid technical jargon
Part of simplifying complicated technical information involves avoiding the technical jargon. While some level of use may be necessary to teach an audience the concept, be sure to fully explain the terms you use and how they relate to the topic.
For instance, if you’re describing how an IP address works, explain what IP stands for and how it relates to the address. If you graze over that term, your audience may feel lost and miss important details.
Include visual aids
Visual aids like diagrams, charts, images, and illustrations can help your audience further understand the information. Many people remember the visuals they see during a presentation more than the words they hear.
This can be especially helpful if you’re explaining a technical process such as how sending an email works or what happens when you search for a term on Google.
Tip: Want to add something upbeat? Look at the best GIFs for presentations.
Use storytelling
Take advantage of storytelling and relating concepts to your personal experiences. Audiences become more interested when a presenter speaks of relatable situations. Stories can also spark emotions that can better engage your listeners.
Encourage questions and interaction
Making your audience feel involved by encouraging interaction is another great way to help them understand and retain the information. You can do things like break up the audience into small groups with activities or dedicate time at the end of the presentation for a Q&A session.
Gather and adapt feedback
To understand how well you presented the technical information, you can provide feedback forms, surveys, or polls when the presentation is complete. This can not only assist the audience with reiterating what they’ve learned, but help you adjust your content for future presentations.
Get assistance with AI tools
If you struggle to break down complicated concepts, consider using a tool to help. Applications like Plus AI can assist with creating and rewriting any type of content to make it understandable and relatable.
Plus AI works with Google Slides and Docs as well as Microsoft PowerPoint. So, whether you’re presenting a slideshow or document, you can rest assured that you’ll get your points and information across in a comprehensible way.
Let’s look at a couple of examples.
Here, we ask Plus AI to change the slide content so that it’s geared toward a grade school audience.
And here, we instruct Plus AI to rewrite the slide text so that it’s more appropriate for an academic publication.
For complete details on using Plus AI to edit presentations or create entire slideshows from start to finish, visit the Plus AI website.
Conclusion
Don’t assume that your audience has the same level of technical knowledge that you do. Regardless of the technical topic, be sure to understand your audience, use terms that make sense, and include visual aids.
By the way, when you're ready to start making slides, check out our guide to making PowerPoints look good!
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