Thoughts On Presenting & Design mike-pulsifer.org

SlideRocket: A Review

A while back, when Googling for a PowerPoint alternative (competition is good for consumers, and Microsoft too), I stumbled upon SlideRocket.  The concept was intriguing.  An online service that provided an alternative to PowerPoint and even Keynote, allows you to share your slide decks online, and even deliver them remotely in a meeting.  What's more, since it uses Flash and AIR, the decks can be viewed offline.  Even better, they offered a 30-day free trial with which to try it out.  Given all of this, I felt it would be foolish of myself not to give it a go.

Features

SlideRocket gives you a copious amount of features that you would expect to see in a PowerPoint alternative while also providing features that you would not expect, but after some reflection, fall in the category of, "well, duh!"  You can import existing Powerpoint documents into SlideRocket or create your own within their Flash-driven interface.  Unfortunately, if you're a Keynote user, SlideRocket doesn't support your documents.  Your only option is to export your slide deck to PowerPoint first.  With how SlideShare now supports Keynote, this is a pretty glaring omission, in my opinion.  Because it's Web-based, you can access your slides from anywhere, as long as you have an Internet connection.  Also, as I mentioned before, because they leverage AIR, you can even download a copy of your slide deck and use it offline.  The catch is this will not work on the free account.

If you are in the need of stock photography, you can access images from fotolia and flickr directly from within the interface.  If you're using other people's flickr photos, you can even restrict your search to those in the creative commons.  One word of caution, though.  If you intend to use your slides commercially, then the flickr search built into SlideRocket isn't restrictive enough.  You'll still have to find the photos you need the old-fashioned way.  With that said, this integration with image sources on the Web is powerful and can be a huge time saver.  Hopefully, they'll integrate with more stock photography sources in the future.  It also appears as though they will be adding the ability to access icons, templates, stock audio, fonts, and cartoons in the future.  The only other service online at the moment is to have special printings of your slide deck done through Mimeo.

Taking a page from services such as SlideShare, you can share your slides with the world (found under "Publish," not "Share.") through either a direct link or embedded in a Web page.  Graduating from the free to either the individual or business accounts will give you more options, including restricting who has access and removing the SlideRocket branding.

Business accounts give you additional capabilities including the ability to have a team work on the slides with multiple users available in the business account.  You can even set permissions for each user.  You can deliver your slides to remote members of a meeting as well, with you as the presenter in full control of the slides.  Additionally, you can access metrics on you slide decks, seeing how many people viewed your slides and how long they spent on each slide.  Now, if you're giving a presentation, the slide can't really stand on their own anyway, so you may find some of the features useful and some not so.

Pricing

For the feature set they promise, the cost of using SlideRocket seems fairly reasonable.  You get the basics at no cost with two at-a-cost options.  $10/month will give you more features than the free version and $20/user/month will give you the full suite of features.

The Test Drive

For my evaluation of SlideRocket, I created a PowerPoint document to serve as my control in this little experiment.  I encourage you to look at the original document so that you can get a clear glimpse of what they're supposed to look like.  If you've read my earlier post on chart design, then you should recognize many of the slide and the subject matter I used to come up with them.  I then created two slide decks on SlideRocket.  One was an import of my PowerPoint slides and the other was an attempt to recreate those slides as faithfully as possible with only the SlideRocket tools.  The slides are generally how one should not design slides, though my intent was to look at features used quite often in slides that either I create or I am subjected to.  Among the features & effects I included in the test are:

• Blocks of text
• Bullets (gag)
• Gradual build of bullets
• Shapes
• Bar charts
• Pie charts
• Charts with an alternative background color
• Embedding images
• Embedding images full bleed
• Embedding video
• Multiple shapes, including varying fill options

Importing A Slide Deck

The process for importing a slide deck was easy enough.  They even give you two options for importing.  One is to import the slides as images and the other is to convert them from PowerPoint slides to SlideRocket slides.  When attempting to import them as images, I was greeted with an error message when the process failed.  I'm not sure what in the slide it couldn't handle, but when you look at the original deck, there's nothing outrageous.

I next imported the slides to be converted into the SlideRocket format.  This type of import as a little more successful.  That is, I didn't get any errors.  What I can't say, however, is that it went without a hitch.

The first thing I noticed is that the font sizes were not respected.  This seemingly simple effect, font size, was too much for the import.  Everything on the title slide was shrunken down to 18 (point I assume).  It also had difficulty with text inside drawing objects.  Though the font was preserved, it too was reduced in size.

SlideRocket handled JPEGs well, at least those used as slide backgrounds.  Additionally, it did give provide one feature I wish PowerPoint had:  the ability to extract a slide background for use elsewhere.

Drawing objects were a mixed bag.  SlideRocket converted the thought balloon and donut to rectangles and the pattern fill (which I wish people wouldn't use) used in one rectangle was lost.  In the last slide of the deck, I threw a lot of drawing objects at SlideRocket, with the intent of uncovering redrawing of the diagram should it have any issues.  With the exceptions just mentioned, it handled the import fairly well.

Charts were a mixed bag as well, though more risky, it seems, than the drawing objects.  The bar charts were converted to images that didn't appear to be the right size and/or scale because the text and numbers show signs of disproportionate scaling.  With these charts imported as images, all hope is lost of editing them without reimporting a replacement slide or recreating the chart within SlideRocket.  The pie chars fared much worse with text labels being cut off, and the legend getting carved up.  The pie charts themselves were also skewed oddly and moved to the far left edge of the slide.  The line chart fared much better, though the legend in this chart was sliced nearly in half, just like the others.  The moral of the story:  if you have charts that you want to import, don't.  If the charting capabilities of SlideRocket doesn't give you what you need, then save your chart as a graphic first and then import that.

PowerPoint 2004 has a nasty habit of flagging PNG files as needing QuickTime and a decompressor.  Every other software package and project that uses images can support these files.  However, in true Microsoft fashion, they fail to support open standard they themselves don't own (MPEG-4 video is another).  My question during this evaluation was, "can SlideRocket see this PNG for what it really is and display it?"  The answer:  no.  If they're using Microsoft libraries on the back-end, then this result should come as no surprise.  With the color depth of JPEG, the losslessness of GIF, and transparency support far superior to GIF, there is no good or justifiable reason for Microsoft to not support PNG properly.

PowerPoint has the same problem with QuickTime movies (MPEG-4).  Again, a standard they don't own, and thus don't support.  Now in this case, Microsoft isn't the only one to blame.  It's at this point that I stumbled upon a limitation of SlideRocket.  All video that you import needs to be Flash Video (FLV).  I'll cover this some more later.

Builds within a slide also did not make it through the import.  On the slide with the iPhone screenshot, the two bullets are supposed to appear one at a time.  This was not preserved.

In summary, when importing PowerPoint slides, you do so at your own risk.  Expect to redo elements of most of your slides and the entirety of many others.  Lack of Keynote support is also a huge downer.

The final imported product:

Creating A Slide Deck From Scratch

One of the selling points of SlideRocket is how it is an alternative to PowerPoint and Keynote altogether.  Thus, the next part of my evaluation was an attempt to recreate the slide deck from scratch.  Though SlideRocket bills itself as an alternative to Keynote, my using it as an alternative requires more than just copying some build effects and slide transitions.  If it's not as easy (or easier) to use as Keynote, then it's got a hard sell.

As a design tool, SlideRocket lacks a lot of what the standard tools have, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.  Presenters need to show more restraint anyway and tools that force a little bit of that restraint are doing a service (think Keynote's chart palettes).  However, ease of use should be something that's just nice to have, but rather it should be a functional requirement.  This is where I feel SlideRocket comes up short.  The toolbar to the left is a nice touch, but the properties panels to the right took quite a bit of getting used to.  The library link on the bottom isn't your asset library (which I can't seem to learn), it's your slide library.  Keep in mind that you don't have any slides in there unless you explicitly add them to your library.  The menus at the top are particularly annoying to me.  As a Mac user, I have certain user experience expectations.  The design of the menu system, however, has its own expectations:  that I'm a Windows user.  To be on a Mac and forced to deal with Windows user interface conventions was quite jarring.  The copy and paste keyboard commands that I expect to work don't.  I have to constantly remind myself (they think I'm using Windows.  It's Ctrl, not Command.  Worse yet, the copy and paste was not responsive many of the times and I often found myself pasting what I copied previously, not what I just copied (or thought I did).

SlideRocket does offer a modest selection of simple slide templates.  Fortunately, they don't hit you with a bunch of horrendously complex templates like some applications *cough*PowerPoint*cough*.  The five they do offer, all-white, all-black, a gradient theme similar in concept to what Apple uses in their keynotes (small k), "Elegant" (a lighter gray gradient theme, and "Ripple," which I think we can all do without.  In the future, they'll be adding the ability to share themes and layouts with other SlideRocket users.

Adding new slides is fairly simple, with it giving you the layout of the last slide you created as a default.  Using the panel to the right, you can change it to five other layouts if you wish:

• Title slide
• Text (think default PowerPoint "you know you want to use bullets!" slide layout)
• Title only
• Blank
• Picture - horizontal
• Picture - vertical

Adding elements is fairly easy and is the best part of the UI.  Click an icon and often either the appropriate drawer slides out or you're presented with an asset library.  Text boxes are simple to add,  for example.  However, once you need to modify properties, you're faced with a rather confusing properties panel with some odd UI conventions that either don't seem to make sense or just don't seem to work, period.

There's a decent amount of shapes available that can be drawn to the slide.  Again, the properties panels to the right leave a lot to be desired.  A LOT; as in, you can't do squat.  Come to think of it, instead of complaining about the panels each time I cover a feature, let me make it clear right here:  they suck.  They're so bad, it's one of the main reasons why I felt very limited when using SlideRocket and why I felt frustrated with how I was unable to bend it to my will.  The manipulation of shapes and positioning and formatting of them was torture.  Add to this the copy+paste issues I mentioned earlier, and suffice it to say, I was relieved when I was finally done.  If given a choice next time, I'd rather choose waterboarding.

Adding images worked well.  To be honest, with the exception of the asset library, it's hard to screw this up.  With that said, I did like the way they implemented the asset library.  It's also from here where you can access image sources such as Fotolia and flickr.

My attempt at adding video left me, well, sad.  I knew I had trouble when I tried to upload my short QuickTime movie and it didn't want to  let me select any.  It would have been better, much better, if SlideRocket let me know up front that Flash Video and only Flash Video can be used.  This left me in a bit of a quandary since I don't have any software that I'm aware of to convert my movie to FLV.  After a while spent on Google, I came across Zamzar, a free service that will convert your movies to any one of many different formats.  Using Zamzar, I was able to convert my QuickTime movie to Flash Video and upload it to SlideRocket.  I really wish SlideRocket was more upfront with this restriction as it's one that will surely leave many people quite puzzled.

Shapes left me mad, images made me happy, video left me sad, and charts, well charts just plain old let me down.  Knowing that SlideRocket is built in Flash and that Flash is a vector-based application, I held quite a bit of hope in their chart capabilities.  Alas, it was not to be.  Bar charts were quite limiting.  I could not choose between data labels or the Y-axis.  I got the Y-axis, whether I wanted it or not.  Where it put the labels also failed to impress.  You had the choice of outside (only if the bars didn't go to the top) or inside and inside meant dead-center.  You couldn't isolate individual data points for their own color in the way that would be easiest, but even using the Keynote method leaves unimpressive results.

Pie charts had their own frustrations.  For example, SlideRocket's chart's legend is ridiculously small.  There's no way on this green earth that anyone in the back of a conference room could read the legend.  Also, when you change the start angle so that you can more intelligently orient the slices, SlideRocket conveniently forgets your stated intentions and reverts it back to what it's default to as soon as you move away from the slide.

Line graphs were nothing short of amazing; utterly amazing in their ability to trash the visual display of my data.  Not only did it fail to use the line colors I chose for the data series, but in the final product, data points that it still maintains fail to show up on the chart at all.  You better hope your data points don't go something like 48, 34,0,25,0.  That 25 will not show up on the chart whatsoever.

The final product, built within SlideRocket:

Remote Delivery

One of the enticing points of SlideRocket is the ability to drive the slides while your audience, located anywhere in the world, can listen to your presentation (over the phone, Skype, etc.).  I tried this out on my computer using two different browsers to simulate the presenter and audience and it worked well.  I rehearsed several times in the conference room where I was due to present (a different slide deck than these examples, of course) without a hitch.  I even was able to use my presentation remote just fine.

Come show time, SlideRocket failed me miserably.  When attempting to advance to the second slide, the second window that had the slide playing went to the back, giving me the the regular SlideRocket interface.  To make matters worse, the moment that happened, Safari froze solid.  The only thing I could do was move the mouse and do a hard reset.  Even command-option-escape didn't work.  Fortunately, I had rehearsed enough so that I could keep going and get the remote folks back up to speed quickly once I rebooted and relaunched Skype and the SlideRocket deck.  This surely didn't give me confidence that SlideRocket was indeed ready for prime time.  It's too bad it waited until then to teach me that lesson.

Summary

SlideRocket is a service whose concept genuinely has promise.  Unfortunately, in my opinion, it just fails to deliver on many counts.  The ability to embed full-featured slide decks in a Web page, a fail-safe mechanism when presenting on the road, integration with online services such as Fotolia and flickr, and an alternative to the software out there now make SlideRocket and services like it something I'd like to see succeed.  However, the UI frustrations, limitations, and broken charting functionality make the extra effort to create slides in SlideRocket an effort I would rather not undertake.  If they can fix these problems, I would love to give it another thorough review because as I said, based on what they promise, I'd like to see them succeed.  However, they first need to deliver on those promises.