2nd Edition of 100 Things Book

Image of book cover

When I wrote 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People I, of course, hoped people would like it (every author wants to be a “best seller”!). It has turned out to be even more popular than I had thought and hoped, and I am very grateful to all the readers who have read it and who have reached out to me about it since it was first published.

Over the last few months I’ve been working on a 2nd edition. I wanted to update some of the research and include some new ideas. So I’m happy to say that I’ve finished the 2nd edition and sent it off to the publisher for printing. The official date it will be available is June 30 (2020) but it is available for pre-order now at Amazon.

My publisher has also given me a promo code for 35% off if you pre-order it through their outlet. (good through June 30). The code is 100THINGS.

If your copy is dog-eared and you want a new one, or if you want to buy one for a friend or recommend it to others, try the 2nd edition.

100 MORE Things

Cover Of New BookSome of you who read my blog may know about my book 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People. The book came from a series of blog posts by a similar name that I started several years ago. Thank you to everyone that helped that book be as successful as it has been.

You may or may not have noticed the last few blog posts that I’ve written:

Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder’s Age, Gender, And Geography

The Best Way To Process Big Data Is Unconsciously

People Read Only 60% Of An Online Article

These have been from my NEW book that has just “hit the shelves” (and the online distribution channels too!). It’s 100 MORE Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People. It’s all new stuff, and most of it is from research that has come out since the first 100 Things book was written.

I hope you check it out and I hope you enjoy it. If you do read a copy please consider writing a review at Amazon.

And if you are interested in purchasing the book now, here’s a link, and thank you in advance!

Top 10 Things Every Presenter Needs To Know About People: #1 – People learn best in 20 minute chunks

20 Minutes

I’m wrapping up my new book, 100 Things Every Presenter Needs To Know About People (It’s available for pre-order and will ship on May 17th), so I thought I’d take some ideas from the book for some blog posts. I’ve picked my 10 favorites (always hard for me to pick only 10 when I love all 100!), and will do a “Top 10” series here in the blog. This is the first post in the series.

When I am coaching and mentoring people on presentations I almost always recommend that they watch some TED talks. If you aren’t familiar with TED talks, go to www.ted.com and watch some. These are short talks by accomplished people in their fields. Most of these people don’t earn their living making presentations, but all of the presentations are very interesting. You can learn a lot about effective presentations watching TED talks.

Most TED talks are 20 minutes long —  I think that’s one reason why they are so effective. These same presentations stretched out to an hour might not be quite so brilliant.

20-minute presentations are an ideal amount of time —  Maureen Murphy tested this idea in an experiment. She had adults attending a 60 minute presentation at work, and tested to see the difference in memory and reaction to the same talk given in one 60 minute long presentation, versus a presentation that had 20 minute segments with short breaks in between. What Dr. Murphy found was that the people enjoyed the 20-minute chunked presentations more, learned more information immediately after, and retained more information a month later.

Plan your presentation in 20 minute chunks —  See if you can build in some kind of change every 20 minutes. For maximum learning you want a break every 20 minutes, as opposed to just a change of topic. The best ways to accomplish this are:

  • If you are presenting for more than one hour you probably have a break planned. Time the break so that it comes at one of these 20 minute time periods.
  • Instead of taking one long break, take several short ones. For example, it is common for a half-day workshop to go from 9 to 11:30 or 9 to 12 with one 20-30 minute break at around 10:30. Instead of one 30 minute break, have one 15 minute break and then 3 other short 5 minute breaks.
  • When I am presenting I sometimes introduce short “stretch” breaks. These are anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes in length. I just announce, “Let’s take a short 3 minute stretch break”. I time these to fall in the 20 minute intervals.
  • If you have activities, exercises, or interactions, plan them at 20 minute intervals. Although they are not true breaks, they allow people to assimilate the information just presented.

If you want to read the research:

Murphy, Maureen. 2012. Improving learner reaction, learning score, and knowledge retention through the chunking process in corporate training. Denton, Texas. UNT Digital Library.http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5137/.

And if you want to check out the book here’s a link to Amazon: