Prezi has become quite a popular presentation tool over the past few years. The broad idea is to have one giant 2D space where all of your visual material resides. Each slide is just a particular view of an area of the space, and each transition is a matter of panning, rotating and zooming around the space to reach the next slide. On the whole, I think using Prezi leads to bad presentations — in this post I will explain why.

Giant pan/rotate/zoom is hard to watch

The transitions in Prezi are some combination of zooming in and out, rotating, and panning. The primary sensation that zooming and rotating induce in the audience is seasickness. What a lot of people forget when designing their presentation is that these transitions tend to be more disorienting the more that the screen fills your vision. What looks cool in a 6-inch window on your monitor is a different matter on a 6-foot projector screen. It always feels to me like the roller-coaster movies that they used to show in the early days of 3D and/or IMAX:

And at least the roller-coaster video doesn’t zoom in and out as the roller coaster swings around! Watching these transitions play out on a large screen is generally unpleasant, so they need to be worthwhile if you’re going to use them.

Animations: semantics or gimmicks?

The primary aim of a presentation is generally to convey information. Admittedly, it’s not a bad idea to hook the audience with something that will wow them. The first few souls who used Prezi, or Powerpoint, or even an overhead projector probably impressed their audience. But there are two problems:

Firstly, it’s not fresh any more. Everyone’s seen Prezi. The newness has worn off, just like it did with Powerpoint’s glitzy animations, so now it’s just tiring.

Secondly, if it doesn’t help convey the information in your talk, it’s just drawing the audience’s attention away from the content rather than enhancing the delivery.

My belief is that noticeable animation/effects are only useful when they have semantic meaning. For example, you might start with a large diagram, and then zoom in on a part of interest, then pan to a nearby part. Or you might start with a small focus, then zoom out to show more context. This is what Prezi should be used for — sparingly! But so many Prezi presentations have zooms that are gimmicky and don’t have a useful semantic meaning. They’re just there to whizz around. Not only are they meaningless, but the zooms have a Goldilocks problem — they are often either too much or too little.

Too Much Zoom: Microdot Transitions

A microdot is a steganography technique whereby messages are encoded in a tiny form in an otherwise innocous message. That exactly describes the Prezi ultra-zoom transitions. We see one slide, and then — surprise! — the next slide is contained on a random microdot somewhere in the image. A needless extreme zoom fires us into the image like a cannonball, for no gain at all. There’s no reason for a slide to be hidden in a microdot. Whatever happened to just flicking to the next slide?

To give you some examples, here’s a Prezi with several of these terrible microdot transitions:

It’s not hard to find other examples — the Prezi site is littered with them.

Too Little Zoom: Little Gain

So at one end of the zooming scale, we have those microdot transitions, where you cannot see anything of what you’re about to zoom in on (so why use zoom?). At the other end is a small zoom, which is irritating for a different reason. One presentation that Prezi recommend on their site has the wonderfully awful subject of “The Journey of the Modern Thought Leader” — so listen up, thought followers, to hear what they’ve done wrong. Here’s one slide:

This then receives a zoom animation to focus on the text:

However — as soon as you put up the first slide, everyone will strain to read the text, because that’s what’s on the slide. (In general, unless you put up a wall of text, everyone will immediately try to read your slide, even if it’s small or zoomed in or greyed out.) Those with good eyesight will read it on the first slide, and be bored by the time you move to the second zoomed in version. Those with bad eyesight will get frustrated at not being able to read what is dangled in front of them on the first slide, and may not bother on the second slide.

The better option is what they do later in the presentation, where they only make the text appear just before zooming in. But that again makes you wonder: why making this a zoom at all? Why not just transition to a separate slide?

It’s just a tool

Of course, Prezi is ultimately a tool, and like all tools it can be used well or badly. But I’ve yet to see it used well for an entire presentation. Much of what is nice about the popular Prezis is not the animations, but rather the visual style with all the nice drawings. However, that could easily be transferred into Powerpoint, Keynote or whatever. The main thing that Prezi seems to buy you — the zooming and panning around a large canvas — is exactly what I think is wrong with it. Hence, my opinion at the moment is that Prezi is generally not worth using. (If you know of some good Prezis that manage to avoid these problems, please do point to them in the comments below.)