What is a presentation?

Presentations go beyond the projector

Opportunity

The rigid constraints of print and television mediums no longer make sense in a world where everyone is walking around with connected computers in their pockets. Authoring tools haven't advanced past allowing us to build and share digital versions of document models of the past.

We already have a viable alternative to the old overhead projector metaphor. Today's devices are built around one main technology: the web browser. The browser has evolved around as much as it has shaped the devices of today. A presentation is a website.

Introduction

Swipe initially allowed users to swiftly convert PowerPoint-style presentations into accessible online formats, using their phone as a remote for live presentations. It added a new layer to existing tools, but once presentations were online, the potential for significant improvements became clear.

I joined the project early on and took on roles as Product Design Lead and Senior Front-End Developer in 2014. I dedicated myself to enhancing the product, driven by a belief in the web's potential to deliver robust tools that compete with native applications.

Below, I'll highlight some of the final design solutions and features that I contributed to.

Content first

The guiding principle we followed was to get out of the way and put the content first. There is never more UI than you need and we dedicate as much screen real estate to your content as possible.

Screenshot of Swipe application

Simple by design

Markdown was the obvious choice for markup language when Swipe began experimenting with slide authoring. It was important to build an editor that provides a really good experience to both expert and novice markdown authors.

Make the invisible visible

Uploading dozens of files at once is a common scenario. Our upload manager offers complete control, allowing you to pause, cancel, and retry failed uploads. Importantly, this makes uploading files less disruptive—you can continue editing your presentation or switch to another without waiting for uploads to finish.

The path to success is not linear

It was very important that the tool makes it as simple as possible to massage and mould a presentation. This means predictable multi-select and drag and drop support that you can trust. Because you're likely to make last minute changes these tools should work equally well on mobile.

On mobile even a small collection feels large. The drag auto-scroll interaction done right feels so natural it becomes invisible. We also found that the scrolling behavior needed to be tuned differently based on screen size for it to feel right.

Be smart

Embedding 3rd party content was a tiresome multi-step process. The solution was to add a smart text field above the content menu. Pasting a supported content URL brings you straight to the confirmation step. This power move makes you lightning fast. To make it even better all menu navigation is usable from the keyboard, no mouse required.

Be consistent

You won't find any modal dialogs in Swipe because we worked hard to make all interaction contextual and in place.

In the same spirit, you'll see controls like the deck management equally at home in different contexts throughout the product.

Enable synergy

Private by design with granular permission controls that you expect from a modern tool. Emailing Keynote files back and forth is a thing of the past.

Looking ahead

I've only scratched the surface of what Swipe is and haven't touched on what we want it to become. I'm grateful for the indulgent opportunity to design the tools I want to use and the space to build what I dreamt up. Swipe serves many tens of thousands of customers and together we've created countless interactive lessons, pitch decks, conference keynotes, photo albums, mood boards, prototypes, portfolio websites, documents and more. Because what is a presentation anyway?

Update: Swipe was acquired by Whereby in 2019. Unfortunately the service will wind down but I'm excited to continue working on these ideas in a new context.