My first project was an analysis of King County Housing Data. I was tasked with creating a non-technical presentation to represent the results. Looking back, I can definitely see I’ve grown over my time in creating presentations. I find it healthy to revisit and update my work based on the new knowledge and understanding I have now. Part of being a lifelong learner is the willingness to embrace your previous self and not condemn them for what they didn’t know but celebrate how far you’ve come and when its possible, update to reflect where you are now.
Step 0: Identify Your Audience
Of course the initial step is to figure out who you are targeting with your presentation. This identification will impact all of the decisions you make hereafter.
For this presentation, I’m choosing to present to real estate agents operating in King County. So they won’t have a technical background, but do have a vested interest in selling homes at an optimal price.
Step 1: Template Usage
One of the biggest lessons I’m continually learning is the impact of design and how that can either showcase or hinder your communication.
Looking back at my presentation, my first step is to reformat the whole presentation with a more relevant and elegant template:
vs. 
Already, the one on the right gives you the idea that we are talking about houses.
To find amazing free templates, I usually just search for it. This template is from Slidesgo. They provide both google slides and powerpoint templates. This already is a huge step up from the default themes that exist. Personally, I take a longer time choosing a template than I usually anticipate. This is because I try to find a template that makes it really easy for me to communicate what I need to communicate. I don’t want to have to bring in a lot of extra graphics. Also, a good template can inspire me to put the presentation together because I’m excited by how it looks.
Step 2: Identifying Key Points
In going back through this presentation, I need to outline the presentation so it is logical and includes the key points I’m trying to communicate.
My old outline went like this:
- Introduce the topic of King County Housing Costs
- Identify major corporations impact on the rising housing costs
- Question 1: What are the unique features of the top 25% most expensive houses
- Question 2: How do houses built before 2000 differ from houses built after 2000?
- Question 3: Which season of the year has the most expensive houses sold?
- Slide about the model that had the best result for predicting price and the features I used
- Future work explained
- Thank You
Now, part of my project was to answer three different questions using the data. That’s not a bad thing to do, but it didn’t necessarily fit with the goal of the presentation. While those are interesting finds in the data - I really need to focus this presentation to be about selling houses.
Introduction:
- The problem - predicting housing prices
- The solution - housing features that influence housing prices
- The data and tools used - data from King County and regression
Body:
- More about the King County housing data
- More about regression and how it works with multiple variables (brief and less technical)
- Features that were found to greatly impact housing prices
Conclusion:
- How does knowing these features influence selling houses
- Why is this model better at making the predictions
- The confidence level using the R^2 value and also the parameters I limitied to get that value
- What are the next steps in this work
Step 3: Putting It Together
Alright, you’ve thought through it, you have a template and a plan. Time to bring in the content and make it work. Remember to keep it simple and short as you want to appeal to your audience’s attention span.
The finishing touches now include utlizes Tableau for some amazing visuals that also can have their colors match the template!
Final Comparision
So I was able to go from this:
To this beautiful and much more fulfilling slidedeck:
Full post in PDF form is on my github repository