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Three years ago when I uploaded a slide deck to SlideShare, it was the go-to site for presentation sharing. In the years following that initial upload, I've shared a handful of my slides. Unfortunately, the SlideShare interface has suffered from feature creep. The interface has gone from being simple and user-friendly to feeling clunky. Sharing slides with SlideShare just wasn't worth my time. I had to find an alternative…and then I stumbled upon Speaker Deck.
A project from GitHub, Speaker Deck brings simplicity back to the slide sharing user experience. With a minimalist interface, the focus is on the slide deck. The usual features like embedding, social media sharing, linking, and downloading are presented without feeling like they overwhelm the site's design. When you hover over a thumbnail of a slide deck, slides advance as you move your cursor. It's a novel accent, but I wish it would work via swipe on mobile devices. In fact, that's really my only critique of Speaker Deck.
Speaker Deck looks great and it is a great alternative for anyone who is tired of SlideShare's cluttered design and irritating pricing strategy…Did I mention that Speaker Deck is completely free? All features…for free, unlike SlideShare which locks your previously uploaded decks in their original private or public state. If you want to change that particular option on SlideShare, you have to pay for it. On Speaker Deck, aesthetics, functionality, and the user experience are exemplary.
The featured presentations category on Speaker Deck reminds me of the slide decks on display at Note & Point…the designs are quite good. If you're looking for inspiration, I guarantee that you will find it at Speaker Deck. Remember, your presentations can always improve.
For a quick comparison between my old slide sharing site and Speaker Deck, here is my SlideShare profile versus my Speaker Deck account. Even the individual slide deck pages are perfectly designed. Here is an example of my most recent upload of a digital identity presentation. I'm using Speaker Deck from now on for slide deck sharing/embedding. Let's hope that they keep the front end of the site as user-friendly as it is now.
What do you think? Is simple better in this case? Are you going to make the switch to Speaker Deck?
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