Do you use Prezi? Still not?! It has 40 million users and you are telling me you are not one of them?! What is your excuse?!
OK, I'll save you from the rest of the marketing bullshit.
As an avid Prezilian and a dedicated educator, I have been evangelizing Prezi as a great educational tool. I gave a number of talks, seminars, and workshops, to introduce the benefits of this fairly young online software. Thanks to my researcher spirit, it also meant that I started surveying what people think about Prezi (gee, am I becoming a UX researcher?). The general opinion I encountered is strangely ambivalent. While most people are fascinated to see prezis, for their dynamism and spacial virtuosity, very few of them are comfortable when it comes to making them. In other words, a great number of people reach the point of user registration, with the intention to master this genial tool, but quite many of them end up entering their account once or twice only. More often than not, they quit after a couple of attempts. Simply speaking, it is because many people still find it too difficult and time-consuming, as compared to PowerPoint.
Bearing this in mind, I tried to find and propose solutions for an easier prezi production. This is how I bumped into templates, whose sole purpose is to make the software more user-friendly. I figured, their use must be very frequent, given that people generally struggle with all the freedom, as far as content and design are concerned. So, following this hypothesis of mine, I launched a research project and accepted to present it at a conference. This conference was just yesterday.
I must admit as a start, my hypothesis proved wrong. People don't seem to use templates; in fact, because of the arrangements of the page, most of the templates (let's say, 80 out of 90) remain hidden for most users (they would need to discover a button and make a click to find the majority of the templates). Also, the templates are restricted to certain themes (football, space travel, botanics, journey, etc.), or they are very schematic (imagine five circles and four arrows); this means that it is limited what topic they can be ideal for. Thirdly, people have a hard time customizing them. If, say, they only need four cicles for their four main topics, and the template contains five, they are stuck (no kidding).
To present this topic, of course, I also made a prezi, using one of the templates (called Uncharted Territory). Since most of the times I start my prezis from blank, having to use a template was a more or less uncharted territory for me. My impression about them is that, for a starter, they are useful (you can get inspiration and tips how to construct a prezi), but once you become more expert, they seem to be too limiting (both theme- and stucture-wise).
Below you can click through my prezi. Full screen recommended.
