Demo Guide

A well developmed project demo is a great opportunity to showcase your hard work and to practice talking about a project in front of a group of people. Below is a guide on how to present a project.

Guidelines

1. Important: Start the presentation by actually demoing your app. It is recommended that you skip demoing the log in/log out functionality. You can mention it in the demo, but start your demo already logged in. This will help save you time to talk about the more interesting features. Plan to live demo your application, but have a recording ready just in case there are unexpected issues. The recording is a nice backup.

2. Presentations should be about 5 minutes long (and definitely not more than 8!). It is important to practice timing!

3. You should have slides to help you stay on point for what to talk about. Slides should not contain a wall of text, but instead have bullet points on what the presenter is talking about or code snippets etc. The exception to having slides is when you are demoing the application.

4. When you demo your application, make sure it is the only window on the screen. It is very distracting if there are other applications open or lots of tabs. Keep your screen clean so your audience knows what to focus on.

What to talk about?

After demoing your application what should you talk about? Below are a few suggestions to consider. Remember you only have 5 minutes, so choose what you focus on wisely. What sets your application apart from other applications or what you are most proud of in your application can be a good place to start.

• Showcase the technical challenges you solved
  • Consuming a 3rd Party API
    • How did you prove out that this API would work for you?
    • What challenges did you face with the endpoints, or data?
  • Optimization
    • Why did you implement it? What were the benefits or the drawbacks of this implementation?
    • A presentation slide might include a screenshot of a before and after the implementation that shows how request time was improved or all time-consuming processes you mitigated.
  • App Architecture - Diagram the architecture of the application
    • What does the data flow look like and what is the benefit or drawback of this architecture?
  • Database Design
    • If the database relationships are complex or interesting this could be a good topic to talk about how your team made those decisions
    • What are the pros and cons to the design
• Thoughtful Design
  • Did you consider how users might experience the application?
  • How did you design or plan based on who the user might be?
• Lessons Learned
  • If given the opportunity to start over what would you do differently?
  • What would stay the same?