How to Make Interactive Presentations [An Engagement Guide]
- Ink Narrates | The Presentation Design Agency
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Last month, while working on a sales enablement deck for our client Jake, he asked a question that caught us mid-slide:
“How do you keep people from zoning out two minutes in?”
Our Creative Director replied instantly, like it was muscle memory:
“You don’t present to them, you present with them.”
That sentence summed it up perfectly. As a presentation design agency, we work on many interactive presentations throughout the year. In the process, we’ve observed one common challenge: most teams treat “interaction” like it’s an optional add-on, not the foundation.
So, in this blog, we’ll talk about how to actually build presentations that people don’t just sit through but lean into.
In case you didn't know, we specialize in only one thing: making presentations. We can help you by designing your slides and writing your content too.
What Are Interactive Presentations, Really?
Let’s be honest. The phrase “interactive presentation” gets thrown around like seasoning. Everyone uses it. Few know what it actually means.
An interactive presentation is not about clicking a button to go to the next slide. It’s not about embedding a poll and calling it a day. And it’s definitely not about asking, “Any questions?” once at the end.
Interactive presentations are designed to be a two-way street. Not a performance, but a conversation. The format itself encourages the audience to respond, react, decide, or even steer the direction of what they’re seeing. Think of it as a presentation that behaves more like a dialogue than a broadcast.
You’re not there just to deliver information. You’re there to engage, provoke thought, spark decisions, and hold attention. If that sounds ambitious, that’s because it is. But it’s also absolutely doable when you stop treating the audience like passive spectators.
So, when we say “interactive,” we’re not suggesting a tech upgrade. We’re suggesting a mindset shift.
How to Make Interactive Presentations
If you’re still treating your presentation like a linear monologue that runs from Slide 1 to Slide 42, you’ve already lost your audience. People aren’t wired for passive listening anymore. They tune out quickly. They scroll while you speak. They pretend to nod while checking emails. So if your deck doesn’t give them a reason to mentally stay in the room, it fails.
Now, before you throw animations and polls at your slides, let’s slow down. Making interactive presentations isn’t about gimmicks. It’s about intentional design. And that starts with rethinking the structure.
1. Design a Non-Linear Structure
Here’s something we learned working with a global SaaS team last quarter. They had a 30-slide investor pitch, perfectly rehearsed, but they kept losing attention halfway through. Not because the content was weak, but because the audience didn’t feel like they had a say in the flow.
We redesigned it with a home-slide layout — a simple, clickable menu where investors could choose what to hear about first. Product? Market size? Roadmap? The speaker started with a two-minute intro and then said, “Where would you like to begin?”
That changed everything.
The audience went from listening to leading. Engagement shot up. Questions came faster. That one tweak — breaking the linear pattern — gave the audience a sense of control.
You can do the same. Use a clickable table of contents. Create branching paths. Build short modules instead of one long script. Interactive doesn’t always mean tech-heavy. Sometimes it’s just about how you organize the story.
2. Use Embedded Prompts and Decisions
A big part of interaction is choice. But most presentations ignore that. They assume what the audience wants and deliver that without ever checking.
Instead, build in decision points. For example:
“We have two approaches to this. Want the quick-and-dirty version or the deep dive?”
“There are three use cases. Which one fits you best so we can start there?”
“I can show you the data now or circle back after the demo — what works better?”
These moments make people feel like co-owners of the experience. And guess what? People remember what they helped shape.
We once created a pitch deck for a fintech founder who hated talking about compliance but had to. So we gave him an out. On Slide 6, he’d say, “I can walk you through our compliance framework now, or if you trust that it’s solid, we can skip ahead.”
Most VCs skipped it. Not because they didn’t care — but because they appreciated the autonomy. And that mutual respect made them engage harder in the later slides.
3. Bring in Live Demos or Real-Time Inputs
You don’t need to be in tech to demo something. You just need to stop describing and start showing.
If you’re explaining a process, walk through it live. If you’re pitching a product, show it in motion.
Even if it’s a service, use scenarios. Create small moments where the audience sees how your idea behaves in the real world.
One of the most successful strategy decks we built last year involved zero bullet points. Instead, the client walked their audience through a simple decision-making tool — live — based on actual client inputs. The tool wasn’t fancy. It was a Google Sheet with logic built in. But it worked like magic because it responded in real time.
The audience wasn’t just watching. They were using. That’s the difference.
4. Ask Better Questions (And Ask Them Early)
Let’s get real about something. Most presenters ask questions like they’re checking a box.
“Any thoughts on this?”“Make sense?”“Any questions before we move on?”
These aren’t questions. They’re exit ramps.
Interactive presentations require real questions — ones that spark thinking, not silence. Questions like:
“What’s the first thing that stands out to you here?”
“If you had to explain this idea to your team, what would you highlight?”
“What’s missing from this picture, based on your experience?”
Ask these within the first five minutes, not at the end. Early engagement sets the tone. People stop being spectators and start behaving like participants.
One tip: prepare for silence. Not every question gets a response immediately. But if you build space for conversation — and stay silent long enough — someone will step in. And when they do, others follow.
5. Use Interactive Visuals, Not Just Slides
A static chart does nothing. A clickable chart? That’s a different story.
In one project for a retail client, we created a heatmap showing customer behavior across regions. Instead of cycling through ten different slides, we built one map. The presenter could click on a region and the stats would appear dynamically.
This wasn’t a technical miracle. It was just smart layering inside PowerPoint. No code. No software. But it made the room lean forward.
You can also do things like:
Reveal data on click to maintain narrative tension.
Use sliders (yes, even in Keynote or PowerPoint) to simulate change over time.
Build toggles for “before and after” comparisons.
The point isn’t the tech. It’s the interaction. Give people a reason to look at the slides, not just through them.
6. Don’t Fill Every Second. Leave Gaps.
This one’s counterintuitive. We’ve seen it a dozen times: people cram slides with content to avoid “awkward pauses.” But the best interactive presentations have moments of pause baked in. Not silence — space.
A slide with a bold stat and no explanation. A provocative image with no caption. A moment after a tough question where the speaker just waits.
These aren’t gaps. These are hooks. They invite interpretation, opinion, reaction. They make the audience lean in instead of lean back.
One nonprofit founder we worked with had a slide that simply read:“$0.00”Nothing else.
He stood silent for five seconds, looked around, then said, “That’s how much we’re getting in federal support right now.”
The silence was louder than anything he could’ve said.
Use silence. Use tension. Use space. Not everything needs narration.
7. Let the Audience Steer (At Least a Little)
If the audience asks a question, don’t say, “We’ll get to that later.” Get to it now. That’s how you reward engagement.
We’ve seen presenters derail entire planned flows because someone in the room took the conversation in a better direction. That’s a win, not a problem.
Build flexible slides. Keep extra ones in a hidden appendix. Be ready to jump around. Interactive presentations are rarely clean or predictable — and that’s why they work.
One of our senior designers calls this “planned improvisation.” You know your material well enough to go where the energy is. That’s how you stop presenting at people and start connecting with them.
Why Hire Us to Build your Presentation?
If you're reading this, you're probably working on a presentation right now. You could do it all yourself. But the reality is - that’s not going to give you the high-impact presentation you need. It’s a lot of guesswork, a lot of trial and error. And at the end of the day, you’ll be left with a presentation that’s “good enough,” not one that gets results. On the other hand, we’ve spent years crafting thousands of presentations, mastering both storytelling and design. Let us handle this for you, so you can focus on what you do best.