The first step in the Extreme Presentation method for designing a presentation is to identify the communication preferences of the different personality types that are likely to be in your audience. I like to use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator for this. For example, your audience will contain Introverts, Extraverts, or (most often) both. Introverts need some kind of pre-reading–they need to be thinking about your material in advance. Extraverts need lots of Question and Answer (Q&A) time, so if you have a one-hour presentation to a bunch of extraverts, don't go in with more than 30 minutes of content. And if you expect a mixed group–as you will have almost always–then send the pre-reading to everyone (only the introverts will read it, which is just fine) and also allow lots of time for Q&A. More details on this here.
Adrian Bachmann, a market analyst at a major research company and a recent attendee at the Extreme Presentation workshop, emailed me and told me that he found the humanmetrics site useful for helping identify personality types.