What you need to know before using a cartoon in your presentation

I was reviewing a technical presentation for a client. The topic was the latest dental procedures. Every few slides a cartoon popped up. Cartoons about people with bad teeth. They were tangentially relevant to the topic of the presentation – but didn’t help to promote the message of the presentation. When I asked the client why she had included the cartoons she said: “My presentation is soooo boring. I need something to keep the audience awake.”

Can you relate?

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New evidence that bullet-points don’t work

At last, we have some scientifically rigorous evidence to show that slides full of bullet-points don’t work.

The research is the work of Chris Atherton, a cognitive psychologist. Chris recently delivered a presentation at the Technical Communication UK Conference and has put up her slides on slideshare. There’s been a tremendous amount of interest in them, but as they were designed to complement Chris’s talk – they only tell half the story.

In this post I’ll explain the findings of Chris’s research. I’ve written the post based on Chris’s slides and asked Chris to comment on various aspects. Chris has also reviewed this post to make sure I’ve got all the science right.

The research

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Here’s a quick way to make over a bullet-point slide

It’s called the Assertion-Evidence Format and it was developed by Professor Michael Alley (I’ve mentioned it previously but somehow never devoted a whole post to it).

BTW, if you’ve downloaded and read my Presentation Planning Guide, you’ll see that this slide format dovetails nicely with the planning system I describe in the Guide.

First let’s look at the Assertion part of the format. [Read more]

Powerpoint custom animation experiment – check out the animation for yourself

Yesterday, I reported on the results of an experiment into the impact of Powerpoint custom animation on learning. I’ve now been given permission by the authors (Dr Stephen Mahar and colleagues) to publish samples of the screencasts used in the research.

Summary of the experiment

The purpose of the experiment was to test the hypothesis that: [Read more]

New research questions the benefits of custom animation in PowerPoint

I thought that simple, non-distracting animations that brought in slide elements one at a time as I verbally introduced them was helpful. I thought that it helped members of my audience focus on the slide element that I was talking about.

Seems I might be wrong.

Research carried out by Stephen Mahar, Ulku Yaylacicegi and Thomas Janicki found that students who were shown an animated PowerPoint slideshow learnt less than those that saw a non-animated slideshow.

[Read more]

How to persuade other people to ditch the bullets

You’ve read Presentation Zen and Slideology and you’re convinced about the benefits of using visually-engaging PowerPoint slides when you present. But everyone else in your organization stubbornly sticks to the bullet-point slides. How can you persuade them to change their minds?

The absolute first thing to do, is to be a good role model. When you present, demonstrate the effectiveness of presenting with visual slides. This is the most persuasive action you can take.

However, it’s not always enough. There’s an obvious irony to the fact that when people are surveyed about presentations, their No 1 “hate” is people reading off bullet-point slides. Yet the majority of presenters probably read off bullet-point slides. I’m sure there’s an overlap between the two groups:

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Little-used methods to make the delivery of your PowerPoint stand out

There’s a revolution in the design of PowerPoint slides, but not the delivery.

Most speakers still rely on their slides to cue them. They click, they talk, click, talk, click, talk…

Here are five methods that will make the delivery of your PowerPoint presentation stand out.

1. The Reinforce method

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PowerPoint Design in 2009: Most promising new technology

This is the fourth post in the series guiding you through the 40 contributions to “PowerPoint Design in 2009?  The first three posts are:

PowerPoint Design in 2009: Does Design Matter?
PowerPoint Design in 2009: Develop visual thinking skills
PowerPoint Design in 2009: Six most recommended tips

Here are the links to all the contributions to the PowerPoint Design in 2009 project:

1. A list of all the blogposts  with a one or two sentence summary of each post.
2. A list of all the blogposts with quotes from each post.
3. The e-mail contributions that I received quoted in full. These are from Cliff Atkinson, Guy Kawasaki, Julie Terberg, Michael Alley, Nancy Duarte, Richard Mayer and Seth Godin.

[Read more]

PowerPoint Design in 2009: Six most recommended tips

This is the third post in the series guiding you through the 40 contributions to “PowerPoint Design in 2009″.  The first two posts are:

PowerPoint Design in 2009: Does Design Matter?
PowerPoint Design in 2009: Develop visual thinking skills

Here are the links to all the contributions to the  PowerPoint Design in 2009 project:

1. A list of all the blogposts  with a one or two sentence summary of each post.
2. A list of all the blogposts with quotes from each post.
3. The e-mail contributions that I received quoted in full. These are from Cliff Atkinson, Guy Kawasaki, Julie Terberg, Michael Alley, Nancy Duarte, Richard Mayer and Seth Godin.

[Read more]

PowerPoint Design in 2009: Develop visual thinking skills

This is the second post in the series guiding you through the 40 contributions to “PowerPoint Design in 2009″.  In the first post I explored the issue  “Does Design Matter?”.

And here are the links to the PowerPoint Design in 2009 resources:

1. A list of all the blogposts  with a one or two sentence summary of each post.
2. A list of all the blogposts with quotes from each post.
3. The e-mail contributions that I received quoted in full. These are from Cliff Atkinson, Guy Kawasaki, Julie Terberg, Michael Alley, Nancy Duarte, Richard Mayer and Seth Godin.

[Read more]

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