What would you like to see in PowerPoint slide design in 2009?

Welcome to this blog - my aim is to make a difference to the success of your presentations. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! Olivia

I’ve invited a number of bloggers to write a post on their own blogs on the theme “What I’d like to see in PowerPoint slide design in 2009″.

This is a Group Writing Project (see www.groupwritingprojects.com/about for more information) and you are welcome to contribute. Here’s how you can take part:

If you’ve got a blog:

Write a post on your own blog and publish it by 12th January. The post doesn’t have to have the title I’ve suggested - as long as it ties into the theme. Then send me an e-mail (olivia[at]effectivespeaking.co.nz) or write a comment on this post with a link to your post. I’ll need this by 12th January.

If you don’t have a blog:

You can still take part - just write a comment on this post by 12th January.

In the week following 12th January, I’ll publish a summary of all the contributing posts and comments with links to the full posts.

The idea for this project was sparked by a provocative post by Laura Bergells on her Maniactive blog. You might want to check it out to get your own ideas flowing.

I’m looking forward to your contribution and to a stimulating and creative flow of ideas.

Olivia

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How to do an agenda slide like Garr Reynolds

Garr Reynolds’ slides from his recent webcast are now online. Garr has an innovative agenda slide. He’s transformed what is normally a boring bullet-point slide into something beautiful and effective. Check out slides 7 to 12 for the agenda slide sequence:

Here’s what I like about it:

1. It’s a visual representation of the presentation timeline. I can see how much time is going to be spent on each section of the presentation.
2. It reinforces the main theme of the presentation. I can immediately grasp that the most important part of the presentation is “How design thinking can help”.  Garr uses both size and colour to achieve this.
3. It looks beautiful. Notice in particular the trademark Garr colour scheme - varying shades of the same colour plus one stand-out colour for the most important section.
4. It’s an elegant solution. Horizontal timelines are intuitive but it’s sometimes difficult to fit the words in horizontally. By putting some above and and some below the line Garr has elegantly solved this problem.

It’s easy to make an agenda slide like this. Create one for your next presentation and your audience will find it both innovative and useful.

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A critique of Malcolm Gladwell

Garr Reynolds from Presentation Zen has highlighted several presentations from Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm Gladwell is a master storyteller in his books. He carries that through in his presentations. Watch the video - then read my analysis below for what you can learn from Malcolm Gladwell and his presentation style.

What Gladwell did well

So what did you pick up on what he did well. Here’s my list:

1. He had a Key Message

There was one consistent theme or key message in his presentation - and all of his presentation was focused on supporting that key message. I do have a suggestion on how Gladwell could improve how he states the key message. Near the beginning he said:

“Cap rates are really low.”

This is clear and succinct but doesn’t tell us why it matters. An audience appreciates knowing why we should listen near the beginning. The way Gladwell stated his key message near the end of the presentation was much more effective:

“We are squandering our talent.”

That’s when we really get the point and why it matters.

Sometimes people are concerned about repeating their key message in the same way at the beginning and at the end of their presentation - but it works in an oral presentation. Martin Luther King said “I have a dream” eleven times.

2. He cut everything else out

Gladwell has just published a book Outliers. I’m sure he had a ton of material that he could have included in this presentation. But he resisted the temptation. He picked one point to highlight and stuck to that.

3. He had a clear structure

Here’s how I would represent his structure visually:

This is an excellent three-part structure. Gladwell picked the three most important constraints and concentrated on those. There are probably many other constraints, but again he resisted the temptation to overload his audience.

4. He supported each point with concrete evidence

Gladwell is a storyteller in his books, so it’s no surprise that he has excellent examples and statistics throughout his presentation. As I’ve done with other presenters (Al Gore, Seth Godin) I’ve analysed the proportion of evidence (examples and statistics) to points/discussion in his presentation:

In Al Gore’s presentation, 60% of the presentation was evidence, and in Seth Godin’s case 67%. These are all great presenters - take a look at this metric for your own presentations - and benchmark yourself against these guys.

My only quibble around Gladwell’s use of evidence is that on two occasions he used a second example or statistic when we had already got the point. We didn’t need the Czech soccer team example after the Canadian hockey example. That was overkill. Second, he gave us a second set of statistics around the capitalization rate of Chinese Americans which didn’t seem to me to say anything significantly different to the first set of statistics. It confused me. The lesson here is that most points only need one example or set of statistics to back them up. Only use a second piece of evidence if it is appreciably different.

5. He used signposting to make the presentation easy to follow

Signposting is letting your audience know where you’re going, where you’re at and where you’ve been in your presentation. Gladwell told us he was going to look at three constraints and then told us as he moved from one to the next. He could have used signposting even more without overdoing it. When we teach the technique of signposting, the presenter often tells us they feel like they’re overdoing it - but the audience loves it. So don’t be afraid of frequent signposting.

6. He communicated with passion

I love the way Gladwell presents. I love the intensity that he brings to communicating his ideas to an audience. I feel like he really wants his audience to get what he’s saying.

So what could Gladwell improve?

Gladwell volunteered that he was a Powerpoint virgin - and I think he did great for a first timer. Here’s some suggestions that I would make.

1. Use your slides to state a message

The first slide was simply this:

This is a waste of a slide. Instead of a heading, state a message. Gladwell could have had a slide which reinforced his key message:

2. Use Powerpoint to show things visually

Remember the slide which listed all the Canadian hockey players with their birthdates and Gladwell reading them out. He could have added visual impact by first showing them the slide on the left, then saying “look at how many have birthdays in the first half of the year”, and then clicking to reveal the highlighting of those players - as in the slide on the right.

There were a number of concepts later in his talk where visuals would have improved my ability to grasp the point. The statistics that he used in his Chinese American example would have been easier to follow with a visual like this:

When Gladwell explained that Chinese Americans with an IQ of 100 performed as well as White Americans with an IQ of 120, a slide like this could have been helpful:

Note that if I was presenting with this I would show the two trend lines, and then animate in the white dotted lines to show that Chinese Americans with an IQ of 100 perform as well as White Americans with an IQ of 120.

3. Presenting with PowerPoint

Gladwell had some issues with keeping the slides in sync with what he was saying. For example, he showed us the hockey player slide way before he started talking about it. I suspect that Gladwell didn’t rehearse his talk with the Powerpoint slides and so hadn’t worked out when he should click. PowerPoint does add another layer of complexity to presenting - you need to work out the right time to click for each slide and then to rehearse that.

Gladwell then stopped using slides, so it would have been better if he had blanked the screen. You can do this by pressing the ‘B’ key on your keyboard while you’re in slideshow mode, or insert a black slide in your show beforehand.

4. Using notes

There’s nothing wrong with using notes, but Gladwell’s were rather obtrusive. He also only looked at them between sections of his talk - so he could have reduced their size right down. Possibly, Gladwell could have managed with one 3×5 inch card with a visual overview of the structure of this presentation as I showed earlier. That would have been enough to get him from section to section.

In summary, this is a compelling talk from Gladwell with solid content and engaging delivery. He’s great without PowerPoint, but he could also use Powerpoint effectively in his talks to explain his concepts visually.

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5 steps to effective Powerpoint Presentations

Stepcase Lifehack just published a blogpost on tips for more effective PowerPoint presentations. I was surprised to see some outdated and unhelpful advice. Here are my five steps to create an effective PowerPoint presentation. I’ve written about many of these steps before, so I’ve provided links to more detailed posts if you’d like more information.

1. Plan your presentation on paper first.

Keep away from the computer. Garr Reynolds from PresentationZen calls this going analog.

Instead focus on your audience and what you want them to take away from the presentation. What do you want them to do? How do you want them to think differently? What do you want them to remember? This will become your Key Message. See this post for more guidance A Simple and Concrete Key Message.

Then structure the flow of your presentation around what your audience will want to know - see Answer your audience’s questions.

The Lifehack post recommends writing a script. I don’t recommend this. Here’s why:

• Unless you’re a skilled dialogue-writer you’ll find it difficult to write your script in conversational language. And conversational language is what works best in a presentation.
• Once you’ve written a script, you may find it hard to keep from reading it. Reading to your audience is an effective way to put them to sleep.
• You may think that you can memorise it - what that means is that you’ll end up “reading” from the script in your head. You’ll still sound artificial and stilted. And you’ll be focusing on remembering what comes next rather than focusing on getting your ideas across to your audience.

Presenting is about communicating ideas - not exact words and sentences. So instead of a script create a set of notes for yourself. Your notes don’t say what you want to say - they remind you of what you want to say. For more guidance on creating notes, see this post The lost art of notes. Then you can focus on connecting with your audience.

Once you’ve created the structure and flow of your presentation, you can start creating slides. There are many different creative ways of creating slides. In this post, I’ll take you through a quick and easy way to use when you’re short of time.

2. Put one statement on each slide

Take each main point of your presentation and express it as a short and succinct statement. Put each statement on one slide.

That’s the only text you put on the slide. The Lifehack post says ‘No paragraphs’! I go further and say ‘No bullets’! Here’s why:

• Bullets are the speaker’s notes in disguise. Take them off the screen and put them in your hand or on the table/lectern in front of you.
• Having bullets on your slide and talking at the same time harms the ability of your audience to take in your message. See The problem with traditional bullet-point slides and New scientific evidence for banning bullets from your PowerPoint slides.
• Bullet-points are outdated. See 5 ways bullet-point slides damage your brand.

If you run out of time, these simple one-statement slides will work fine. If you’ve got time, go onto the next step.

3. Add a relevant visual to each slide

Now look at how you can add a visual element to each slide which helps back-up the point of the slide. There are four main types of visual:

1. An image or photograph which directly represents or is a metaphor for what you’re talking about.
2. A diagram which helps your audience understand the concept you’re describing.
3. A graph which shows the meaning of your data.
4. A flowchart that demonstrates the process you’re explaining.

For more description of each of these see this post on The application of visual thinking to presentations.

I agree with the Lifehack post that irrelevant, distracting images and cliched clipart shouldn’t be used. Watch out also for cliched images - the Slide:ology blog has lots of examples of these.

4. Pay attention to design

The Lifehacker post says:

Avoid the temptation to dress up your pages with cheesy effects and focus instead on simple design basics.

I agree. The key design principles are:

• Use a simple background - decorative templates add clutter.
• Use a sans serif font such as arial or helvetica.
• Use text which contrasts well with the background.
• If you’re using photos have them fill the whole screen and put your text on top of them. If necessary use a semi-transparent rectangle - a mask - behind the text to ensure that it is readable.

These two posts expand on these points:

• Powerpoint slide design - the basics
• PowerPoint slide design - adding elegance

The Lifehacker post says avoid dark backgrounds if you can to help with readability. This used to be true with older dimmer datashow projectors, but now with brighter projectors it’s not an issue unless you’re in a very light room like a conservatory or direct sunlight is hitting the screen.

5. Dance with your slides

You know not to read from your slides. But don’t go the other extreme of ignoring your slides like a wallflower at a dance. Dance with them. They are your partner in the presentation - sometimes you lead, sometimes the slide will lead. For more ideas on how to do this see my post Are you missing out on half the power of your PowerPoint slides?

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Are you stuck within the Overhead Projector Paradigm?

In the days of overhead projectors, we’d slide a piece of paper down the transparency to reveal information step-by-step. That’s the Overhead Projector Paradigm.

When you’re stuck in this paradigm, you’re not using the full power of PowerPoint. What are the signs that you’re stuck in the Overhead Projector Paradigm?

• You bring on elements one-by-one
• You add elements to the slide from the top to the bottom of the slide
• You never have an element leave the slide
• You never have an element move on the slide
• You never have an element get bigger
• You never have an element get smaller.

This is a lost opportunity. You can add so much meaning to your slides by using animation creatively.

Here’s an example from Dave Paradi’s blog. Dave does regular slide makeovers on his blog which I normally find creative and inspiring. But this week when I watched his slide makeover - I was amazed - in this particular makeover, Dave was stuck within the Overhead Projector Paradigm! And as a result he’s missed the ability to use the visual power of a slide. You can click here to watch his slide makeover. You might want to go and watch it and look for what he’s missing before you come back to see my take on it. I’ll start by showing you the stills - and then a video so that you can see the animation in action.

Here’s Dave’s first slide:

The calculation describes how an asset like a building is valued. If you’re unfamiliar with the terminology let me first define the terms: NOI stands for Net Operating Income eg; the annual rents minus outgoings. The cap rate is the rate of return on your capital investment that you expect.

Dave has missed the opportunity to represent the figures visually. Here’s how I might show the calculation:

Dave then shows how you can increase the value of a property by raising the rent:

The yellow arrows are supposed to represent the number growing - but why not actually show the numbers growing directly:

In this slide, I would animate the “top-up boxes” with an entrance animation - you can see this in the video below.

The second way to increase the capital value of a property is by reducing the expected cap rate (you do this by reducing the riskiness of the income eg: by converting the tenants from short-term leases to long-term leases):

And here’s how I would show the impact of lowering the Cap Rate:

Here’s a video to show the animation and the words that I would use to present it:

[display_podcast]

By liberating yourself from the Overhead Projector Paradigm, you’ll be able to make full use of the visual power of PowerPoint.

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5 ways bullet-point slides damage your brand

Your presentation style is part of your personal brand. If you’re still clinging to bullet-point slides, it doesn’t matter how dynamic you are as a presenter, your personal brand will be damaged.

That’s because when you use bullet-laden slides in your presentation, your audience will make five decisions about you and your presentation:

1. This is going to be boring

When an audience sees the first slide of your presentation and they see row after row of bullets they’ll sink just a little in their seats. They’ve had to sit though many boring bullet-laden presentations before and they’re thinking “Uh-oh - this is going to be boring.”

Just like Pavlov’s dogs it’s a conditioned response. Paylov’s dogs salivated when Pavlov rang a bell because they anticipated being fed. Audiences deflate when the presenter uses bullets because they anticipate being bored.

2. You don’t know your stuff

If you knew your stuff, why would you need a screen to prompt you every few seconds? One of our course participants summed it up:

“I’ve been burying my expertise in a barrage of bullets.”

When I see someone presenting with bullet-point slides, I often think that I could deliver the presentation better than they can - even though I know nothing about the topic. Bullet-point slides obviate the need for your knowledge.

So take your notes off the screen, and put them in your hand. Now you can show off your knowledge.

3. You’re not up-to-date

The PowerPoint revolution has happened. People have seen PowerPoint used to show images to inspire and amuse, to show diagrams to clarify and explain, and to show charts that make data meaningful rather than deadly.

So when you show slide after slide of bullets, your audience will make that mean that you’re out-of-date and that you and your organisation are stuck in the past.

4. You’re lazy

Bullet-point slides send the message that you’re not prepared to put the work in to transform your presentation. The audience may be thinking “If you’re lazy about preparing your presentation, what else are you lazy about?”

You may be overestimating the time it will take to transform your presentation slides. Many of our course participants are surprised by how quickly they can put together a visually interesting PowerPoint presentation. See this post about The best PowerPoint slide format to see how long it takes compared to the alternatives.

5. You’re wasting my time

When you sit through a lengthy bullet-point presentation, do you think to yourself  “The presenter could have sent me the slides for me to read and that would be a lot quicker!”

Your presentation is part of your personal brand and that of your organisation. If you’re still clinging to bullets, you’re damaging your brand.

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The 3 steps to creating a PowerPoint Diagram

When you see that a diagram might be useful to explain the concept you’re talking about - don’t go straight to PowerPoint. Doing this is as bad as trying to design your whole presentation in PowerPoint.

Two things can happen:

1. You try and squish your concept into an unsuitable diagram type.
2. You get caught up in creating the technical aspects of creating the diagram without having a big picture view of how it’s going to work.

I know because I’ve done it. Now I storyboard first on paper.

That way the diagram will be designed to fit the concept, rather than the concept squished into an already existing diagram type.

Here’s an example of the process that I went through for a slide make-over I did recently for a client. First here are the original bullet-point slides:

Step 1 : Visual analysis

The first step is to study the written material to work out how it could be presented visually.

I identified the following ideas which could be presented visually:

• the difference between owning a job and owning a business
• if you own a job, the impact on you if you can’t work
• moving from doing it all yourself to putting in place systems and people

The key visual concept that I came up with was to show the business and the person as virtually the same entity for “owning a job” and to show those entities separating as the person moved to “owning a business”.

Step 2: Storyboard

My next step was to sketch out my ideas for how to show these concepts visually.

Step 3: Create in PowerPoint

Finally I went to PowerPoint and started creating the diagrams. Below is a screencast of the animated slides with my narration:

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Robbery at Bullet-Point

This is a guest post from Tony Burns, my life-partner and co-trainer at Effective Speaking.

Every so often an audacious robbery occurs in full view - yet nobody notices.

Late last year, Dublin Police launched a new crime prevention program called Freeflow. On the very same day a lone man drove a truck into Dublin’s Guinness brewery, hitched it to a trailer and drove out the security gates with 450 kegs of beer.

When we attend business presentations, we often see presenters robbed in plain view of the audience - yet no-one seems to notice. And the thief?

PowerPoint!

If you’re not wary:

1. PowerPoint will steal your credibility
2. PowerPoint will steal your clarity, and
3. PowerPoint will steal your audience.

PowerPoint steals your credibility

Powerpoint steals your credibility every time you use a slide to remind yourself what to say. It doesn’t matter how few words you use, the audience can see what you’re doing. Even though you don’t have notes in your hand, there’s an audacious con going on. You’re pretending that you don’t need notes. But…your notes are on the screen - everyone can see them. And as a result, instead of you being the credible source of the information, the screen is.

One of our course participants summed it up nicely - “I was burying my expertise in bullets.”

Solution - create notes on paper using brief key words and phrases. That leaves your slides to be a visual stimulus for your audience - not verbal cues for you.

PowerPoint steals your clarity

PowerPoint steals your clarity when you use Topic-Bullet list slides. The Topic-Bullet list format consists of a topic heading such as “Ways to help an audience remember” and then underneath, a bulleted list of those ways. Such a slide has limited effectiveness as a hand-out (for when the audience has time to read and reflect) but during the presentation when attention is limited, lists of words create distraction and confusion - ideal circumstances for committing a robbery.

And it’s the clarity of your message that’s being stolen.

Solution - use Assertion-Evidence slides.

The headline of your slide should be an assertion - the point you’re making, such as “Your audience will only remember what they process”. The rest of the slide provides evidence to support this be it anecdotal, statistical or the recommendation of a credible expert.

PowerPoint steals your audience

PowerPoint steals your audience when the slideshow is the centre of attention.Commonly, presentations start with a title slide followed by Topic-Bullet list slides. The presenter stands at the side of the room, speaking to the slides (sometimes literally!) and the screen steals the show. Audiences report that this style of presenting is boring, patronising and a rip-off of their time.

Solution - Remember, you are a presenter not a projectionist. Place yourself in the centre of the room and have the screen slightly to your side.

Introduce your slides before you show them - so that your audience sees that you are running the show - not the show running you.

And occasionally use a blank slide - forcing the audience to be totally focussed on you. The beginning and end of your presentation are ideal times to use this powerful technique.

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Review of the 3 books of the Presentation Revolution

There are three books which have ushered in and defined the PowerPoint Revolution. If you can only buy one, which one should you buy? Here’s my analysis of the three books and my recommendation.

Cliff Atkinson was the pioneer with Beyond Bullet Points. The Beyond Bullets approach is an entire system for creating a presentation with the support of non-bullet PowerPoint slides. It’s published by Microsoft and is a hybrid between a software how-to book and a presentation book. I find the system too limiting and constraining. Note: I have the 2005 edition of BBP - there is a 2007 edition which may be improved.

Garr Reynolds came next with Presentation Zen, based on his blog of the same name. His book is imbued with the philosophy of simplicity. If Cliff’s book is methodical, Garr’s is philosopical. The book attempts to cover most aspects of giving a presentation from planning the content, to designing the slides to the delivery itself. However, the strength of the book is the section on slide design. Garr made us non-designers aware of the importance of design in PowerPoint presentations. The discussion on the planning and delivery of a presentation is at a high conceptual level. There are useful insights for presenters with some experience but the lack of practical guidance could be frustrating for a beginner.

Then came Nancy Duarte with Slide:ology. Slide:ology is the most beautiful of the books. It is also the most focused. Nancy concentrates almost exclusively on slide design (there is an out-of-place section on audience analysis).

Here’s a table which summarises the strength and differences between the three books:

	Beyond Bullets	Presentation Zen	Slide:ology
The case for the PP Revolution	Appendix discusses Mayer’s research insofar as it applies to the approach described in the book	Develops the case for a new approach to PowerPoint presentations	Short discussion on using slides for visual communication
Content Planning	Template for planning a presentation. Too detailed and constraining.	Applies Zen principles to art of planning content	Short discussion on audience analysis. That’s all.
Slide design principles	Presents one method of constructing a slide with no discussion of principles.	Excellent discussion at a conceptual level	Excellent discussion and gives detailed guidance - a non-designer’s guide to slide design
Slide design inspiration	None	Many terrific examples to inspire you. Examples tend to be from educational-type presentations. Lots of examples of charts, but very few of diagrams.	Huge number of examples from real corporate presentations including makeover of charts and diagrams.
Delivery	Traditional advice on delivery	Applies Zen principles to presentation delivery	None

So which one would I buy? I would no longer recommend Beyond Bullet Points. Not when you can see what’s possible with slide design in Presentation Zen and Slide:ology.

If you want a philosophical discussion of simplicity in the art of presentation together with wonderful inspiration for designing better slides, go for Presentation Zen. But after I’d read Presentation Zen, I felt like I wanted a “A non-designer’s guide to slide design” to help me put into practice the principles and the inspiration that I had from Garr’s book. I could copy the ideas behind some of Garr’s ideas, but I felt like I didn’t have enough grounding in the basics to create my own designs.

Nancy’s book fulfills that need. So if you want the non-designer’s guide to PowerPoint slide design, together with visual inspiration, then Slide:ology is the book for you.

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The Top 10 PowerPoint slides from Slideshare

Slidesharing sites like Slideshare and Slideboom are a great place to get inspiration on PowerPoint slide design. You can see different ideas and adapt them for your own presentations. Slideshare is currently running the World’s Best Presentation Contest (see footnote) which has some great examples of PowerPoint slide design. To save you time I’ve picked two sample slides from the 5 most popular entries. They’ll offer you inspiration for the design of your own slides.

(To see the whole slideshow click on the link I’ve provided for each set of slides).

1. Play with text

Non-designers (like me) tend to assume that text has to be all the same size, the same colour, left or centre-justified.

Here are examples of playing with text from Ethos3’s entry into the competition.

2. Illustrate statistics

Here’s an interesting way of showing statistics - zoom in on the trend lines. Note also the use of different coloured text to highlight the increase. This is from jbrenman:

3. Use pictures instead of words

This next example by pdharam is from the “Creative/Offbeat” category - but offers a possibility for business presentations. Use a picture that says it all - no words from you or the screen.

4. A fantastic metaphor

This slide deck by grahairs uses the metaphor of an elevator for the seven levels of love. Between each level, there’s a slide with the lift going up. What could you use this metaphor for?

5. Creative masking

This set of slides about the destruction of the Amazon by gauperes uses creative masking techniques. The mask is the semi-transparent circle underlying the text, allowing the text to stand out from the background. Normally the mask is simply a rectangle and is only there to ensure the text is legible. However, in this case, the mask also represents size:

Footnote

It’s not really the World’s Best Presentation Contest, because these are slide decks not live presentations. The slide decks have been designed to be self-explanatory without any narration. It should be called the World’s Best SlideDeck Contest.

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