I gave a presentation this week, audaciously called Creating Better Presentations: An Information Design Approach, at the annual conference of the Rochester Professional Consultants Network. I began with some live polling of the audience and a brief exercise to show them the left-brain, right-brain diversity in the room. So far, so good.
Then, I attempted a quick summary of the controversy over how PowerPoint is used and abused. When I reached the part about how experts ranging from Edward Tufte to Seth Godin agree on the basic problem - the typical bullet lists of talking points on slide after slide - though they differ on the solution, I knew I had hit some raw nerves.
Hands went up and people blurted out objections. "You mean to tell me..." Or, "But we've been taught..." Or, "Hey, the lists help..."
As I addressed these questions, giving specific examples from cognitive and educational psychology research showing why endless bullet lists communicate poorly with a majority of people, most of the audience seemed to accept that there might be a better way than "what we've always done." I was really glad I started with the learning styles exercise that so neatly divided the audience about in half.
I mentioned this experience in an e-mail to Cliff Atkinson and he responded with some intriguing questions: Why do people exhibit this "raw nerve" reaction when the practice of bullet list presentations vs. using graphics is discussed? Do they feel unprepared to use graphics effectively?
Seth Godin's blunt (brutal?) answer to the presenter who worries that creating slides with effective information graphics will be hard:
"But what you do now is lazy and ineffective. It bores people and doesn't communicate with them. Once you get the hang of this process, it's actually easier to make a great presentation."From Seth's e-book, Really Bad PowerPoint (and How to Avoid It), p. 8.
"Getting the hang of it" is what I tried to introduce in the fifteen minutes I had left. I quickly touched on the differences among the rich information design lessons Tufte provides for clarifying displays of complex information, the multimedia learning principles from researchers like Richard Mayer, and the simple use of dramatic images to illustrate a point urged by Godin. A major part of my message was that we don't have to adopt one of these approaches and reject the others. All of them are right - for certain messages to certain audiences. All of them are wrong in other cases.
Heck, even bullet lists can work in some settings. For example, if you are teaching a well defined task that needs to be performed in a set sequence of steps, a numbered bullet list approach might actually be the best method to introduce the subject.
For organizing a great PowerPoint presentation and deciding which approach to information design works best for your message and your audience, I recommended to my audience the wonderfully practical storyboard template that Cliff has created. I recommend it to you, too. He has a new Introductory Module that you can download FREE.
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