How are you about putting slides together for technical presentations?
I admit it – I have been derelict in my duty to you. Around PowerPoint, anyway. I’ve done you a disservice. And it’s this comment by Nancy Duarte, the PowerPoint design guru, that made me realise it (scroll down – her first point).
She said that the current trend towards PowerPoint-Zen-type slides (one full-bleed image and a bit of text) is all well and good for marketing presentations, or keynotes, but what about presentations for technical people? Someone, she says, needs to come up with the standards for slides for physicians, scientists and engineers.
Well, that person, I’ve humbly decided, is me.
The Lightheart rule for PowerPoint slides is:
You only need a slide in a presentation if you’d need one in conversation.
I still stand by that.
That doesn’t get away from the fact that in conversations about technical topics, you might need a diagram or two. And it seems like no one has ever put together the advice for how to do that, apart from silly rules about how many bullet points to have or what colour text to use.
Here are my first thoughts about how to design visual aids for technical presentations. I reserve the right for this to be provisional as I do more thinking and research…
When thinking about the information you’re delivering…
- Think about what they know already, what they need to know in order to make the decision (more about this in my free book)
- Start with what you would do in conversation, in terms of formality and level of detail
- If listing features (facts) about a system, check that the audience really needs to know them
- Always link facts to advantages for the audience
When designing the presentation as a whole…
- Use as few slides as possible and only leave them up when needed.
- Think of building up a large picture one piece at at time.
- Look for sequences and cycles.
- If you break it apart by putting something on a separate slide, reintegrate it back into the whole.
- Label charts and graphs with the message of the data, not a description of it.
When designing the slides themselves…
- Show how parts connect
- Bigger is more important
- Centre is more important
- Sides are peripheral
- Left is generally the past, right is generally the future (if you set it up that way)
- Build up the picture in stages if it’s complex
- Use arrows to show the flow of information or the steps in a process
- Use words only when symbols won’t be understood without them, and make the text LARGE
I’m going to do some more research into the visual display of data and synthesise what I find out. I’m thinking these principles are going to look a little, ahem, naive in a few weeks…
What do you think – would some more help on this topic be useful, or has this already been done well by someone else? Where else do you suggest I look?
***
Comments from last week’s post about PowerPoint include:
The smart and lovely Ray Bigger:
PowerPoint is not, and never has been, the problem. Most ppt’s use 5%of it’s full capabilities and judging by the many, many presentations I have seen about the same % of people really understand how to use PowerPoint.
The very funny and insightful Jeff:
Great post. I am hoping that 2009 becomes the year of the great PowerPoint (and Keynote) revolt. It is time to come right out and say that slides seldom matter. It is the content and the skill of the presenter that matters. Content and skill are tough; PowerPoint slides are easy.
I would add one item to your Purposes list. That item is: PowerPoint makes people appear to be busy. Notice I didn’t say productive. The first steps of effective presentation design sort of look like day dreaming. Fire up PowerPoint and you get the feeling you are doing something.
The always thought-provoking Natasha Golding:
If we were feeling really radical we could say that Powerpoint, and all the books and trainers that go along with it, is built around the fallacy that we lack the ability to impress or inspire without whizzy slides. Zooming out the big idea is that fundamentally we’re lacking and our only cure is to consume…
My question would be about aesthetics. Powerpoint, or SlideRocket, slides can provide a beautiful visual background for your stage. I do think that the environment you present in effects what the audience understand and remember of what you communicate. Visuals that don’t distract but bring in a sort of background emotional context for your message are enjoyable.
I’m concerned that if you totally stuck to the ‘only use it if you’d need to draw something in a conversation’ rule we risk developing a rather brutalist approach to presentations. We don’t want to take out all the fun and the beauty.
***
In other news:
I’m back in Singapore after a fun few weeks working in the UK. In fact, I’m typing this on the flight back home, before having a few days in Bali (thanks Airmiles).
Books:
I’ve finally gotten around to reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody about how technology is affecting our capability for mass collaboration. V insightful.
Movies:
Slumdog Millionaire was totally worth it, though a little bit of a straight line.
Twilight totally wasn’t worth it, despite very pretty people. In fact, it was whilst watching Twilight that I started the notes on this article. Yeah, that good.
The Reader was beautiful and ambiguous (people – please stop showing me up by asking if it was as good as the book…)
The Women was a little disappointing but with a stream of great one-liners.
Milk is a freaking masterpiece.
Tech:
I am loving my new Samsung netbook. It’s tiny, light, fast and lasts 7 hours on a single charge. What’s not to love?
Oh, and my tiny Flip Mino camcorder is a dream. Makes my ‘have I got everything?’ list a little long, but it’s worth it.
Hi Andrew,
This is a great and much needed post. It has been so wonderful to see the influx of good design principles into presentations (not a moment too soon!), but those principles can be awfully hard to translate into a more technical presentation. One of the things I often notice in more technical presentations is that it can be the tendency of the presenter to believe that more complex visuals = more valid challenge or solution. It reminds me of when we all used to “compete” for who had the most homework in high school (am I alone in that??), where really the prize should be the other way around… Learning to pare it down to the absolute bare minimum is a discipline, and an excellent one to hone.
I will definitely blast this out to the SlideRocket community, who I am sure will appreciate it.
Take care,
Tracy
http://www.sliderocket.com
You raise a very good point. In a lot of ways I’d say the principles of technical presentations are the same as any other kind of presentation (in that your audience need to be the centre of what you say etc.) but there are some pretty significant differences, too.
I’m not saying I’ve got the definitive answer – or even anything like it! – but I started thinking about this in my blog a while ago: http://www.curved-vision.co.uk/presentation-skills-blog/2008/10/22/presentations-vs-public-speaking
Maybe a little online conversation is in order…
I love your suggestion that we only use slides in our presentations when we’d use them in a conversation. Brilliant point and (like most brilliant things) so elegantly simple!
Simon
I am very anxious to see what your research unfolds in the area of technical presentations. Having written and presented several technical papers for the oil and gas sector, you need to decide if the chart or graph is needed in your message and if it is, what is it to say to your audience?
From my experience, the technical presentation often involves data in various formats. Often only one or two key pieces of data are relevant to the message however the slide contains reams of informatoin. The challenge is to direct your audience’s attention on the key data and prevent them from scanning the irrelevant information. Subtle animation often helps.
Best of luck in your research.
M.J.
On this theme, I was working with a senior manager of the NHS who deals with statistical presentations on a daily basis. She commented that technical presentations as she understood them (that is, presenting figures on change and so on) are actually amongst the easies to present….
Statistics are designed to illustrate trends and patterns. If you think of those ideas as ‘stories’ in the data you’ve got your presentation susses. What’s more, statistical trends in intrinsically visual – nothing’s more visual than a graph!
Simon