PowerPoint tips that are clear and to the point

I spent the weekend on the Island of Guam (three hours south-east of Osaka) finishing up a good quick read on presenting better with slideware in a new book called Clear and to the point: 8 psychological principles for compelling powerpoint presentations by Stephen Kosslyn. I would like to add this book to the short list of books on the topic worthy of your money. There may be nothing necessarily new for the most experienced of you in this book, but because the advice comes to you from a renowned cognitive neuroscientist from Harvard, who aligns his list of presentation and PowerPoint "do's & don'ts" with sound psychological principles, this book will be of help to you as you try to change your own "PowerPoint culture" around you. It's one thing when a designer says the current methods are flawed, but it is quite another when a cognitive neuroscientist says so. The book is by no means the final word on presenting with slides, but it does offer plenty of graphic examples of what works and what doesn't, and it will give you some "hard evidence" to use while you try to persuade your own entrenched curmudgeons trying to defend the status quo.

Kosslyn says that presentation success can be virtually defined by meeting these three goals:

(1) Connect with your audience
(2) Direct and hold their attention
(3) Promote understanding & memory

In other words, you must (1) make a connection with your audience and their goals and their interests, (2) you must get and keep their attention and interest and let them know what is important and what is not, and (3) you must make it easy for them to follow, digest, and remember your material. The eight principles are grouped around these three goals in an organized fashion. You'll have to get the book to get all the details, applications, and visual examples, but basically the principles are grouped like this:

Goal 1: Connect with your audience. This goal is supported by the principle of Relevance and the principle of Appropriate Knowledge. Do not include too much nor too little information, and select information and use language appropriate for your particular audience.

Goal 2: Direct and hold attention. This goal is supported by the principles of Salience, Discriminability, and Perceptual Organization. Attention is drawn to areas that are perceptibly different, so leverage design principles such as contrast and make differences big and obvious. Or as graphic designer Robin Williams would say, " Don't be a wimp!" Also remember that people will naturally tend to group similar elements into a single unit.

Goal 3: Promote understanding and memory. This goal is supported by the principle of Compatibility, the principle of Informative Changes, and the principle of Capacity Limitations. Messages are easier to remember when they are compatible with meaning. For example, the word Red presented in green text violates this principle as would a graph about the homeless cat population in Osaka decorated with a background image of people playing with their healthy dogs. Remember too that people expect any change in your presentations — such as a sudden interjection of a joke or a story, or a visual change in slide color or an animation, etc. — to have meaning, and when they don't have a meaning this becomes noise and hurts effectiveness. And of course, audiences can only retain a limited amount of information in a presentation (see cognitive load theory), so choose carefully and do not try to stuff people's brains with more and more information. It won't work.

Backgrounds, salience, and compatibility
Let's use two of the principles, salience and compatibility, to examine the single issue of slide backgrounds. The most important element of your design should also be the most salient, says Kosslyn. This could be done in many ways such as with larger or bold type, color choices, positioning, and myriad other ways that help guide the viewer's eyes. Generally, slide backgrounds should have low salience, says Kosslyn. That is, backgrounds should be simple without lots of perceptible differences among the background image itself since this would interfere with the foreground elements. And if you use a photo for your background image, Kosslyn reminds us to use a background image that underlines our message instead of undermining it. A good background, says, Kosslyn, can "...allow you to underline your message effectively, or it can create confusion, the background image should not conflict with the message of the display." Let's looks at some examples below.

   
Above: These are posters I found in two store fronts at a shopping mall in Guam Sunday. The one on the left uses three colors (white, red, black), the one on the right has over twice as many colors at seven (yellow, green, blue, red, black, violet, and white). In both cases the key element is the number set in large type: 40% and 50% are what attracts the eye of the shoppers looking for a deal ("off" and "%" are made smaller because they are a step down in importance and are assumed or implied given the context). The limitations of the discount (that they are for selected items only and that you have to buy one first at full price to get the discount on the shoes, etc.) are made subordinate and may in fact be missed until the clerk informs the customer who is now all ready in the store. The power of the "40% Off" on the colorful poster for a game software shop is reduced due to weaker overall design priority of the poster, which even includes superfluous clip art, and in the end simply blends into the sea of noise.(The poster reminds me of some PowerPoint slides that have a large title competing with the more important elements in the slide). The poster for the shoe store is a good example of salience ("Attention is drawn to large perceptible difference") as it is clear which element is the most important.

Let's look below at a few different ways to treat a chart on cell phone internet connectivity rates from 2004. The theme in this case is how far ahead Japan and South Korea are compared to the rest of the world in this area. It is not necessary for every bar to be a different color. South Korea is highlighted because that is the focus of discussion.

 
Above Left: Background image from this PowerPoint template has too much salience itself and competes with the chart in the foreground. Right: Here the contrast is better between the background and the foreground, but the sand and beach ball are not compatible with the message. The background image (also a PowerPoint template) may be appropriate if the chart was comparing sunburn cases or days spent at resort holidays, etc. Still, you could find a better image elsewhere rather than using a tired template.

 
Above Left: Besides the color being inappropriate for this chart, the template has a fixed place for the slide title that is nearly a third down the page which interferes with the legibility of the text. We could reduce the size of the chart and place our title in it's designated place, but that would mean the top third of the slide is taken up by ornamentation. Right: The photo is appropriate perhaps for a presentation on organic farming but is not compatible with mobile phones. There are also some contrast and legibility issues as some of the text is difficult to see.

 
Above: A background photo of a cell phone user in Japan or South Korea may work. This photo does not make for great contrast, however. Contrast can be helped by placing a dark transparent box behind the chart, and still further by adding a Gaussian blur to the background image.

   
Above: I prefer to keep slides quite simple when displaying charts, graphs, or tables. Either of these may work. A white background can make for good contrast with dark text and other elements (nothing has more contrast than black and white) and works well when your room is relatively bright. In a dark room, however, a white background may be overpowering.

Clear and to the point gives a great amount of specific advice that's rooted in well-known psychological principles. I have no issues at all with the principles outlined by the author, but any time you give specific do's & don'ts in a book like this you are bound to have people disagree with some of your example treatments. I have some minor issues with only a few of the slide examples in the book, but all-in-all I would say that this is one of the most useful books on PowerPoint to ever be printed. Why this is not getting more press and more sales is a huge mystery — it's as if Oxford Press or the author do not want this book to do well. Odd. This is not a how-to-use-PowerPoint book, nor does it prescribe a method (which are two of its attractive features to me). But this is a very good book and it deserves some buzz. This would be an excellent supplementary textbook for a college-level speech-communications class, and of course, anyone who presents often will find the book provocative and practical. You may not agree with all the examples, but that's fine. The important thing is to get the conversation going.

If you can't afford yet another book related to PowerPoint/presentations, then you can get some feel for the material here in this article by the author.

Comments

[Caroline Schneider]

Garr, you made some successful buzz for that book. I just ordered it, as I'm always looking for scientific arguments (in this case - cognitive psychology) in order to explain what makes up a good PPPresentation.
Moreover, thanks for adding your examples on salience. That's what makes PZen so special: knowledge is immediately & perfectly put into practice by the PZen-Master.

[John Windsor]

Good post, Garr. Some of the titles of the Principles put me off — the last thing we need to do is send people off to their dictionaries (limits the understanding & adoption of the ideas) — but your examples helped redeem it.

[Daniel Condurachi]

You explained very intuitive the importance of the background in a PowerPoint presentation. The advice you give on this blog helped me a lot to do my final presentation for my MBA. Thanks to you I got an A++ (http://blog.bycoddot.com/freelance/2007/07/16/i-graduated-my-mba-thesis-a-with-congratulations-dealing-with-perception-in-the-marketing-of-a-new-product-snowy-snowboards-marketing-management-mba/)

[Chaim Krause]

You write, "A white background can make for good contrast with dark text and other elements (nothing has more contrast than black and white) and works well when your room is relatively bright. In a dark room, however, a white background may be overpowering."

I am curious if you often create two versions of slide decks that you present often, a dark set and a light set, for just such occasions.

Also, the example slides you used, being shown as thumbnails in the post, and about the mobile phone industry, got me thinking. How long will it be until we see ads like the following:

*** Send a TXT MSG to 345253 to get your personalized PhonePowerPoint presentation sent directly to your cell phone !! ***

What will it be like to provide slides, optimized for small cell phone screens, with accompanying voiceovers, probably in full mp3 stereo sound? Will they be any different then current day flash-based advertisements or will they be sold for microcredits deducted from your phone bill by self-help authors? Or, what about live feeds of your presentations, with your slides shown on a cell phone screen and your live audio sent over the same cellphone connection for those who can't attend, or maybe just running late on there way to a live presentation in progress.

Sorry for the drive-by blogging in comments-mode. :)

[Justin]

This post reminded me of a story from grad school. We were often required to do presentations, but rarely were we required to use PowerPoint. However, in one class we were given a set of instructions for developing a slide show and a list of expected elements. One of the requirements was simply put as "Include a background." So I did -- a white one. This was a conscious choice because:

A) I had seen many presentations on this projector and knew it was not very bright. Since I was presenting during the daylight, the white helped brighten the slides.

B) I have never liked full images as backgrounds. Everyone up to that point had used full image backgrounds and I had found each difficult to follow.

I received a B on my presentation simply because I had failed to include a background. I argued that white is a background and that the professor did not specify that I must use an image background. He said that every student except me had clearly understood the requirement, as every student except me had used an image for a background. I wasn’t going to argue aesthetics with him, but it was frustrating to find this type of design sense being incorporated into a curriculum not dealing with design.

Garr, thanks for the post. It reminds me there are always multiple ways to solve a problem. Some good, some bad. From these, you should select the one that meets the criteria of the situation without sacrificing personal aesthetics.

[Mike Sessler]

Great thoughts, Garr. I recently completed several PowerPoint presentations for Adobe, following many of these principles along the way. White background, simple text (all 30 pts. or larger) and photos or icons (from iStockPhoto) that supported the points.

They loved the look and came back with not a single graphic or image change. Simple and clean wins again! Thanks for being a champion of excellent design.

[Jorge Camoes]

Tufte about Kosslyn:
"Stephen M. Kosslyn, Elements of Graph Design (1994), a book confirming that psychology is for graphics like ornithology is for the birds." (in the Ask E.T. forums)

Powerpoint for the Birds? Great! I want one!

[tartle]

Thought this link http://snipurl.com/1q9eq is ironic comment on the 3 goals... and looks too familiar!

[Matthew Cornell]

*Excellent* post. Very helpful, and at the same time a great model of compelling use of case studies. Much appreciated.

[Website Design]

I really appreciated your explanations. Very clear.

[Jan Chappell-Ortiz]

As a college student I found this to very clear and helpful towards my course in PowerPoint presentations.
thanks

[Juhani Mykkänen]

I love your site, but I would like to point out one thing that doesn't jump out from your post.

You compare the 50% and 40% off commercials and make the correct conclusion, that the one with less colors and distracting stuff is clearer. However, I think you should also take into account the result that is wanted from the ad.

The bright colors and cheesy graphics are things that seem "cheap". This is why they are sometimes used on purpose by graphic designers. People get the feeling that hey, I'm getting really cheap stuff.

In the "clear" example with the more professional looking overall image, there's a message of quality, which contradicts with the "50% off" message. People might get the feeling, that 50% off from that store is still not cheap enough for me.

The "looking bad on purpose when it comes to discounts and price graphics" is a commonly used trick and should not be ignored in a situation like this, even though your point was correct :)

[Liz Akers]

Hey Garr,

A lot of my clients tell me that using PowerPoint can create a malaise in it's self. (still taking in Kosslyns three above mentioned goals in to consideration)

With the new digital age, everything from our television adverts to our emails are all looking slicker... something that PowerPoint can't really keep up with

New technology has meant that Flash can be used in such a way to create a really slick alternative to PowerPoint, such as PresentiaFX.

Which, I reckon, is about time...

[PINKLENA - Girl french]

Excellent post ! I'm subscribing to your feed so I can make sure I catch more