What I’d Like To See In Slide Design In 2009
Over on the Speaking about Presenting blog, Olivia Mitchell asked what everyone else would like to see this year in slide design. I’ve got a really long list of things I’d like to see this year, but I’ll focus on the top 3 on my list:
Less Organizational Inertia
Quite often, one of the reasons why we get battered with walls of text, riddled with bullets, beat senseless with charts and diagrams is organizational culture. It’s they way it’s been done for years and the bad habits have permeated the organization to the point of it being very much part of its culture. Well, organizational culture is one thing. Organizational Inertia is another. This is where the culture of PowerPoint abuse goes beyond culture and becomes either law or accepted truth.
The former can be addressed because there’s opportunity to sell the organization on a better way, especially since a case can be made for the positive effect on the bottom line. The later, accepted truth, is what drives the most intransigent forms of organizational inertia. Here, you’re dealing with small minds. People too closed minded and set in their ways to consider oportunities for self improvement. Why strive for self improvement when there’s nothing to improve, right? “It’s worked this long (meaning, people haven’t actually died from it), and it’s what people expect, so why change it?” I’ve heard that enough to make my ears bleed.
There’s no easy solution and each organization requires a different approach to countering organizational inertia, but the less of it I see in 2009, the happier I will be.
Simpler Diagrams
Working in the world of IT, I probably see more than my fair share of overly complex diagrams slapped on slides. Someone starts feeling a little industrious while slapping together their barrage of bullet points to create highly detailed diagrams. Many of these are created in Visio and pasted into slides. Many others are created within PowerPoint itself. The thought that does not appear to go into these diagrams concern the very people that need to interpret them.
Text is inevitably too small. When pasting these big diagrams onto slides, quite often the diagram itself has to be shrunk to fit onto the slide. What results is text that is far too small to be read by most people. If they’re sitting in the back of the room, you might as well forget it. Simplicity and information (not data) density are goals that would aid legibility. Edward Tufte’s books are a great resource in this regard, especially Envisioning Information
Metaphors get lost on the audience. Quite often, visual metaphors in the diagrams, whether or not the creator realized they were creating them, don’t jive with the expecations and understanding of the audience. Where I work, these kinds of slides are shown to audiences that are mixtures of technical and non-technical people. Within the group of technical people, you’ll have varying degrees of expertise and specialties. Metaphors need to be kept simple and as universal as possible.
There’s often just too much stuff. They’re just too complex. Presenting your audience with very complex, even if just visually complex, diagrams steals their attention away from you. In The Information Design Handbook
An End To Slides As Handouts
All too often, slide decks are assembled with the intention that they also serve as handouts. Well designed slides are terrible handouts since they lack the on-slide text necessary to form an informative narrative. What the audience is left with is a presentation that is ineffective and handouts that have no value to the people they’re passed on to or kept by because they still need explanation. You can never fit enough text on a slide to make them useful handouts. At the same time, you all too can easily have too much text on a slide, rendering them useless in a presentation.
There are many solutions to this approach, but one that I think helps by not only creating handouts (that are distributed after the presentation) but also helps you prepare your talk is to write out a narrative of your talk. Include the visuals. You’re not going to write every last thing you’re going to say. However, you’ll have enough down on paper to be useful while giving yourself a chance to learn your presentation before you even start rehearsing it.
These are the top three things I’d like to see in slide design this year. Do you have any others? Have you run into the same issues I have? Feel free to comment below.