Sacred Cow #5: If the Audience Is Technical, They Want To See Detailed Diagrams
This sacred cow is roaming the halls where I work. It's old. It's loud. It smells. It's abusive. It's obnoxious, and it rudely disrupts nearly every technical presentation I have to sit through. Unfortunately, we're not unique in our suffering. This parasitic bovine is present everywhere you have technical people. Fortunately, there are treatments for this affliction if you know where to look. This is a sacred cow that must die else the brain rot that follows it will infect management, sales, and, oh... too late.
Well, rather than letting the technical community continue our sacred cow herding, we can be good citizens and slay this beast. Trolling SlideShare for some good examples of bad examples, I came across a gem. Complicated diagrams, despite protests from worshipers of this sacred cow, do not enhance the presentation. They do not aid comprehension. In truth, they harm and inhibit comprehension. Slides such as the example to the right can introduce what's called "map shock," a form of information overload. The Information Design Handbook by Jenn & Ken Visocky O'Grady describe this as:
"...also sometimes called visual shock, is a phenomenon experienced by individuals when encountering complex maps, diagrams, or pictorial representations. Information processing stops as the person tries to orient themselves to the overwhelming quantity of data. Users describe a sense of being lost, and of not knowing where to start, often accompanied by a physical and sometimes even audible, reaction."
(p.75) emphasis mine
All too often, people delivering technical presentations are doing this to their audience while expecting them to retain this information. It's just asking too much of the audience, no matter how technical they are. Even though the audience may be technical, the same guidelines that many of us who are passionate about great presentations write about still apply. We may have different aptitudes, but we all have brains that all operate under the same principles. Attention is attention. Retention is retention.
If you absolutely need to get that message across with a diagram that, by its very nature, is technical, try applying these guidelines:
Build it slowly. Rather than overwhelming your audience with all of that complexity at once, gradually build it one piece at a time. Don't display the next piece until you're ready to talk about it.
Keep it simple. Keep each build stage simple enough that someone in the audience can absorb it quickly (3 seconds or less). Ask yourself, "Would this work on a billboard?"
Consider the folks in the back of the room. Don't forget the people in the back. If there's text and they can't read it, you're not helping them at all. They're either going to ignore you as they try to figure it out or give up and lose out on this important visual.
It is important, right? If it's not important for the comprehension of your message, leave it out. Otherwise, it's just noise.
Take it easy with Visio. Copying and pasting visio drawings into your slides may be the easy way out, but rarely is doing the right thing easy. If you can't draw your diagram within your slideware itself, take several snapshots of your diagram in each logical build stage. Don't just throw up a fully completed diagram unless your purpose is to observe first-hand the effects of map shock.
Observing these principles will require extra time and effort, but the results are worth it. Educate those around you. Let's put a long overdue end to this sacred cow.
mage credit: Automania, used under a Creative Commons license.
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.
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