Picture and a Thousand Words
If you’re worried about following the presentation design guidelines – five bullets per slide, no more than ten words per bullet – you’re doing it wrong. Seriously, stop it.If your slide deck is edge-to-edge words, you may as well tell your audience to read the proposal, or article, or hand out your notes and be done with it. Because reading is what they’ll be doing anyway, right before they nod off.
Text-heavy slides and bad visuals are where the death-by-PowerPoint meme was born. Endless, bulleted text on presentation slides are a crime against humanity that needs to stop.
Seriously though, people read faster than you talk, and humans are hardwired to decode those scribbles and make sense of the visual language you have parked in front of their eyes. Their brains prioritize the visual information over the sound of your voice, and while they’re busy reading the words on your slide – all 50 of them if you followed that guideline above – they’re not listening.Frankly, if you’re standing there reciting bullet points, why should they listen anyway? They’ll rush through reading and then check out until you switch to a new slide. If the bullets are different from your speech, they will toggle back and forth between reading the words and listening, just to verify that the information is actually different. Meanwhile, they’re not really listening to the information they’re hearing. They don’t know what you’re talking about, and won’t remember any of the information anyway, so they toggle to their email, or pull out their phone. You’ve lost them and you’re not getting them back.
I understand, you’re worried they won’t remember what you’re saying without the words on the screen, or they’ll miss something and want to include more text so they can read it later.
Unfortunately, putting more words on the slide is the best way to ensure they won’t remember anything and will miss a whole lot of what you’re trying to communicate. By giving them all that visual language, you’re guaranteeing your presentation will not be memorable.
Numerous studies have documented this phenomenon.
- Hearing a lecture or presentation with no visuals at all results in the lowest retention rate
- Reading the content improves retention of some facts
- Giving the audience the oral information with a compelling visual improves retention by an astounding 55%
Compelling, appropriate visuals are key to creating a visceral impact and making your presentation memorable. The right visuals keep your audience engaged to listen, process and retain your message.
If you’re worried they won’t remember complex details, provide a document or the script of your speech (after the presentation), paired with the compelling visuals from your deck – which gives your audience the details and reminds them of the emotional impact.
I Haven’t Got the Time
Then there’s the other presentation guideline that causes trouble with visuals, “But, I only have 20 minutes to present – I can’t have more than 10 slides.”Stop it
If you only have 15 minutes to present you need to scale your story to the time – not cram as much of your points into the time, and onto the slides, you have.
So, you’ve condensed your story down and packed as much of it as you can onto the slides you allowed yourself. Sure, you had to go down to 14-point text and it’s hard to read, but that’s okay, they’ll be listening to you anyway.
Except, they won’t.
I’ve seen this one in action, it wasn’t pretty. The presenter parked on a slide with dense, tiny text and talked rapidly for five minutes. When the slide came up, everyone in the room leaned forward and squinted – even with two screens at each end of the conference room, no one could read it.
Instead of turning their attention to the presenter, almost everyone in the room pulled out their phones or flipped up their laptops. When the presenter switched to the next slide a couple of people glanced up, but another cramped mess with tiny text drove them right back to their personal business.
When you make it impossible for people to access the visual information you’ve presented you’re betraying their trust in you as a presenter. As soon as they shift their focus off the speaker to try and decipher the tiny text or graphics, their attention is lost.
If you’re presenting for 20 minutes you need exactly as many slides required to effectively illustrate your tight, compelling, 20-minute story. There is no rule or slides-per minute guideline.
An effective story accompanied by interesting images, statistics or easy-to-read charts every minute to 30 seconds is more compelling than droning through a list of speaking points crammed edge-to-edge on slides that switch up every two minutes.
One of the best 20-minute keynote presentations I've ever seen was illustrated by more than 60 slides. Do the math – as the presenter was speaking, the slides behind him shifted every 20 seconds. Some of those slides had images, some had a single statistic to highlight the data in his speaking points.
Back to that 1,000-Word Image
Slides are for the audience, not the presenter. If you feel you need more bullets on your slides to help you present, that means you need more practice telling your story.Slides without text demand more from the presenter. A captivating presentation demands a solid story, custom content, and targeted visuals.
If you’re worried about remembering to move the slides as you talk…back to the practice again (see rule 5). Practice so much that the flipping of slides just happens as you talk because you know where you are in your story and in the deck. As the (limited) text and images pop up to highlight and punch what you’re saying, the audience will glance at the screen, absorb the visuals and toggle their attention right back to you. This is how you get through 60 slides for a 20-minute presentation. This is how your speech makes an impact, becomes memorable and makes people want to go back at look at your materials, and read through your accompanying notes or white paper.
Your goal in a speech or presentation is not to share every detail, it’s to intrigue your audience enough that they remember how you made them feel – that they want to consume the rest of the detail, the extra reading or watching, that they want to know more about you, your business or what you’re selling.
Create the back up docs, get some good visuals, and get the words off your slides.
Who am I to tell you how to present? After almost a decade, thousands of client-facing presentations, and hundreds of strategy meetings and coaching sessions, I bring a whole lot more to the table than just another pretty slide deck. I help clients with presentation strategy, provide devil’s advocate input (even if it’s challenging), coach on delivery and execution, and create visuals for technical, creative, data-based, sales and educational presentations.
Do you agree with what I have here? If not, leave me a comment – I’m always open to new perspectives and alternative opinions.
No comments:
Post a Comment