Abstraction

As an ex-comedian (no longer funny), business presentations can be disconcerting. I am always scanning the audience for their reactions, and it’s hard not to feel that I’ve failed somehow if the crowd seems bored. I know, I know. Business isn’t entertaining. More to the point, my current business of networking protocols and the management thereof isn’t entertaining. There’s no way to make it entertaining, either. I suppose I could begin a presentation by saying that “a priest and a Rabbi walk into a bar arguing about MPLS dynamism,” but damned if I know where to go from there. Besides, everyone knows that men of the cloth are more into L7 than they are routing methodologies.

But I digress. Believe it or not, it turns out that many presentations today have some room for improvement. They are, research shows, somewhat boring (in the coma-inducing sense of “somewhat”) and less effective in terms of conveying information.

Initially I thought I’d throw in a sample or two of these poorly-done slides, but I figure it’s not necessary. Everyone has seen them: the slide has a 3-5 word headline, and a series of bullet points. The more technical the presenter, the more bullet points and the smaller the font. For example, a presentation given by a VP of marketing will have about 3 bullets using a 30 point font. A VP of engineering has 30 bullets using various random 10 point fonts pasted from different documents and never normalized.

Research shows that slides that use a sentence instead of a 3-5 word headline are more effective. Further, using images instead of bullets is more effective still. Write a sentence on top, such that reading the headlines of slides tell a little story. Then use pictures down below. Simple as that:

This alternative slide design features a succinct sentence headline that states the main assertion of the slide. That assertion is then supported by evidence presented in a visual manner. Presented in Figure 1 and Figure 2 are excellent examples of this design.

Does this make the presentations more entertaining? No. But it does make ‘em more effective:

Recent experimental tests have shown that the assertion-evidence slide design is superior to the traditional design at communicating technical information to an audience. Studies have shown that using the assertion-evidence design in the teaching slides of a large STEM course led to statistically significant increases (p < 0.001) in the knowledge and comprehension levels of students of course material [Alley et al., 2005].