Relational Presentation Blog – Flexible PowerPoint

By Robert Lane     www.aspirecommunications.com

As the New Year roles over and Microsoft’s ownership of PowerPoint pushes 22 years, I wonder if presentation designers finally will begin spreading wings to take advantage of the software’s marvelous potential for visual interaction with audiences. Ten years ago I thought such a movement was just around the corner. I was wrong.

The phrase visual interaction sounds strange in a PowerPoint context even today, despite the fact that just about every other form of media has become both highly visual and highly interactive. Few presenters use hyperlinks on a regular basis to escape PowerPoint’s linear, slide-after-slide drudgery. For that matter, few dare replace bullet points with visually meaningful forms of expression.

For those who dare trying a more robust style of presentation this year, the following four categories of design principles might prove useful:

Visual Expression

Incorporate meaningful visual content wherever possible—which is almost all the time—and eliminate traditional bullet points. Even though the whole right-brain/left-brain concept is pop science malarkey in many respects, the brain clearly handles visual content differently than it does textual information. Text is a coding system. It has meaning only in a symbolic sense and viewers must expend a great deal of cognitive resources decoding words and phrases on slides. In doing so, they have little capacity left for paying attention to the speaker—or they pay attention to the speaker and ignore text-heavy slides altogether. Both situations are less than ideal.

Visual processing, on the other hand, can occur simultaneously and efficiently along with verbal processing because different brain regions are involved. That’s why we can watch a movie and fully absorb the visual stimuli, all the while paying attention to ongoing dialogue. Including meaningful (content) pictures, video clips, and other forms of rich media on slides gives audience members the best value for their time. See the following article for more information on this subject.

Pictures and graphics, especially, are powerful communication tools if used correctly. They play at least 20 different roles in visually interactive presentation, such as providing examples, enhancing persuasion, simplifying complexity, forming metaphors, and setting up humor.

Effective Cognitive Design

Resolving to be more richly visual with performances, alone, is not enough. Presenters must assure that slides follow good cognitive design principles. Something as simple as having only one main idea per slide makes a huge difference. Doing so increases visual processing efficiency and also allows a speaker to navigate to, and focus on, a single topic at a time while answering questions or working through complex subjects. Unless the goal is to show crucial connections between separate pieces of knowledge, absolutely do not place numerous ideas (or multiple bullet points) on a single slide.

In fact, take advantage of another important cognitive design principle—simplification—by separating individual bullet points onto their own slides and then reducing each point to just a few words. Bullet points longer than 5 words belong in a handout, not on a slide. Simple text phrases speed up verbal processing and cause less conflict with a speaker’s words. Spoken words can fill in extra detail.

Content Organization

Becoming visually interactive with audiences requires a radical shift in thinking. A speaker must move beyond a single-slide-show-mentality and begin delivering many slide shows during performances. That is, he or she divides content into numerous small shows and links those shows together, to facilitate finding individual topics on demand. The resulting PowerPoint-based structure resembles a Web site in many respects and requires the same kind of organizational strategies used by Web site, video game, and database designers.

An interactive speaker must be able to locate individual pieces of visual content quickly, mimicking how the tongue spontaneously generates appropriate words during a conversation. In fact, individual slides are part of a visually interactive speaker’s vocabulary. Hierarchical slide organization makes such media-enhanced conversation both possible and practical, in the same way grocery store organization aides our search for a bottle of shampoo, can of soup, or stalk of broccoli.

Navigation Strategies

The final principle underlying visually interactive presentation involves appropriate use of what are called navigation elements and navigation styles.

A navigation element is a collection of PowerPoint shapes or picture thumbnails that contain a hyperlink and are organized into vertical or horizontal arrangements on slides. A navigation style is a strategic way of using these elements for moving between slides and separate slide shows.

Showcase navigation style, for example, contains numerous links on the first slide of a linear show (a special slide called a switchboard), with all remaining slides in the show holding content. Navigation is a back and forth process between the switchboard and individual content slides.

Topical navigation style, on the other hand, contains a navigation panel at left that spans all slides in a long linear show. In this case, the speaker can move between topical categories by clicking upper links, and then access specific slides by clicking lower links.

Learning visually interactive presentation techniques takes a bit of time and effort, but the process is relatively straight forward with the help of appropriate books and workshop sessions. Being able to tailor talks to individual audiences is worth the effort. We hope this New Year sees many more presenters expand their horizons this direction.

Filed under: Cognitive Strategy, Design of Slides, Interactive, Pictures, PowerPoint, Visual Language on January 5th, 2009