Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft® PowerPoint® to Create Presentations that Inform, Motivate, and Inspire (Business Skills)

by Cliff Atkinson

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KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

your own presentations, the better you know your audience, the better you’ll be able to customize your material to them.

PowerPoint feature gives you the ability to see additional information that does not appear on the screen the audience sees.

Figure 1-2. Remote control devices offer presenters the ability to advance the slides of a PowerPoint presentation without using the keyboard.

Never breaking eye contact with the jurors or looking back at the screen, Mark now began to tell a gripping story that would lay out the evidence of the plaintiff’s case through the next two and a half hours of the presentation.

This slide worked much more effectively than a list of bullet points ever could, because we don’t live our lives in bullet points—we live in images and

stories.

But in a nonfiction presentation, making the audience the center of the action can dramatically increase their sense of involvement.

You’ll learn how to create similar dramatic tension in your presentations in Chapter 3, when you plan the two specific slides that present your audience with an unresolved problem that your presentation will help them to solve.

Esta es una excelente forma. De presentar el problema

Figure 1-10. This summary slide visually distills the entire case into a single image. The horizontal bars above and below the icons are red to indicate that this slide stands out as the most important in the presentation.

Mark now guided them along what appeared to be a very simple story as he introduced the three most important parts of the case, which he then explained in more detail as his presentation moved forward. Now the jurors could relax as they listened and watched the story unfold.

Instead of reading bullet points from the screen, Mark used his slides as visual cues to prompt him on the next point he would make, allowing him to speak with a natural and spontaneous style that came from the depth of his knowledge and authority on his topic. And instead of looking at the screen to see what was on it, Mark kept his attention focused on the jurors, making eye contact with each person throughout the presentation.

Buena recomendación para la presentación

that presenting with bullet points on a PowerPoint slide is more effective than presenting without them, or studies showing that using a PowerPoint design template to make every slide background the same produces better

learning than not using a design template, or a quantitative justification and rationale for commonly accepted PowerPoint design guidelines such as the 6-by-6 rule, which states that every slide should have six lines of text with six words per line.

approaches has created a void in terms of research-based guidelines on how best to use the software, and this void has been quickly filled with popular myths and cultural habits. In other words, the main reason we approach PowerPoint the way we do is simply because that’s the way that we’ve always done it, and not because any research says it’s better than any other way.

This chapter is inspired by the work of Richard E. Mayer, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Ranked as the most productive researcher in the field of educational psychology in the world, Mayer is the author of 23 books and more than 350 other publications and has been researching multimedia learning and problem solving for almost 20 years. In his books and related articles and papers, Mayer proposes a way to understand the use of multimedia that promotes meaningful learning and lays out a set of principles for designing any multimedia experience based on his own research and that of others. For more information about the research on multimedia learning and its implications for PowerPoint presentations, see:

delivered, of course, it’s not your fault as a presenter—after all, you delivered the PowerPoint presentation, and what they did with it is their problem, not yours.

party, it is common for people to say the jury just didn’t “get” the evidence, or when a sales presentation does not succeed, the presenter might say the audience just didn’t “get” the benefits of the product or service. It is hard to separate the pipeline metaphor from our thinking because it is woven into the words and expressions we use commonly every day.

first possible outcome is that your audience experienced no learning (upper right). This is the worst-case scenario—in spite of your work in preparing your presentation and your audience’s time and effort in showing up

and paying attention, no learning happened to make the experience worthwhile.

second possible outcome is that your audience remembered perhaps the bullet points on slides 12 and 33 and the diagram on slide 26—but that’s all they remembered. In this scenario, they remember only bits and pieces of the presentation because they experienced fragmented learning (middle right). In fragmented learning, the audience members remember at least some things; but from a

presenter’s perspective, you have no control over what they learned because the fragments could be any pieces of information among many, and you don’t know which ones. The third possible outcome is that the audience remembered exactly what the presenter intended—they experienced meaningful learning (lower right). Meaningful learning is what any group wants to achieve in their time together—the people in the audience understand what the presenter intended, and they are able to apply the information after the meeting.

Figure 2-6. The three types of human memory: sensory memory, long-term memory, and working memory.

first type is sensory memory. Sensory memory is the part of the mind where your audience members briefly store the initial

impressions of sights and sounds as they look at and listen to the environment around them. Sensory memory is potentially unlimited in capacity, although sights and sounds might ...

The second type is long-term memory—the part of the mind where your audience members store information over an extended period of time, from as little as 30 seconds to as long as a lifetime. In a presentation context, this is where you would like your audience to store the new information you intend to communicate to them. Beyond just remembering the new information, you also would like them to be able to access and apply the information fro...

The third type is working memor...

called short-term memory)—the part of the mind where your audience members hold their attention. The theories underlying working memory are complex, but essentially, working memory is a temporary holding area for information. As sensory memory briefly holds sights or sounds, working memory then pays attention to some of them and ho...

Figure 2-7. The limited capacity of working memory to process new information creates a narrow passage—much like the eye of a needle—that stands between the information you present sensory memory and the information that is integrated into long-term memory.

This extremely small space of the “eye” of working memory constitutes the most formidable challenge you face as a presenter.

Figure 2-8. When you show more information than working memory can handle, audience members remember only bits and pieces.

This study offers research-based evidence to support the saying “Less is more”—the less you overload working memory with extraneous information, the more learning improves.

The new information is clearly not presented in bite-size pieces; instead, it fills every

What you see here is visual overwhelm rather than visual organization. Using the same predesigned background for all of the slides gives them a uniform look, but it also prevents you from using a range of design techniques to visually highlight the most important information on single slides or across slides. It also makes the overall presentation appear visually repetitive, which causes boredom that quickly shuts down attention.

Figure 2-12. Notes Page view includes the on-screen slide area above and an off-screen notes area below.

Allan Paivio described his theory of dual coding in the 1970s, and during the same decade, Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch described a similar two-channel structure in working memory.

This helps working memory focus attention on the single point that you explain verbally during this slide. Instead of reading the headline verbatim, you let the audience quickly read and digest it on their own.

With the screen behind the speaker, the audience sees and quickly digests the slide and then pays attention to the speaker and his or her verbal explanation. The entire experience appears seamless to the audience.

BBP presentation runs at the speed of conversation—about one frame per 30-60 seconds—allowing time for the audience to digest the new information and then focus next on the presenter. This even and appropriate pacing ensures that your audience experiences only the right things at the right times.

Researchers call this the split-attention effect, which creates excess cognitive load and reduces the effectiveness of learning. You can observe similar dynamics when you’re watching a film or TV show and the sound is slightly out of sync—it’s very noticeable because your working memory has to do the extra work of continually trying to synchronize the mismatched images and narration.

Myth: I don’t need to worry if what I say doesn’t match up with my slide. Truth: Research shows that people understand a multimedia presentation better when they do not have to split their attention between, and mentally integrate, multiple sources of information.

The result is that the relationship between your spoken words and projected visuals is not fully addressed. You might assume that the information on your slide can stand alone, without verbal explanation, but a PowerPoint slide does not exist in a vacuum—you are standing there speaking to your audience while you project the slide.

complain that the presenter should “E-mail it to me!” or “Just give me the handout!” This frustration has a research basis—writing out the text of your presentation on your slides and then reading it to your audience contradicts the widely accepted theory of dual channels.

Myth: It’s OK to read my bullet points from the screen. Truth: Research shows that people understand a multimedia presentation better when the words are presented as verbal narration alone, instead of both verbally and as on-screen text.

Audiences who experienced the second presentation retained 28 percent more information and were able to apply 79 percent more creative solutions using the information than those who experienced the first presentation.

Michael Alley, author of The Craft of Scientific Presentations: Critical Steps to Succeed and Critical Errors to Avoid (Springer, 2005), conducted a study using two PowerPoint presentations, each with a different headline format. One presentation included only sentence fragments at the top of each slide, and the second presentation included a complete sentence at the top that summarized the most important point

the slide. In tests to measure the knowledge and comprehension of the information in the presentations, the audiences who experienced the slides with the complete sentence headlines saw an average improvement in test scores of 11 percentage points over the audiences who saw the slides with the sentence fragments. When you use the title area of the slide to summarize your point for your audience members, you properly guide their attention, and in the process you ease the burden on their working memory to figure out your point.

The simple elements of a BBP slide work together to guide the complete presentation experience. First the audience members quickly digest the headline, then they view the simple graphic that illustrates the headline, and then they turn their attention to the verbal explanation of the speaker. The result is an engaging multimedia experience that balances visual and verbal elements and contributes to meaningful understanding.