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How to avoid death By PowerPoint | David JP Phillips | TEDxStockholmSalon
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Anyone who gives presentations or wants to improve their slide design and delivery skills should watch this video.
TL;DR
This video explains how to avoid creating boring and ineffective PowerPoint presentations. It highlights common mistakes, like overwhelming slides and redundant information, and offers five design principles based on brain science to make presentations more engaging and memorable.
Key Takeaways
- Many PowerPoints are ineffective because they overload the audience's limited working memory, leading to information loss within seconds of presentation.
- Presentations should focus on a single, clear message per slide to align with our brain's limited capacity for processing multiple ideas simultaneously.
- The 'redundancy effect' shows that presenting text on slides while speaking the same information results in almost zero audience retention.
- Visual elements and concise text on slides enhance the message, while excessive text or complex graphics detract from audience comprehension.
- Our brains are biologically wired to notice large objects, signaling colors, and contrast, a principle that can be leveraged in slide design.
- Standard PowerPoint templates often place the headline as the largest element, which can inadvertently draw attention away from more critical content.
- Effective PowerPoint design should work with, not against, our natural cognitive and perceptual tendencies to maximize audience engagement and understanding.
In This Video
- 00:00The Puzzling PowerPoint Problem
The speaker questions why PowerPoints look so bad and why audiences tolerate them, leading to wasted time and boredom.
- 01:25Beyond Vengeance and Intelligence
The issue isn't revenge or intelligence, but something else related to the brain and presentation skills.
- 02:32Examples of Terrible PowerPoints
The speaker shows examples of extremely poor PowerPoints from universities, CEOs, and the UN.
- 03:54Impact on Audience Memory
90% of a presentation is forgotten within 30 seconds if slides are bad, due to limitations of working memory.
- 05:42Five Design Principles Introduced
The goal is to present five design principles to optimize PowerPoint slides cognitively and psychologically.
- 06:07Principle 1: One Message Per Slide
Having only one message per slide is crucial because humans are limited in processing multiple pieces of information simultaneously.
- 07:17Principle 2: Avoid Redundancy Effect
Don't repeat spoken words with on-screen text; use slides for visuals and documentation for text to avoid cognitive overload.
Questions & Answers
Why do PowerPoints look the way they do?
The speaker questions how we accept the way PowerPoints look, noting that even when presented with a bad PowerPoint, people often create equally bad ones themselves.
What is the main problem with current PowerPoints?
Current PowerPoints are often dismally bad, filled with charts and text, leading to boredom and a waste of the audience's time and intelligence.
How much information is retained from a presentation with bad PowerPoints?
If a presentation uses bad PowerPoints, about 90% of what was said is forgotten within 30 seconds due to cognitive overload.
What is the redundancy effect in presentations?
The redundancy effect states that if you have text on slides and speak the same words, the audience will remember very little, if anything.
How should PowerPoint be used effectively?
PowerPoint should be used to display short, clear text and supporting images, with detailed explanations in the documentation field, not on the main slide.
What visual elements naturally draw our attention?
Our eyes are naturally drawn to moving objects, signaling colors (red, orange, yellow), high-contrast objects, and large objects.
Key Terms
- Working Memory — Working memory is a cognitive system with limited capacity responsible for temporarily storing and processing information for complex tasks like learning and reasoning.
- Redundancy Effect — The redundancy effect occurs when presenting the same information simultaneously in different formats (like spoken words and on-screen text), leading to reduced learning.