Presentation Design

When you get ready for a face-to-face presentation, you spend time preparing yourself for the time spent in front of a crowd. From organizing the content into meaningful chunks, to designing slides and speaker notes, to even figuring out what your going to wear – all of these tasks help you to set the mood and highlight the focus of your presentation. Regardless of whether you are going to build the core of the online session around a slide-based presentation (ie. PowerPoint or Keynote) or another format such as a live lecture, spending time preparing the design of your presentation is as crucial as knowing what you are going to teach.

Design Strategies

A plenitude of online presentations are delivered in some sort of slide-based software, and all with mixed results. This begs the question that if PowerPoint is risky in terms of delivery, why do people keep on using it. The current answer is comfort – in research studies on PowerPoint in the classroom, it has been found that there is a sense of self-efficacy amongst students when lectures are delivered with PowerPoint. ^[1] Given that our goal is to always make the audience feel comfortable so as to prepare them for learning, using familiar tools can help to mitigate learner anxiety in the potentially new environment of the webinar room.

So how do we make sure that the presentation is designed to promote learner engagement? There is much written on the topic of presentation design, but all of the strategies touted as key are focused on one famous concept:

KISS

KISS stands for Keep It Short and Simple. Obviously this is easier said than done, but if you focus on the strict learning objectives that you’ve set for the lesson, and use your proposed schedule as a guide, you’ll be able to keep the meat and ditch the filler. Good presentations leverage a focus on the design principles of usability, cohesion and focus. As you create your presentation (and this could be slides, visual content, or even supplemental design materials), you’ll want to focus on the following best practices:

Clear Agenda and Plan
If your participants know where they are going, they understand the expectations of the lesson from both the presenter and participant stand point.  

Use an agenda slide to give users the game plan from the beginning so that they can wrap their minds around what they’ve covered and where they’re going to go.  Number your slides to allow participants to know where they’re at. Showing your audience that you are organized from the start helps to build confidence and trust in both the material and the presenter.

Content Chunking
Translating your content into meaningful slides is often a process where the time needed to successfully complete the task is grossly underestimated.  Don’t be tempted into simply copying and pasting your lecture content into slide after slide. ^[2]  Instead, break content into meaningful thematic chunks that can be presented, and then explored further with some sort of engagement activity.  You might also consider building your slides around an education design model that integrates the presentation of content with demonstration, guidance, feedback and assessment. Lastly, if you have a particular important point to make, be sure to emphasize it visually and repeatedly. ^[3]

In addition, try not to prattle on too long about any given topic.  In her book “100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People,” Susan Weinschenk states that “Sustained attention lasts about 10 minutes.  Assume that you have at most 7-10 minutes of a person’s attention.  If you must hold attention longer than 7-10 minutes, introduce novel information or a break. Keep online demos or tutorials under 7 minutes in length.” ^[4]

Visual Hierarchy to Create Focus
You establish a visual hierarchy on your slides by keeping all design elements to be big, bold and brief.  While it’s easy enough to increase font size, or bold text for emphasis, most slides suffer from the final B in that they aren’t brief enough.  Keep text relevant and focused, using the space to clearly define one or two concepts at most.  In Domizio’s article “Giving a Good Lecture,” she states that “by decreasing the attention your audience will need to pay to complicated slides, you will increase the attention they pay to you and your ideas.”  ^[5] Indeed, leaving the audience with a clear picture of what’s going on means weeding out all of the unnecessary fluff and keeping slides lean and mean.  You might even consider trying the Pecha Kucha format for your slides – in this presentation style, each slide is presented for no longer than 20 seconds, and you present no more than 20 slides.  A side effect of designing in this way is that you are forced to consolidate your content into focused takeaway messages rather than laundry lists or essays. ^[6]

Strong Uses of Color and Type
We could spend hours going through color theory and the principles of typography, but if you were to take away one rule of thumb for both, remember that less is always more.  Choose fonts that are legible at a wide variety of sizes, eschew script or gimmicky fonts, and control all desires to use any more than two fonts.  You can create emphasis with bold, italics, caps and shadows, and use only one font in the process.   With regards to color, you want to create contrast without inducing eye strain.  Choose a select few shades that make your text stand out, and stick to that color scheme throughout the entire presentation.  Consistency is key when it comes to presentation design, and your job is to exert control over your slide design with a cohesive and clean design statement.  In that with great power comes great responsibility, I’ve listed some additional sources below, including links to locations for strong design templates for those that are nervous about the task of making these color and type choices.

• Color Theory for Non-Designers
  This boot camp on color theory focuses on the most important aspects of choosing color for various design projects along with a printed cheat sheet to use as you put together your next color scheme.
• Thinking with Type
  This stunning website covers the history and application of type across any medium, giving you practical information on how to use type to effectively communicate on screen or in print.
• Free Microsoft PowerPoint Templates
• Free Mac Keynote Templates
• Mac Keynote Presentation Inspiration
• Powerpoint Presentation Inspiration

Utilize Media as Appropriate
You’ve heard that a picture speaks a thousand words, but did you know that there is research to prove it?  Weinschenk discusses the psychological reasoning behind design principles, and shares that people “can remember things that you see (visual memory) better than words.” ^[7]  If you can use an image, video, chart or visualization to bring the point home, by all means, include it into your presentation.  And don’t be afraid to break free from bullets – oftentimes a presentation that takes the form of a series of images, each with captions and no bullet points, is better remembered than a collection of text-based slides.

Time for Discussion and Feedback
It takes time for people to process new knowledge, and a good part of that involves setting aside time to apply new knowledge to personalized needs and situations.  

Make sure that your presentation shares one idea at a time in a clear and focused manner, and is immediately followed by time to converse on what was just presented.  This dialogue could take the form of a chat, poll, or open discussion.  It’ll also allow you to solicit information on how well your audience understands what you have explained thus far, and what they need to better understand.

To Slide, or Not to Slide

There are a lot of detractors of PowerPoint – most notably, Yale statistician Edward Tufte whose ideas in his essay, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,” helped to launch the Death by PowerPoint movement. Tufte explains that the software is a crutch for the presenter rather than a tool for better cognition amongst students, and that the excessive bulleting leads to gross generalizations and and weak correlations. ^[8]

In truth, Tufte throws the baby out with the bathwater – yes, PowerPoint has the capability of failing in the exact ways cited above. But so do all interface designs. The bottom line is that anything that you create, whether it be a series of slides or a web module or an interactive simulation, should take into account sound design principles.  Moreover, any technology that you employ requires analysis before launch to ensure that it will help to meet the goals of instruction. ^[9]

Alternatives to Slide-Based Lectures

Are you looking to break free from slide prison? There are several approaches that you can take to create a non-linear, interactive presentation that will capture the attention of your audience. Just make sure that whatever tool you choose to use still allows you to follow the sound design principles listed above.

• Prezi – Called a zooming presentation editor, Prezi allows you to display information dynamically, showing relationships between elements with movement through 3D space. With great power comes great responsibility, however, in that Prezi can pose completely separate usability challenges of its own. Just keep in mind that a little goes a long way.
• MyBrainShark – Traditionally used to add narration to slide-based presentations, this free web application actually allows you to create dynamic animations and simulations with a simple wizard. Upload different types of content and media, embed music and/or narrations, and let the software compile it for you.
• Web Tour – One strategy for eschewing slide-based presentations is to use the screenshare feature built into most synchronous presentation tools. Load up various sites into different tabs or windows on your screen before the presentation, and click through them to present anything and everything that might possibly be displayed on the screen.
• Demonstration – Catalyze learning with practice by giving a demonstration. Using the screenshare feature to display anything that you can load up onto your desktop means that you can illustrate all sorts of software and applications in real time. Consider displaying data visualizations and interactive infographics to engage users with dynamic presentations of information.