On viewing the slide below, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan,  remarked, “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war!”

This would be funny if the consequences weren’t so serious.  In this recent article in the New York Times,  they reveal the growing use of PowerPoint within the military and the backlash it’s creating.

In essence, PowerPoint is being used to replace more in-depth briefing papers, and its templated design encourages the elimination of  complex details and nuanced conclusions.

The real argument is not against a complex graphic if its needed to support or clarify your argument, but the use of bulleted lists that cause the author to over-simplify and state conclusions like fact. The simple reality is that PowerPoint is not a good replacement for a written report, whether your in business or the military!

Read the complete story “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint” to learn more.

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Great tips on telling your story in this video with NPR’s  Scott Simon.  There are takeaways here for any presenter delivering presentations via video webcast or audio webinar.

Tags: authenticity, effective presentations, presentations, storytelling, video presentations.

The question “How much time do I need?”  comes up alot in the context of preparing for a webinar.  What tends to happen is the presenter has a slide deck in hand and they wait until the week before to really start considering the audience needs and reviewing the content.  It’s not until the webinar practice session a few days before the presentation that they see what others are presenting and get any feedback on their slides.  Due to time constraints, there is only time for slides corrections.  So how much time should you spend on presentation creation?

Presentation authority Nancy Duarte, author of the book Slideology and principal at Duarte Design (clients include Apple, Cisco, and Al Gore among many others),  puts it this way;

“The amount of time required to develop a presentation is directly proportional to how high the stakes are.”

Duarte goes on to provide this guidance:

• 6-20 Hours Research & collect input from the web, colleagues, and the industry
• 1 hour Build an audience-needs map
• 2 hours Generate ideas via sticky notes
• 1 hour Organize the ideas
• 1 hour Have colleagues critique or collaborate around the impact the ideas will have on the audience
• 2 hours Sketch a structure and/or a storyboard
• 20-60 hours Build the slides in a presentation application
• 3 hours Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse (in the shower, on the treadmill, or during your commute)

Total Time: 36-90 hours

At first glance this may sound like too much time, but when we started tracking our own content development time for new presentations we found this to be fairly accurate. When you already have a presentation, tailoring it for a specific audience will eliminate some of the up-front time, and in many cases you will be able to re-use slides/slide layout with only minor modifications.  Still, you will be looking at 30 hours to put together a quality presentation and be comfortable with its delivery.

Tags: create a presentation, create a webinar, effective presentations, LinkedIn, PowerPoint, practice, storytelling, time, web seminar, Webcasts, webinar, webinars.

Richard Mayer

We recently wrote a post on Richard Mayer’s ‘Ten Multimedia Design Principals‘  citing his book Multimedia Learning.

I wanted to share another point from Mayer’s research that Cliff Atkinson drives home in his book Beyond Bullet Points called the Redundancy Effect.

Mayer’s research shows that reading text displayed on the screen actually lowers retention.

Mayer conducted experiments using two multimedia presentations. The first was your typical PowerPoint presentation that used bulleted text and the second had all text on the screen removed.

The result; viewers of the second presentation retained 28% more information and were able to apply 79% more creative solutions using that information than viewers of the first presentation.

Bottom line: Stop putting bullet points on your slides! If they need that detail, create speaker notes for download after the event.

Tags: Cliff Atkinson, effective presentations, LinkedIn, PowerPoint, Richard Mayer.

Richard Mayer is a professor in psychology at UC – Santa Barbara. Mayer is considered the authority on educational psychology, publishing over 18 books and 250 articles and chapters on the topic.

Mayer and his colleagues conducted numerous experiments and studies into how we learn best through-out the 90′s. The result of their efforts was the landmark book Multimedia Learning.

Following are some key conclusions and principals from his work  to guide your multimedia development, including your webinar presentations.

Multimedia Works!

People do learn better with words and images, versus words alone.

Bottom Line: Ditch the conference calls, go online for greater effectiveness.

Redundancy Principal

We comprehend explanations better when words are presented as verbal narration alone, versus both verbally and as on-screen text.

Bottom Line: Don’t read you slides – if they are text heavy use them as notes and a handout and put relevant graphics on your slide.

Segmentation Principal

We learn better when information is presented in bite-sized chunks.

Bottom Line: Break your content into clearly defined segments, like chapters of a book.

Signaling Principal

People learn better when information is presented with clear outlines and headings.

Bottom Line: Agenda/outline slides and progress indicators/sign-post slides do help your audience. Slide titles matter too.

Personalization Principal:

We learn better when information is presented in a conversational style rather than a formal one.

Bottom Line: This theme is why we like to record your company’s thought-leaders and subject-matter experts, rather than produce a canned, professional narrative.  Your presentations are naturally the most authentic and genuine. For presenters, it means you should practice your presentation so that you can simply use notes to guide you. You already know the subject matter. Being comfortable with the presentation structure allows your expertise and enthusiasm for the subject to come through naturally.

Spatial Contiguity Principal

We learn better when related text and images are placed next to each other.

Bottom Line: Don’t make your audience guess which images and titles go together, put them next to each other.

Coherence Principal

We learn better when any extraneous information is removed from a slide.

Bottom Line: If it isn’t critical to your point, delete it. I know some presentation experts even recommend ditching the ubiquitous logo, tagline, and date information from your footer since it is superfluous to your point.

Modality Principal

We learn better from animation with audio narration than from animation and text captions.

Bottom Line: We need to engage both the audio and visual “channels” to the brain. Voice narration with your images is the best way to go.

Temporal Contiguity Principal

We learn better when narration and animation are synchronized versus asynchronous.

Bottom Line: You want your narration and animation to reinforce one another. Animations or screen motion need to happen in sync with what you are describing.  This is particularly important for demonstrations and takes some practice to do correctly.

Individual Differences Principal

Each of us will interpret a presentation uniquely based on prior knowledge, visual literacy, and spacial aptitude.

Bottom Line: We each learn a little differently. It is important to consider your audience profile when creating the presentation, use examples and stories to clarify your points, and gather feedback from your audience whenever possible.

You can learn more about Richard Mayer and his research here.

Tags: effective presentations, LinkedIn, Multimedia Learning, PowerPoint, Richard Mayer, web demonstration.

I came across this SlideShare presentation from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Buffalo. I thought it added a few good points regarding how we process information so have embedded it below. Here are the highlights:

• The slides should not say everything that you do. (This is the same message that all the leading presentation experts – Garr Reynolds, Nancy Duarte, Cliff Atkinson – are saying so its not a ground-breaking thought but sets up this next important point).
• Show your slide for 14-21 seconds before talking about them to increase retention by 30%. The reason – the image will make its impression, then you complete the picture with your story.
• The average attention span is 18 minutes. Makes you wonder why we schedule everything in 60 minutes blocks.
• Two-Three slides per minute. Now this is a good point of argument – I’d say it depends, but if you do a good job of using images and not text on your slides may be effective. It really is not clear to me how this works with the second bullet about showing the slide for 14-21 seconds before speaking. Doing the math, you would have 6 to 15 seconds to talk per slide! I have seen this work, but you really need to have your talk well rehearsed to do this smoothly.
• Engage the audience every 3-4 minutes. Obviously polls can be used, but simply using chat to get feedback and draw connections from those comments to your content works too and keeps the presentation flowing.
• Color visuals increase willingness to read up to 80 percent and improves retention by 75%.  Yellow is the first color that you see.

Tags: effective presentations, PowerPoint, Training.

When you are broadcasting a PowerPoint presentation during a web seminar it can be very distracting to have your mouse pointer (the little arrow) dancing across the screen as you or your presenter is speaking. The movement on the screen draws the audience’s attention from the presenter’s narration. It can even be confusing to the audience since their is no correlation between where the mouse is going and what the speaker is saying.

To prevent this from happening, after the Slide Show view has started, use this combination:

• To hide the mouse arrow:  Ctrl + H
• To restore the mouse arrow:  Ctrl + A

Here is another tip (when your in the Slide Show view):

When you really want the audience to focus on what you are saying, blank the PowerPoint screen:

To go black:

• Press the B key
• To restore press the B key again

To go white:

• Press the W key
• To restore, press the W key again

These tips and more can be found at David Paradi’s blog Think Outside the Slide.

Tags: PowerPoint, webinar.