The Secret To A Successful Presentation
When you sit down at your computer to start working on your presentation, are you in a hurry to get it done as quickly as possible, or are you motivated to create a presentation that is worth your time, as well as the audience’s time? If you’re just in a hurry to be done with it, then these tips might not be a good fit for you. However, if you’re excited about the opportunity to deliver your message to an audience, then let me give you an important tip to increase your chances of success.
Don’t cram information onto your slides.
Period.
Just don’t do it.
Why?
When you stuff your slides with information, your audience is more likely to burn out from information overload. Yes, information overload is a real thing, not just something people say when they want to take a break. During presentations, information overload is caused when the presenter asks the audience to process too much information.
For example, if the presenter is lecturing while also clicking through slides that have bullet point lists, charts, graphs, and diagrams, the audience will quickly reach their cognitive processing limit for that time. The audience will need to take a break and recharge until their cognitive load capacity is replenished.
So, how can you stop this from happening to your audience during your presentations?
Well, there are a few options. First, edit your content and remove and extraneous points. You don’t need to tell your audience everything about everything. Tell them only what they need to know and stop there. If you can’t separate the essential from the nonessential elements, then ask an informed associate to take a red pen to your content for you.
Once you have eliminated the fluff from your presentation content, then you are prepared for the next step: reducing the effort it takes to understand your slides. Even if your presentation content has been edited so that only essential points remain, your presentation will still be challenging to digest if you present too many of your essential points all at the same time.
You need to give each of your ideas some space so that the audience can process each point fully before being presented another idea. To give each point some space, try to present only one idea per slide. Avoid bullet points or numbered lists as much as possible, and instead only show the audience one point at a time. If you absolutely cannot get away from bullet points, practice progressive disclosure and reveal only one idea at a time.
Let me show you some examples to clarify these suggestions:
One Idea Per Slide
BEFORE:
The slide above presents a question and the answer on the same slide. Presenting information in this way minimizes the impact of both the question and the answer, while also overloading the audience by asking them to process both elements at the same time. As a result, the content on this slide has minimal impact, with maximum cognitive load.
AFTER:
By separating the question and the answer into two different slides, the suspense of the question is preserved and the cognitive load is lightened. Since the two slides have the same design, creating two slides was as simple as copying and pasting the first slide, then deleting the old text, and adding the new text. It was super simple and fast.
Progressive Disclosure
As I stated earlier, you should try to avoid bullet points as much as possible. However, if you must use bullet points for some reason, and you cannot present only one idea per slide, try to reveal one bullet point at a time to simplify the process for the audience.
BEFORE:
This slide has too much information for the audience to process at one time. The template details in the header and the footer, plus the large text at the top and the bottom of the slide, combined with the bulleted list of lengthy points is overwhelming to comprehend and not pleasant to view.
AFTER:
The slide above was created to emphasize the importance of the headline from the original slide. The slides below show how the original bulleted list was transformed into a creative list that shows only point at a time. As the presenter clicks forward, a new point is shown. By presenting only one point at a time, the information is easier to understand, and the audience is less likely to burn out from information overload.
Conclusion
Take the time to create a presentation that is worth sharing with an audience. If you rush through the presentation creation process, and stuff your slides with too much information, your audience will likely forget most of what you said, as well as leave slightly confused as to the point of the presentation. Lighten the cognitive load for your audience by editing your content and being thoughtful about your design.
Additional resources:
Why Bullet Points Kill Presentations
Minimize The Extraneous Load of Your Presentations
A Simple Alternative To Bullet Points
