For a long time in the business world we were limited by technology. Although presenters have been able to use PowerPoint since 1987, back then we didn’t have access to the huge image libraries and free video content that we are spoiled by today. This led to a lot of bad habits forming in the presentation space that are still thought of as ‘the way it’s done’ by millions of business presenters across the globe right now.
Even in 2021 we still see many of the following problems in presentations:
- Overuse of bullet points
- Too much content cluttered onto a single slide
- Presenters reading from their slides
- Low quality pixelated imagery being used
- Overuse of bullet points (We know we’ve put this in twice, but we hate bullet points with a passion!)
Becoming a great presenter isn’t easy and there are literally thousands of training courses, books, agencies, and presentation experts out there all offering advice on how best to structure and design the best presentation possible. But if you don’t want to spend ten thousand dollars on a week-long course there is one simple rule that can help guide you.
SIMPLICITY
You’ve probably heard the saying ‘Less is More’ and this is one of our mantras that we try to stick to when designing presentations for our clients. You see, these days it’s so easy to create an amazing looking presentation slide that has a video playing in the background whilst your chart or data magically animates over the top of that video. “Oooooh fancy” we hear you cry!
But whenever you design any part of your presentation you need to ask yourself a simple question:
DOES THIS HELP OR HURT MY AUDIENCES UNDERSTANDING AND ENGAGEMENT?
You will undoubtedly hurt your audience engagement by using fancy animations just for the sake of it, but you will help your audience by using animation to reveal a key fact or important point at the right moment in your talk.
You will hurt your audience by having slide after slide of bullet points that they are forced to read. But you will help them by replacing each line of text with an image, and separating them onto multiple slides.
The list could go on and on, but our message is simple that through every single stage of the presentation design process (and that includes writing content) you should ask yourself this simple question:
DOES THIS HELP OR HURT MY AUDIENCE?
If you have an important presentation coming up and would like some advice please feel free to reach out to us using the form below. We’d love to hear from you.
