Do you want some design inspiration and to learn what I did to make these slides
even more effective and engaging? Well then stay tuned because this video is
part of my slide makeover series.
These slides were submitted by one of our viewers, Sue Griffey. Thanks for
letting me play around with these slides Sue. You rock! The first thing we're going
to do is diagnose the elements that can be improved. We'll start with this slide.
First, I want to talk about what sue did well. There is a visual, it's relevant, and
there's not a lot of text on the slides. The font size for program evaluation is
a decent size, as well. It's a size 32. So now let's talk about what to improve.
First you could probably tell that the image was a bit fuzzy and pixelated
which meant it wasn't meant to be this big. Second the slide size needs to be
updated. Right now it's a square and really it should be a widescreen. It's
also hard to read the text when it's at a weird angle. Plus this is a template
which means there's a bit of clutter, like this rectangle that doesn't mean
anything. You also don't need to have links on your slides because people are
watching the slide and no one's really gonna write down a website link. Just
give it to them in a handout or some other way.
And finally, this page number is also a bit of clutter and it's at a bad angle
so it's hard to read and it stands out because of the red, so we should probably
just get rid of that. And this heading here, it feels a little unimportant
almost like a second thought so we're gonna need to add some design so this
stands out more. To sum it up, this slide has a few issues that we'll need to fix
with some decluttering, design, and organization. Moving on to this slide,
again sue doesn't have a lot of text on this slide which is fantastic. She's also
using this as a transition slide, it's got great large text, and I love that
she's using a full sized image. So now let's talk about
what to improve. The two main things are that the text is hard to read and the
visual itself isn't all that compelling. Okay.
Finally, we have this slide and again sue is doing a great job with trying to
reduce the amount of text she is adding to the slides. She also has a photo of
real people in here which is great. So now let's talk about what to improve.
Well, this slide is a bit confusing. All of this shows up at once so it's hard to
know where to start and what the flow is and, even if there were animations set up
to go in order and walk people through it, it'd still be pretty overwhelming. The
different colors, the different font, symbols, angles...it's just a bit too much
going on so we can clean that up. Now it's time for the makeover. Let's start
with this slide. The title 'Program Evaluation' again it feels a little
unimportant and hidden away all up in the corner. So the first thing I did was
to turn it into a transition slide. Sue would only be on the slide for a few
seconds to introduce the topic of evaluation but it sets the stage for the
audience and gets them ready to learn about this exciting topic. Now I've
remade that process graphic. There is nothing that says you have to use the
original image of a framework. You can remake it and that's what I did here.
Notice that I removed the extra clutter too with a URL, the red rectangle. It's a
lot cleaner now. You might be wondering why I turned an image into text. Well
let's take a closer look at that so-called image. It's actually all text.
There are arrows I guess, but it really is just text anyway and the problem is
that it's a lot of text all at once. So I retyped the framework and I've created a
whole series of animations so now I can actually walk people through this
instead of showing it all at once. Let me show you what I mean. I'm going to give
an example of how I could see this happening. Ready?
Let's start over. So let's talk about the steps in a program evaluation. Here is
the CDC framework for program evaluation, and we're going to go through this
step-by-step. First you engage your stakeholders then you work together to
describe the program. After that you can narrow down and figure out what the
evaluation design is going to be. From there you collect your data or evidence
and use that evidence to justify and explain your conclusions. And finally, you
use and share the lessons learned and when you're done with that the process
starts all over again, starting with engaging your stakeholders.
In addition to these steps, there are some standards that apply to the entire
project. These standards are feasibility, utility, propriety, and accuracy. So that's
the makeover for that one slide. Instead of one text only image and spending, you
know, a minute or two on that one image I've added a series and it's now more
engaging and will keep their attention because there's movement and change, and
it will walk them through each step. Let's move on to the next slide. Here's
the original. I didn't do too much. I just added a more engaging image, a
transparent shape, and then some big text. so this one only took about a minute to
do and it's much more visually appealing. Okay. Now let's talk about the last slide.
This is the one where it's a bit overwhelming. There's a lot going on and
I don't know what order to go in. There's just a lot of information here. So again,
I'm going to first create a transition slide. I took this image which was really
tiny and I made it fullscreen. Plus I added in a transparent shape and some
big text again. So here is how I picture the series happening now. Okay. So now
let's talk about why you should do an evaluation.
Well you can use it to document program accomplishments and show beneficiaries
what's been done, improve the implementation and effectiveness of
programs, better manage limited resources, demonstrate program effectiveness to
funders, justify current funding, and support the need for increased levels of
funding. So do you see what I did here? There is technically more text but I've
used icons, it's still big text and it's organized in a way that actually makes
it easier for people to read and follow along. So those are the makeovers. Let's
do a quick comparison of the before and after. Before, we had this text only image
which wasn't really adding a lot of visual appeal anyway and forces you to
stay on this one slide with no movement for a really long time. I broke it up by
adding a transition slide and then creating a series to walk them through
each point. It takes the same amount of time to go through the topic but there's
more movement and interest. This slide didn't have a highly compelling visual
and it was hard to read the text, so I added a nice visual and some clear text.
And finally, this slide needed some focus, organization, and decluttering so I used
icons and white space to do that. If you liked this makeover and you're
interested, there is a free download available to you. It includes the direct
links to the photos that were included in this makeover, they are free. Plus a
list of the information design strategies I used. Now I want to hear
from you. What changes would you have made?
Leave a comment below and thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video
please subscribe, give it a thumbs up, share it in your networks, and make sure
to connect with me on Twitter. See you the next time. Bye.