I took three slides from the most prestigious consulting firm, maybe the
most prestigious company in the world, to see if I can make them even better.
In this video, I'm gonna walk through exactly what I did, why I did it,
and why I think you can do the same thing to improve your own slides.
Hi everybody.
My name is Paul and I'm an instructor at Analyst Academy.
We teach people and teams how to build better presentations based on best
practices from the consulting industry.
So if that sounds like something you're interested in, make sure you check out
our courses at TheAnalystAcademy.com.
A quick disclaimer before I get started.
All of the slides that I use today are from publicly available sources, so
if you're interested in looking at the original slide, make sure you check
those out in the links down below.
All right, so let's take a look at our first slide.
This is a slide from McKinsey about the mining industry, and the title
says "Successful implementation of technology could generate up to 22%
of additional value from productivity improvement for all stakeholders."
So essentially what they're saying is by improving these different technologies,
we can increase revenue, which is a pretty straightforward message, and
there's enough content on the slide to support that message really well.
But where I think the slide could be improved is in the overall flow
and also in removing distractions.
So, for example, the very first thing that I think has to be removed is
this terrible picture right here.
It doesn't contribute to the slides message, it just distracts the
audience, and that's kind of the risk.
With photos.
Sometimes they can make the slide look prettier, and they do have their place on
occasion, but in general, they distract the audience and if it's not contributing
to your message, it should be removed.
So the very first step I took was to take out this photo.
Then the next thing is just with the overall flow and structure of the slide.
Generally people read your slides from top to bottom and then from left to right.
So you wanna set up your content in a way that kind of supports that flow.
And in general, they've done that pretty well.
So they've got a nice title here at the top.
Then the content.
The content then flows over to this chart right here, and they kind of support
that with these arrows right here.
Overall pretty good.
But where I think it needs to be improved is with the title first.
So you want your audience to read the title first so that they can grasp the
overall message of your slide, and then it puts the rest of the details in context.
But the problem here is the title's not big enough and it's not bold.
So first step I took was to just make this title a little bit bigger
and a little bit bolder just so it commands a little bit more attention.
The second thing is, I noticed there's quite a bit, it's
sort of scrunched right here.
You've got the title up top right here, and then this text right
here is pretty close in size.
It's pretty close to together and it makes it a little bit
harder to read the title first.
You don't want people to get distracted.
So there's a couple things we can do about this.
The first is this gray section, right here.
Only applies to the chart way over here.
I move that over, so that frees up a little bit of space, right?
The next thing I did was to take this legend and put it closer to the chart
because there's nothing above this line right here that the legend applies to.
So it's just gonna be distracting people from the title.
Take that legend, move it down here.
And the other thing is actually, in most cases, and especially in this case,
you don't necessarily need a legend.
When you create a legend for your charts, what you're doing is you're asking the
audience to look at the legend, then back to the chart, then back to the legend to
try and understand each of the categor.
It's too much work for the brain and it's unnecessary.
So in this case, what I did right here is just put them right next to their actual
categories, High estimate, low estimate.
Much easier to read.
All right, so let's now take a look at the actual content, the main part of the
slide, which is this section right here.
There's a lot of text and having text on your slide isn't necessarily bad.
I think especially in slides like this, you get a lot of text heavy slides
because there's a lot of information that needs to be communicated.
But there are ways that we can make this a little bit easier
for the audience to read.
And overall it is a pretty good chart.
I debated for a while here kind of separating this into.
Column chart like this where you've got your low estimate and your high estimate.
But the problem with a chart like that is it's gonna suggest that there's kind of
this increase over time from low to high.
And that's not the message we're trying to communicate.
We're trying to portray that there's two situations, a low estimate
and a high estimate for a total potential improvement of 22%.
So actually, I think this kind of single column chart does this pretty well.
If you have more suggestions for this, I'd love to hear your thoughts down in the.
But one thing that I think can be improved with this column chart is there's kind
of this equal focus on this number, this number, and this number, and that just
is, that doesn't really fit with the message we're trying to communicate.
The most emphasis should be on this number right here, because that's
what connects with the title.
So an easy fix for that is just to make the font for these a little bit
smaller and make this one bigger and.
And already, I think that looks a whole lot better.
This part of the slide is much cleaner.
It's much more focused and easier to understand.
The next step is actually a pretty small one.
It's more just a formatting change.
If you notice right down here, This text is a little bit off so
it doesn't align in the middle.
And usually that happens because you add this kind of extra line at the end
of your text without thinking about it, and so it messes up the alignment.
So just a small change there, but it bothered me, so had to change it.
The next section to talk about is.
Really this main content section right here.
The reason why it's a little bit challenging to kind of work through
is because there's a lot of text and processing a lot of text all at one
time is pretty difficult, especially if you're hearing this presentation live.
You're trying to listen to what the speaker's saying.
Think about what you're gonna say.
Reading through a lot of text is pretty hard and contrary to what you
might think when you're sitting there looking at a slide, you're not gonna
wanna read through every single line.
You just sort of skim through it to try and catch the highlights.
And if it's just text, it's really hard to skim.
One pretty simple way that I'm a big fan of is to introduce icons, so, What I did
is I kind of spaced this out just a little bit, gave some extra room right here,
and then now we can add icons that fit in with the message of each of these levers.
When you're reading this text right here, it's just that much easier to grasp the
content that you're trying to communicate.
And there we go.
I think this slide is significantly better.
It might not look like a whole lot of changes were made, and especially
because we've been now looking at this slide for a few minutes.
If you were looking at this slide for the first time, you'd have a
much easier time actually processing the information on the slide and
trying to get to the key insights.
All right. Let's talk about slide number two.
So this one is about goods and data flows across the globe, and it's, as you can
tell, it's a pretty straightforward slide.
It's just a list of recommendations, and some of these recommendations are supposed
to be key enablers for digitalization.
And overall, this is actually a pretty normal slide.
You might see this at the end of the deck or sometimes at the beginning of the deck
to kind of frame the entire deck, uh, but it's a pretty straightforward slide.
No charts, no numbers, and that's completely fine.
So first, let's talk about the overall structure of the slide.
Title on the top.
List of recommendations, take away, down at the bottom.
Again, straightforward.
Totally.
Okay.
But where I think that slide could be improved a little bit again, is with
the title, it's not that bad, but there's two things that I wanna change.
First is, there's plenty of room right here.
So we can make this title bigger and we can make it bolder.
And also notice how it kind of goes outside of the margins here.
It just makes for kind of a messy look, and I think it should be improved.
So first step was to just improve.
And second thing to notice is this legend right here.
I think it's trying to indicate that some of these are enablers for digitalization.
Some of 'em are kind of enablers and some of 'em aren't enablers at all,
but that message isn't that clear.
So I think we can improve that by, instead of making this kind of a
gradient box right here, have it just apply to certain recommendations.
And that doesn't look very good, but at least logically it makes more sense.
So let's take it one step further and try to make it look good.
One way we can do that is by removing this fill color.
It just kind of blends in with this darker orange right here, I guess.
Doesn't blend in.
It more clashes.
And so if we can improve that just a little bit, By removing the fill
and moving this legend down here, that's gonna look a whole lot better.
So now that we've removed the legend, we've got all this space right here.
So we can probably space out the slide just a little bit more.
Gonna make the title just a tiny bit bigger and kind of space, some
of these sections out a little bit more so it's easier to read.
and if we wanted to, we could probably leave the slide just like this as
it is and it would look a whole lot better and be completely fine.
But I think there's a few more things we can do.
First thing is the text on the slide is kind of hard to read just because
there's a lot of it less than our last slide, but it's hard to really
understand each of these recommendations.
So there's a few options here.
One.
Yeah, we could just add icons like we did on the last slide, but with
eight recommendations, that's a lot of icons and at that point the
icons themselves become distracting and don't really help the slide.
So one thing I'm gonna try and do here is just split this into two separate sections
to kind of space the text that a little bit more and get rid of some of this text
to make it more to the point and more.
So now this just applies to this right section right here.
The text is more spaced apart.
And it's kind of trimmed down just a little bit to be, again, more to
the point and more straightforward.
But the problem we have here now is most of the focus is coming down to this
takeaway box right here because it's bright orange and some of this text is
a little bit more boring, so we need to shift that focus just a little bit.
So you focus on the recommendations and then the takeaway box is kind of the
last thing you look at, because if you look at the content of this takeaway
box, it's trying to spark a conversation.
It's not really calling attention to information that's already on the slide.
So we want the audience to look here first, focus on this second and this last.
So visually we need to represent that flow.
So one way we can do that is by bringing just a little bit more
color into these sections up here.
So now not only the slide, a lot easier to process visually, but
look at the logical connection.
The title is mostly about this section right here, and they're
both blue, so the audience can make that connection visually.
It's a lot easier to process, a lot easier to read.
But then the second thing is this point about digitalization
connects with the takeaway box.
And those are both orange.
So again, there's kind of a visual and a logical connection
there that makes a lot of sense.
Makes this slide a whole lot easier to.
So compare this with our original slide that kind of
had that ugly orange gradient.
This slide looks a whole lot better.
It's a lot cleaner.
There's less text to kind of clutter our brains.
There's visual components drawing attention to the parts that really matter,
and there's less focus on the takeaway box, which really was just a distraction.
And then not to mention, we removed this really ugly kind of puke orange color.
That was confusing and tough to look at.
So overall, I think this slide looks a whole lot better.
All right, let's take a look at slide number.
This slide again is about the mining industry.
Title says companies are planning for the future with technology in mind and
expect revenues to keep growing at 4%.
So again, this slide is about technology and its impact on revenue.
And the main challenge with this slide.
You're probably already thinking it.
There's just too much going on.
The components of the slide are all there.
They support the message.
The logic is great, but there's too much going on visually.
It distracts from the message.
It makes it difficult on the audience.
So first thing I'm gonna do, of course, is take out this
photo again, doesn't contribute.
Let's get it out of.
Second thing is, you may have remembered this from our first
slide, but this section right here, there's just too much going on.
It's all kind of bunched together, so it's harder to read the title
and then move down to the content.
So when I go to read this title, I'm also distracted by this text and this
text, and now I'm kind of getting into the slide or getting into the chart.
Excuse me.
So we can improve that by just removing this line and kind of
moving it down a little bit.
Now the title's got some breathing room.
It makes it a lot easier to understand.
The next thing is all these lines on here.
There's so many lines on this chart.
There's the revenue line, which is kind of our main focus.
You've got the EBIT dial line below that, and then these growth rate lines,
and these also have their own callouts.
It's just a lot of lines on the slide, and really if you look at the
message, we don't need all of these.
The focus is on this 4%.
So let's delete some of these ones in this section right here.
And already that looks a whole lot better.
This puts the focus on this section, which is really what we wanna focus
on, but of course, you still have the data for the rest of the slide
that puts it in the right context.
And actually, we can probably take this just one step further and remove
this down right here because there's no focus on this and the title, it's not
really important to the overall message.
So let's get rid.
All right.
Now we have the same problem we had from the earlier slide.
The legend is way up here, and that does two things.
It takes away from this title right here, but also it makes it harder
to understand which line is which.
Yeah, you can come up and look at the legend.
It doesn't take you more than a couple seconds, but that's just
an extra step that you don't need to make your audience go through.
So what I'm gonna do is not only move.
Move each of these down here to kind of match with the lines, but I'm also gonna
change them, make them a different color, a different font, a little bit bolder,
and so it kind of connects with each.
So notice what I did here is I made this the same color as this and I removed the
dots because you don't need the dots.
Again, this kind of matches with this line.
It's pretty easy to see.
It's pretty clear.
You don't need this legend right here.
I also made this kegar line just a little bit smaller and.
Put the label right next to it so it's more clear.
And if you didn't notice this average industry EBITDA margin, I
abbreviated that a little bit and put it right next to these bubbles.
So now we don't need any legend at all.
There's space right here, kind of cleans up the slide just a little bit.
Makes it a whole lot easier to read.
So let's take a second to consider the type of chart that they chose here.
They chose a line chart and I think that was actually the right
choice because with the line chart, it focuses on the overall trend.
You see one kind of cohesive line, and so it forces the audience to focus
on what's happening from start to finish versus say like a column chart.
You have individual columns.
And the focus is on each of the columns and the difference between those two
columns, and that's not really what they're trying to focus on right here.
They're trying to show you an overall trend, and in particular,
they're trying to show you this last section of the trend, this 4%, which
again, connects with the title.
So a line chart is the right choice here.
But one thing I think they could have done better here is the distinguish between the
historical and the projected data on this chart, which happens about right here.
But there's nothing on the access labels.
There's nothing on the chart itself to indicate which of this is historical
and which of this is projected.
And I think that's a big miss here because that's an important part of the message.
So what I did was just add this simple line right here
that indicates where today is.
So this is projected and.
That's historical.
It's pretty clear you don't want this to stand out too much because again,
going back to our pro from earlier, there's a lot of lines on this slide
and you don't want to distract more than you need to, but information
like this is important to the message.
All right, a couple more things I'm gonna do to improve this slide.
This gap right here is actually starting to bother me.
So what I did was I just moved the title over a little bit.
This is kind of more of a standard practice anyway, and with the
legend gone, we can space this out.
It's a lot easier to read and you know, I love a good title.
Then the next thing that kind of bothers me is this section down here.
So these access labels, it's not immediately clear that
these are referring to years.
Like yeah, if you look at it after a couple seconds, of course these are
years, but I think we can make that message pop just a little bit more.
by adding these kind of, I forget what you call these, these little apostrophes, to
make them very clear that they're years.
So when you look at this, you understand right away.
And then along with that, because we've kind of removed this percent sign from
the label right here, if we put it in the actual numbers next to the actual
numbers themselves, I think that also makes it a little bit more clear.
So made those changes.
So now the slide is just that much easier to.
It's clear, it's visually appealing.
It's got the elements you want on it.
Without the elements you don't, it looks a whole lot better than the original.
All right, that's gonna do for today's video.
I hope you found it helpful.
This was a slightly different style than some of the other
videos we've done before.
So if you wanna see more of these kind of videos, let me know.
Or if you'd rather some other content, then let me know that as well.
And if you haven't yet, make sure you check out our advanced
courses@theanalystacademy.com.
We've also got a free course up there that's super helpful.
It's probably way more stuff than we should be giving out for free.
So if you haven't already, make sure you check that out.
If you're on YouTube then there'll be links to that down below.
Thanks again for watching everybody talk to you.