A lot of us have slides that look like this, where it's all text. And a lot of us
are also really short on time and the thought of having to search for visuals
is just not appealing at all. So do you want some quick tips on how to still
make text-based slides more engaging? And then how about a bonus makeover where I
still take those slides and add visuals? Then stay tuned because this video is
part of my slide makeover series and this one is a double makeover edition.
These slides are submitted by one of our viewers,
David Dreyfus. Thanks for letting me play around with these slides David, you're
great! The first thing we're going to do is diagnose the elements that can be
improved. Here is David's original slide and I want to start out with what he did
well. First, notice that you only see the first bullet point. That's because
David set up a basic appear animation for each point. Thank you David.
Folks, if you're going to have a lot of text on your slides then the least you
can do is set it up so that each bullet point only comes up while you're talking
about it. The second thing I noticed was that David tried to minimize or
de-emphasize the citations by using a smaller font size for them and that
matters, because if he used the same font size for the citations look at how the
slide looks now. So that was a neat little design trick. So good job on those
two things David. Now let's talk about what can be improved. Well the first
thing is the amount of text. There's too much of it. I counted and it's 81 words
which on my BATTS scale is a score of 0 for 'oh my god please end my suffering.'
Sorry David. Because there is so much text David also had to do something else
to the slide that I wanted to point out. He had to use a small font size. It's a
size 28 for most of the text. The absolute minimum should be a 30 and even
then that's usually only big enough for a webinar where people are all up on
their screen. The other thing I want to talk about is some clutter that's on the
slide, like these citations. A lot of people add citations to their slides and
I used to do it too. I get it but that's a habit I strongly encourage everyone to
break. Your slides should never have content that you aren't verbally saying
to your audience and that includes citations. And besides, they're actually a
size 18. No one can read that anyway. Just give them the citations in a
handout. That should do the trick. Finally, there are two other types of clutter on
these slides. Do you see them? Well it's the dark grey line and the Rutgers logo.
Now Rutgers is a great University, don't get me wrong, but people do not need to
see that name on every single slide. They will remember where you're from and you
can remind them on the end slide in case you're worried about it.
But right now it's taking away from your core message. And that line is only there
to separate or call attention to that logo, so I'll be removing both of those.
Okay, now it's time for the makeover. Here's the original one more time. The
first thing I could do, which takes only about a minute, is to get rid of the
citations, get rid of the bullet points, and remove even more text from the slide.
Now I would keep the animations so still do that even though I sped this up and
didn't show you all of them. I've also used alternating colors so the
separation between each point is clear and I don't need the bullet points
anymore. Do you see how much cleaner and lighter we've already made this slide? But
of course we can take this one step further without having to even search
for visuals. The trick is to break up each point into multiple slides. So
here's that first point. This is the same amount of text but I've made it huge and
I did a few design tweaks so it looks more eye-catching. Now I can bring in the
second point, that disruptions in health care contribute to waste. Now I have
removed the phrase contribute to the waste from the slide because the arrow
said that for me. So do you see what I'm doing? Instead of just a list of bullets
I'm trying to show and not just tell the audience how they're connected. So that's
the first two bullet points. It's still text, it's just bigger and on a clean
slide with some design tweaks and good use of animations. Let's move on to that
third bullet point, that disruptions are the third leading cause of death
and medical errors. Yikes, by the way. I had no idea about that. But I've basically
just copied and pasted the format from before and changed the wording. Again,
this is the same amount of text that David used on his original slide but it
doesn't feel that way right now. In David's notes he had a comment about how
operating rooms can provide a good starting point to explore these areas, so
I just turned that into a quick transition slide. And that icon, that's
straight from PowerPoint. I didn't have to go looking for it and it was free. And
now I've created a slide for David's last bullet point which is about how
operating rooms are the highest revenue generator and the highest hospital
expense. Again, this includes basically the same number of words from the
original bullet point. And these icons are just from PowerPoint. So think about
this, if you were in the audience which would you rather see? These four slides I
just showed you or this type of slide? And again all I did was break up the
slide, I used some design strategies and animations, and it's almost the exact
same amount of text with the citations and extra clutter removed. But because
visuals are magic I'm going to show you how to go one step further by using some
photos. So we're back to talking about waste. I chose this great visual of a
lonely garbage can on a misty road. We all instantly get that a garbage can
means things you throw away so conceptually it works really well with
this content. And then disruptions in healthcare is now at the top pointing
down. Now we need to talk about how disruptions lead to death and medical
errors so I chose this great visual. Ah, who am I kidding? This is a terrible
visual. It's super weird don't use visuals like that. But I will admit it
was hard finding a visual for this topic. Clearly I wasn't going to show someone
who was dead and I didn't want to show an image of a funeral because that would
just make everyone really sad and probably start
thinking about the last funeral they attended. So that wasn't good so I
eventually settled on this image. It still represents a form of death but in
a way that shouldn't have a negative impact on your audience. And finally, I
was pleasantly surprised that there were some great photos of an operating room.
So it was a perfect fit for this slide about operating rooms. So those are the
makeovers. Now let's compare the before and after. We started with lots of text
and 4 big points on one slide and I redesigned that into four slides with
almost the same amount of text but just designed differently with some free
icons and some animations. And then I tried it using visuals. So what do you think of
these makeovers? I actually like them both even the one that is still mostly
text. As much as I love visuals, I don't use them in every single slide. And this
is a really important topic. Hopefully engaging slides like this will help
David's audience pay attention to, understand, and use this information to
reduce medical deaths and errors. So I hope this shows you that even if you
don't want to look for visuals, even if you only have a few minutes you can
actually take a slide full of bullet points and text and make them more
engaging for your audience. I hope you enjoyed this makeover and learned some
new design ideas. If you're interested there is a free download available to
you. It includes direct links to the photos that I used in this makeover.
Yes, even that weird one if for some reason you loved it. Plus it has a list
of information design strategies I used. Now I want to hear from you. What changes
would you have made to these slides? Leave a comment below. And thanks so much
for watching. If you enjoyed this video please subscribe, give it a thumbs up,
share it on your networks, and make sure to connect with me on Twitter. I'll see
you in the next time. Bye.