The consulting industry gets a lot of criticism for just making pretty slides.
And as a PowerPoint instructor for the consulting industry,
I can tell you that there's definitely some validity to this.
But the truth is, presentation does matter.
Design, formatting, consistency, structure.
All of these things have an impact
on your audience's perception of you, your team, and your organization.
And even more important than all of that, the design of your presentation
can impact your audiences ability to understand what it is you're
trying to tell them, which at the end of the day, is your ultimate goal.
Take this slide, for example.
Sure, it's
painful to look at, but the bigger problem is that it's hard to understand.
I don't know where I should focus my attention.
I don't know what the slide is saying, and I don't know why I should even care.
As frustrating as these slides can be, they are fixable.
In another video I showed you how to build a slide from scratch.
But in this video, I'm going to show you what to do with a slide
that's already been built, especially a bad one.
I'll walk you through the exact process I use when reviewing slides,
and I'll show you how you can improve the slide.
So it's clear, effective, and hopefully a little easier to look at, too.
Coming up.
Hey, everybody.
Paul here from Analyst Academy
where we teach people how to make better presentations
based on best practices from the consulting industry.
If that sounds like something you're interested
in, make sure you check us out at the Analyst Academy dot com.
Right now we've got courses on presentation design, PowerPoint efficiency
and data visualization.
Plus, we've got a free slide
design course over on our website, so make sure you check it out.
When I review slides, I tend to ask myself the same five questions.
The first and most important of these questions is What are they trying to say?
This sounds like a pretty simple question, but you'd be surprised how many people
completely neglect this when they're building their slides.
It can be easy to get caught up in the actual slides
you're making and forget that you're trying to communicate a message.
For some slides, this might not matter, but for corporate style presentations
it usually does.
The slide needs to be able to stand alone,
so somebody who's looking at it, not during a live
presentation, can understand what it is you're trying to communicate it.
Taking a look at our slide
from the beginning, notice how there's not really a clear message here.
I know that the slide is about WhatsApp and there's some helpful data here
and here along with some bullet points to kind of explain
what they're trying to say.
But it's unclear to me their main message and this is where
the title comes into play.
If you can have a strong descriptive title, it's going to help the audience
understand clearly what you're trying to communicate.
Take a look at this slide from Accenture, for example.
Despite it being a pretty busy slide with a lot of text and numbers and data,
I can understand really quickly what it is they're trying to tell me.
And that's because of this nice descriptive title right here.
FinTech investment in the U.S.
nearly tripled in 2014.
It's clear, descriptive, and it helps summarize the slide.
So the first thing I'm going to do to improve this slide is to fix the title.
Now, anyone can look at the
slide and understand the main message I'm trying to communicate,
but the next step in this process is to make sure the content of your slide
supports that title.
An easy way to do this is to make sure your subtitles are also descriptive.
Notice how this right here just says
what's in the chart and not what I should take away from the chart.
So let's fix that by changing this to a more descriptive subtitle,
and we'll change this one as well.
Now it's a lot more clear how the content on the slide
supports the main message of the chart.
But if you really want to take your slides from good to great,
you have to start thinking about the implications of your slide.
In other words, why should this matter for the audience
that you're presenting it to?
You might sometimes hear people reference this idea by saying, What's the so what?
In other words, why does this matter?
Our site tells us that WhatsApp is the most popular messenger app
and it's got a lot of downloads per day as reflected by each of these charts.
But why does that matter for the audience?
Well, to answer that question, we need a lot more context.
But let's say hypothetically, that the company is looking for ways
to communicate with its customers, and they're exploring a range
of different social media applications and messenger apps.
So a simple way to address that would be to change the title just a little bit.
Title says Whatsapp's Expansive reach and popularity
make it an appealing option for connecting with customers.
The message of the slide hasn't really changed,
but it's just been tailored just a little bit more.
Now the audience understands not only what it is
I'm trying to communicate, but why it matters for them.
A really important
part of slide making is understanding why you're making the slide you're making.
How does it fit into the overall presentation
and how does that presentation fit into the overall project
or whatever goal you're trying to accomplish this
I help you understand the content you should put on your slide
and how you can structure, design
and format that content in a way that's best for the audience.
The next question I ask myself is What can I simplify?
Everything you put on
your slide comes at a cost, and that cost is the audience's attention.
So you want to take away things that don't really contribute
to the overall message you're trying to communicate.
And the corporate world slides already tend to be pretty text and data heavy,
so you need to make sure you're cutting out things that don't absolutely matter
for your message.
Here's a good example of this from BCG.
Again, pretty clear title right here, but notice how it's just the chart
that supports that title.
There's no need for extra text, no need for extra pictures or icons.
It's clear, simple and easy to read.
Taking a look at our WhatsApp slide, there's obviously a lot we can remove.
The first is this picture down here
now pictures can be useful on occasion, but the general rule of thumb
is to only include a picture if you need to actually show something
that the audience doesn't already understand.
In this case, the picture is just sort of decorative.
People know what it's like to use WhatsApp
so the picture doesn't need to be included.
Another thing you can do is take a hard look at the text you're using,
see if you can either simplify the text or if possible, remove the text
from your slide.
Again, this isn't always going to be possible,
especially in corporate style slides.
They need to communicate
a lot of information and in most cases be able to stand alone.
In the case of our WhatsApp slide, we have a lot of text here
that just repeats information that's already included or shown in the chart.
So we can probably just
get rid of this completely and it's not going to hurt the message.
So now we can space the slide out just a little bit better,
but we can probably take
this simplification one step further
by removing some of the elements of the chart that are just distractions.
Most of the time you can take the grid lines off your chart.
They do sometimes have a purpose, but 99 times out of 100,
they're just distractions.
So we'll take them off this column chart
and let's take them off this line chart as well.
Another thing we can do is simplify the colors of the chart.
When you have multiple colors, you want to ask yourself,
Do I need to have multiple colors?
Or Can this all be one color?
In this case, the multiple colors don't really add any insight to the chart.
I already know that these are all separate apps, so having different
colors doesn't really help me.
So at this point the slide might look a little boring,
but looking at the details of the slide, we haven't really taken away
any critical information.
It's all still there.
It's just a little bit easier to cut through the noise.
The next question I like to ask myself is How can I show this better?
This applies to pretty much every aspect of your slide.
If you have some text, is there a way you can visualize that
to make it a little bit easier to understand?
Or if you have a chart, is there a better way to display that information?
Can you make the chart simpler?
Remember, your goal isn't to impress your audience, it's to help them
understand your message and sometimes complicated charts get in the way of that.
An important part of slide making is making
sure your charts match the message you're trying to communicate.
This is something we've explored in other videos, like
in the Fixing Data, Heavy Slides, video.
It's also something that we cover in great detail in our data visualization course.
So if you haven't already, make sure you check that out.
Taking a look at our What's Up slide, we've got two pretty simple charts,
a line chart on the right and a column chart on the left.
So let's take each of these one by one.
A line chart is best when you're trying to connect data over time, and that's
because there's a line that connects all of these data points together.
So it's good for showing trends or patterns or exceptions in the data.
But in this case, you're not expressing data.
Over time, this just happens to be ordered from lowest to highest.
So really there's no trend here.
Instead, what we're trying to do is just compare
the number of downloads between each of these different apps.
So much better chart.
Here would be a column chart.
So now we have two column charts.
But an even better choice would be to use a bar chart.
Column charts and bar charts
tend to serve more or less the same purpose,
but there are some reasons why you'd want to use a column chart over a bar chart
or a bar chart over a column chart for one column.
Charts are good when you're trying to express data over time.
That's because our brains naturally read things from left to right
here.
We're not expressing data over time.
These are just distinct categories that in theory could be placed in any order.
But by putting them in a column chart like this, similar to our line chart,
it almost looks like we're trying to show a trend, but there's no trend here.
Another reason why you might want to use a bar chart instead of a column chart
is because the labels tend to fit a little bit better with a bar chart.
Notice how these labels are all kind of scrunched together?
Yes, we could turn them to the side,
but that sort of hurts the readability of the labels.
And the final reason is when you have space constraints,
if you're trying to show two charts side by side on a slide
with these dimensions, usually you're better off with the bar chart.
So let's convert this to a bar chart
and notice how these charts nicely fill out the space.
There's plenty of room for the labels and the audiences
in trying to read it from left to right.
The next thing to ask is what grabs my audience's attention.
Even after you've removed the clutter of your slide, it's important to think about
what your audience is going to focus on because the audience has limited
attention.
So you need to help them understand the key insights of this slide.
Here's a good example of this from Deloitte.
The slide itself is pretty simple, but they've done some important things
here to help the audience focus their attention.
They've used color to help us focus on this bar right here
and shading to help us focus on this row in this column.
And these actually connect very well with the message
listed in the title.
Taking a look at our What's Up slide, there's a few things
we can do to help the audience focus a little bit.
The first is to draw attention to the title.
It's already pretty big and bold, so that helps.
But we also want to create some space
right here to help separate it from the main content of the slide.
So we can do that by moving these down
and adding a simple line underneath the title.
Ideally, you want your audience to focus on the title first,
then move to the subtitles, then move to the content of the slide.
And the reason behind this is related to the pyramid principle, where you want
to communicate your main idea first, then your supporting ideas.
So we're going to visually design our slide to help them do that.
We've already got a big title.
Now we can improve the subtitles of the slide.
These are now going to
track just a little bit more attention than they did before.
But then the third thing we can do is actually improve the charts.
Right now, they're all one color, but what we really want
our audience to focus on is this bar right here in this bar
right here, so we can use color to help us do that.
Now, it's
going to be much easier for the audience to focus on what we want them to focus on,
which is going to help them understand the overall message of the slide.
The final question I like to ask myself is what looks intentional
when you're formatting?
You want to avoid randomness.
Everything should have a purpose.
Why did you choose this color?
Why are these two objects aligned?
Why is this font size look like this?
If you get sloppy with these kind of things,
it can come across as unprofessional and even worse.
Distracting is a pretty good example of a well formatted slide from strategy,
and everything on this slide looks intentional.
Each of the boxes are all perfectly aligned,
the subtitles are all perfectly aligned, and notice even how the color
gets increasingly darker as you get to later stages.
Notice also how they use the consistent red color.
There's no point in using different colors if the colors themselves
don't mean anything.
So what this leads to is a fairly distraction.
Free slide
returning to our What's Up slide?
There's a few different things we can do.
The first, and you may or may not have noticed,
this is we need to change the font type for our title.
It's completely different than the rest of the text on the slide.
Then the next thing we need to do is make the font sizes consistent.
Notice how right here
they're pretty small, but right here they're just a little bit bigger.
We need to make these the same size.
The next thing we need to do is align the different objects on our slide.
When you align two things together, you connect them logically.
So these two subtitles, for example, need to be aligned
to each other.
Then the next thing we can do is change the colors on our slide.
The blue is a fine color and provides a nice contrast,
but the problem is it's the default PowerPoint blue
and where possible you want to avoid the default PowerPoint colors
because it can just come across just a tiny bit sloppy here.
It doesn't really look that bad, but we can make this slide
just a little bit better by changing this to a different color.
And the
final thing to do is add a footnote to our slide
by asking these five pretty simple questions.
We've managed to make our slide a whole lot better.
We first tried to understand what the slide was saying.
Then we looked into what we could simplify on the slide,
we found ways to show the information better.
We help the audience focus their attention,
and we made sure each of the elements on our slide were intentional.
The result is a slide that's not only better looking,
but it's much more effective.
All right.
That's going to do it for today's video.
I hope you found it useful and that it helps you in your own slide making.
If you're looking for more advanced instruction,
make sure you check out our courses over at the Analysts Academy dot com.
Thanks for watching.