The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method

Visualization Taxonomies

With the explosion of interest in information visualization, I find taxonomies of visualization approaches to be very useful in organizing knowledge and facilitating use of different visualization approaches.

The Periodic Table of Visualization Methods, hosted by the impressive Swiss Visual Literacy project, is the most comprehensive visualization taxonomy I have seen.  It divides visualizations into Data, Information, Concept, Strategy, Metaphor, and Compound Visualizations.  Each of these is then classified as a process or structure visualization, and further subdivided into whether they show detail, overview, or detail and overview, and whether they support convergent or divergent thinking. 

Dan Roam's Visual Thinking Codex, from his delightful book The Back of the Napkin, strikes an excellent balance between simplicity and comprehensiveness.  The Codex can be found on p. 141 of Dan's book.  With his permission, I have reproduced it here (although I highly recommend that you get a copy of the book).

Dan Roam
THE BACK OF THE NAPKIN
Copyright 2008 Portfolio
Available at www.Amazon.com 

The vertical axis is organized approximately around the intuitive structure of who/what/where etc., while the horizontal axis uses Dan's SQVID structure: a series of five contrasts that help you define the focus of your visualization: simple vs. elaborate, quality vs. quantity, vision vs. execution, individual attributes vs. comparison, and delta (change) vs. status quo.  

My own contribution to this is the Chart Chooser graphic, which some of you have seen.  (Which is also available in Japanese and Portuguese, courtesy of a couple of readers of this blog, and which the good folks at Juice Analytics turned into a small online application, available at www.ChartChooser.com) 

The PowerPoint Election: What the Science Would Say

Unfortunately for American voters, the three, now two, leading presidential candidates do not offer any real differences among them - when it comes to their PowerPoint presentations.  All three tend to make similar mistakes, violating what we know about the Science of Effective Presentations.  

Here are three: a very polished presentation on John McCain by his campaign manager, Rick Davis, a rougher-looking presentation by David Plouffe on Barak Obama, and Hilary Clinton's Winning in the Tough Districts.

Design mistakes that these presentations make include:

- Using transitions between slides.  Research indicates that this actually hurts communication.

- Providing lists of things instead of telling a story.  We know from research that stories are more memorable than lists

- Using 3D effects in graphs.  3D effects require more effort to comprehend than two dimensions.  

The one good thing that all three do is provide details.  Research supports the idea that details build credibility.  Instead of just abstract notions, these presentations provide specifics: electoral college votes, poll data by state, sometimes even down to the county level, number of campaign head office employees (Obama 800, McCain 250).  

That said, as a voter I think I would prefer to see details on their proposed policy initiatives instead of all this polling information; knowing what others think is not really going to help me decide how to vote.  

Good and bad career visibility

(Photo by Photo Mojo--some right reserved)

Today's workshop brought up another interesting question about FYI presentations.  One participant mentioned how her manager would sometimes tell her she needs more visibility among senior management, and then have her deliver some FYI presentation to them.

The problem with this is that there is no such thing as "neutral" visibility.  If people are getting to know you, such knowledge cannot be separated from what they think of you.  So if all they know of you is that you present FYI presentations, they will think of you as low value-add kind of person.  Better no visibility than that kind of visibility. 

A good analogy is with advertising.  Many people still persist in thinking of awareness-building as something that you do separately from attitude change: first we build awareness, then we create interest, etc.  (the old AIDA model: awareness, interest, desire, action). And yet, as Tim Ambler and Demetrios Vakratsas demonstrated in their ground-breaking Journal of Marketing article on this topic, almost 10 years ago, there is really no such thing as neutral awareness.  When you become aware of something, at the very same time your attitudes towards it are already being formed.  

If someone wants to give you an opportunity for more visibility, make sure that it is good visibility.  Make sure that you will be perceived as someone who can make a contribution to the business: give a presentation that solves an important problem for them.  

Don't ever give an FYI presentation

An interesting question came up yesterday in the Extreme Presentation workshop here at Microsoft. Should you ever give a purely informational presentation, an FYI presentation?

In the workshop I argue that every presentation should be focused on helping to solve a problem that your audience has (not a problem that you have - that would be one of the seven deadly presentation mistakes). Everyone is very busy, everyone has problems.  If you're not helping them solve one of their problems, then why should they spend time listening to you?  

Here's why you should never give an FYI presentation: either the information you are presenting will help your audience solve a problem--in which case you are helping solve a problem, and your presentation is not merely FYI--or else it is not, in which case why do they need the information?  

Ask yourself: why does the audience need the information I am going to present to them?  What does it allow them to do?  Could they do this without my information?  If so, would my information allow them to do it better, faster, cheaper?  Whatever it is that they could not do without your information, this is the problem that your presentation is helping to solve.  

If there is nothing different that they could do once they have your information, then you probably should not be giving the presentation.

Breaking Murphy's Law

The focus of this blog is on designing presentations, not on delivering them. In general I find that poor presentation design can cripple even the best delivery, while on the contrary, excellent design can survive poor delivery. That said, the ideal presentation has of course both excellent design and excellent delivery.

Mr. Murphy is alive and well and his law is one of the biggest threats to excellent presentation delivery. In all the presentations I give and workshops I run, it is rare day where everything runs smoothly. The batteries on the wireless mike are dead, and there are no spares available; the AV jack to my laptop is not in fact connected to the projector; the podium is right in front of the screen, with cables well taped to the ground so we cannot move it easily. Etc., etc. A bit of extra advance preparation can avoid many of these things.

This is why I was delighted to find out that Lee Potts, presentation guru and co-founder of a blog I followed closely in its heyday, Visual Being, has started a new blog on exactly this topic, called Breaking Murphy's Law. I look forward to following it and learning more from Lee.

PowerPoint Research - The Science of Effective Presentation

Many people are aware of psychologist Richard E. Mayer's multimedia research, and its applicability to presentation design. It is very good and relevant work. There is also much additional relevant research that is unfortunately not as well know, including research in advertising, communication, consumer behavior, computer science, and even law. Not all of this is explicitly about PowerPoint--in fact the majority of it is not--but it tells us a lot about how people interact with and are persuaded by presentation visuals and argument.

I have been compiling and analyzing this research for the past couple of years, and I will cover over 200 studies in my forthcoming book. In the meantime, if you'd like to get a preview, the bibliography in my recent column on evidence-based presentation design includes 40 of these studies.

Evidence-Based Presentation Design

I have been a fan of the work of Prof. Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford for many years. I particularly like his Evidence-Based Management approach. Prof. Pfeffer recently asked me to write a column on Evidence-Based Presentation Design for his website. Here it is.

Evidence-Based Presentation Design. It’s ironic: practicing Evidence- Based Management often involves presenting evidence, and yet the way we present that evidence frequently itself violates other evidence, evidence about effective presentation design.

Beliefs that only 7% of your message is in what you say and the rest is non-verbal, for example, or that each slide should contain seven bullets of seven words each, are based either on a faulty misreading of the empirical research or are directly contradicted by the research.

Fortunately, there is ample evidence—from research in communications, psychology, marketing, education, multimedia computing, and law—that can be used to establish design guidelines for effective presentations. ... Read the rest at the Evidence-Based Management website.

How to combat fear of public speaking using Conference Room style presentations

With conference room style presentations, much of the time your audience is looking down at your handout rather than up at your projected slides--and you.  It makes a big difference.

Presentation Wisdom - Search Engine

Here's an idea: what if there were a search engine that covered all the best presentation sites, so that you could look up any presentation topic by searching all those sites simultaneously.

I used Google Custom Search, currently in beta, to create the Presentation Wisdom search engine, and primed it with the following sites:

http://www.extremepresentation.typepad.com/*
http://www.presentationzen.com/*
http://sixminutes.dlugan.com/*
http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/*
http://www.edwardtufte.com/*
http://www.indezine.com/blog/*
http://communicationnation.blogspot.com/*
http://perceptualedge.com/blog/*
http://talk.presentationsroundtable.com/*
http://www.curved-vision.co.uk/presentation-skills-blog/*

Try it: Presentation Wisdom.

I'm open to suggestions for additional sites.

More good stuff from Presentation Zen - the book

Here are some more snippets I found interesting in Garr Reynolds’ book:

“Concreteness: Use natural speech and give real examples with real things, not abstractions.” (p. 77)

“If you feel tempted to use a picture of two hands shaking in front of a globe, put the pencil down, step away from the desk, and think about taking a vacation or investigating aromatherapy”[!]—Nancy Duarte (p. 94)

Signal to Noise Ratio: “the ratio of relevant to irrelevant elements or information in a slide or other display. The goal is to have the hightest signal-to-noise ratio possible in your slides.” (p. 122)

Several examples of excellent Ballroom style presentations (p. 166-178)