The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method

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.