Creative Diagram Contest 2012 -
Whether you consider yourself a presentation designer or not, the idea of updating and making slides more visual is something we could all benefit from. I’m sure you have some tired old slides that have been laying around the slide deck for a long time now. Admit it, you have some of those slides full of bullet points, aimed at your unsuspecting (or sadly maybe they are expecting it) audience.
Take one of your old slides and give it a makeover and you could win some cool prizes … or at least improve your next presentation.
I haven’t had a chance to really put this new guy through its paces yet but it looks encouraging. Infographics are certainly all the rage these days and with good reason. Condensing data into consumable chunks makes for a very healthy mental snack. I’ll be watching this one to see how things progress. If you want to try it out for yourself, just click through and start dragging, dropping, editing and sharing.
What would a historian find about us 50 years from now? -
I was just having this discussion with a friend recently. As we put more and more of our lives online, what will remain if those digital traces are gone or inaccessible. Remember floppy diskettes? Tons of data was left in limbo. CDs? Did your latest laptop even come with a CD drive? Could it read the old ones?
What is being lost in the march forward with technology. As this article points out: “NASA, for example has lost data from its earlier moon missions because the machines used to read the data were scrapped.”
“The United States, which for generations led the world in college degree completion, now ranks 16th in the world in completion rates for 25- to 34-year-olds. At the very time that global competitiveness depends on a well-educated citizenry, we find ourselves on a losing ground in relative educational attainment. Here is the opportunity: By 2018, nearly two thirds of all American jobs will require a postsecondary certificate or degree. The most recent analyses indicate that the United States has been underproducing graduates with postdecondary skills since at least 1980, in the process contributing substantially to income inequality. Community colleges have a crucial role to play in seizing this opportunity. If this nation can add 20 million postsecondary-educated workers to its workforce over the next 15 years, income inequality will decline substantially, reversing the decline of the middle class.” — Reclaiming the American Dream: A report from the 21st-Century Commission on the Future of Community Colleges.
Emoticons coming full circle -
For decades now, yeah it’s been that long, people have been adding emoticons to their messages as a way of adding some personality and clarity of tone. Now people will have the opportunity to emoticon themselves.
While the linked article by the Temkin Group, a customer experience research and consulting group, is focused more on brand loyalty and corporate customers, I think they point of there being a design deficiency applies to many other areas, including education. As we are designing particularly distance education courseware, this might be something to consider. There are three components: functional, accessible, and emotional to any user experience.
Why is design deficiency so widespread? Because companies convince themselves that they’re taking care of customers when they painstakingly define and measure themselves against meeting functional requirements. What this left brain centric approach misses is that functional needs represent only one of three components of an experience. Experiences are also made up of three components, so accessible and emotional components are often ignored.
Crappy fonts, better recall? -
While the HBR article is intriguing I have to say the idea of using crappy fonts makes me a little sad. But I can’t argue with science. And besides the issues of making people read slower and the disfluency causes a level of mental struggle required for learning, there are a few other reasons I can think of that they may have achieved these results.
The brain seeks out novelty. It likes new and different things. It likes to be surprised so the use of an unexpected or unusual font could certainly trigger some interest. Also the brain tends to remember incongruity over repetition so I’d be curious to see if selective usage of “crappy” fonts for key points or callouts might spark better retention of information.
OK, I have to go take some deep breaths and get some chamomile tea for some designer friends who are no doubt huddled in a corner rocking at the thought of using “crappy” fonts.
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Five Second Rule ... No Not That One -
Many of us have done the oops I dropped that [fill in food item here] and invoked the “five second rule” when deciding whether to toss it in the trash or toss in our munch-holes. But the five second rule that the linked article refers to has to do with visual clarity not vittles.
Vinod Khosla has likely been subjected to more presentations than most of us. So he knows a lot about what works, and what doesn’t. What persuades and what doesn’t. What gets the message across effectively and what doesn’t. And he has a five second rule about presentation slides. If you can’t put the slide up for five seconds and then take it down and have the audience understand the message, it’s not a good slide.
Despite many people suggesting that less is more, slides often are still hopelessly cluttered. The problem, and Jerry Weissman points out is that:
Whenever an image appears on any screen, the eyes of every member of every audience reflexively move to the screen to process the new image. The denser the image, the more processing the audiences need. At that very moment, they stop listening to the presenter. Nevertheless, most presenters continue speaking, further compounding the processing task. As a result, the audience shuts down. Game over.
Now I know some of you are going to agree with one of the article’s commenters who said you should know your audience and understand that technical groups like engineers won’t take you seriously if the slides aren’t complex enough. Really? I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone ever told Steve Jobs that his slides were too simplistic.
People continue to confuse the purpose of the various pieces of a presentation. There is nothing saying you can’t supply technical specs, complex diagrams, detailed information and the like in a separate document. You could even put a link to the article in your presentation, or a QR code or whatever, but you don’t need to put the clutter onscreen. The slides are a backdrop to you, the presenter. That doesn’t mean that they can’t also be stars of the show. Sometimes they should be the focal point. But they shouldn’t be the storage closet that spills out every time you open the door.
If only all teachers were like this or at least read it -
I am reblogging this because it’s the closest I’ll get to having had Jann aka mathcat345 as my math teacher. So much wisdom and fun. Yeah, math can be fun, just read this.
I was asked what was my favorite part of the job and my least favorite part of the job, and realized I couldn’t fit my answer into a private reply. I’ll use the ever popular bullets and list the good stuff first, as the bad stuff can pretty well be encompassed in one or two bullets.
- My most…
