io9
Harvard cognitive scientist Stephen M. Kosslyn, who studies how brains process images, wants to improve the world with his cutting-edge research. And he's starting with four ways to make your PowerPoint presentations more human brain-compliant. This morning at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Boston, Kosslyn spoke in a symposium devoted the visualization of data, explaining how breakthroughs in cognitive science have revealed the best way to present information in the PowerPoint format. It was one of the most interesting examples of applied science I've ever seen.
Jumping off from ideas he raises in his recent book, Clear and to the Point, Kosslyn explained that the four rules of PowerPoint are: The Goldilocks Rule, The Rudolph Rule, The Rule of Four, and the Birds of a Feather Rule. Here's how they work.
The Goldilocks Rule refers to presenting the "just right" amount of data. Never include more information than your audience needs in a visual image. As an example, Kosslyn showed two graphs of real estate prices over time. One included ten different numbers, one for each year. The other included two numbers: a peak price, and the current price. For the purposes of a presentation about today's prices relative to peak price, those numbers were the only ones necessary.
The Rudolph Rule refers to simple ways you can make information stand out and guide your audience to important details — the way Rudolph the reindeer's red nose stood out from the other reindeers' and led them. If you're presenting a piece of relevant data in a list, why not make the data of interest a different color from the list? Or circle it in red? "The human brain is a difference detector," Kosslyn noted. The eye is immediately drawn to any object that looks different in an image, whether that's due to color, size, or separation from a group. He showed us a pizza with one piece pulled out slightly, noting that our eyes would immediately go to the piece that was pulled out (which was true). Even small differences guide your audience to what's important.
The Rule of Four is a simple but powerful tool that grows out of the fact that the brain can generally hold only four pieces of visual information simultaneously. So don't ever present your audience with more than four things at once. This is a really important piece of information for people who tend to pack their PowerPoint slides with dense reams of data. Never give more than four pieces of information at once. It's not that people can't think beyond four ideas — it's that when we take in the visual information on a slide we start to get overwhelmed when we reach four items.
The Birds of a Feather Rule is another good rule for how to organize information when you want to show things in groups. "We think of things in groups when they look similar or in proximity to each other," Kosslyn pointed out. Translation into PowerPoint? If you want to indicate to your audience that five things belong in a group, make them similar by giving them the same color or shape. Or group them very close together. This sounds basic, but it often means taking your data apart and reorganizing it. Kosslyn's co-panelist, Stanford psychologist Barbara Tversky, explained that one of the fundamental principles of data visualization is, ironically, misrepresentation in order to get at the truth.
Even these goofy names for each rule of PowerPoint follow a principle from cognitive science: it's always easier to remember an unfamiliar idea if it's named after something familiar.
Comments
I knew there was a reason that cognitive scientists get paid for things.
@braak: Yeah. Overpaid in this case. I detest Powerpoint and all it stands for. Nothing makes a meeting more boring than an interminable presentation. Just email the file and let e read it at my leisure.
So, wait....cognitive science is just figuring this stuff out? These are the sorts of things graphic designers and advertising students learn as freshmen. I hate to go all "That's not sci-fi!" on you, Annalee, but...that's not sci-fi!
:-)
Rule 4: Never make or use powerpoint presentations.
Rule 5: Meetings are a giant waste of time.
-Kle.
@zeppelined: I'm pretty sure using cognitive science to design PowerPoint presentations is scifi.
Zeroth rule - don't read out what's on the slide
I don't know this is kind of common sense. If you need a cognitive scientist to tell you to change a couple colors or stray from having 20 things on screen then I doubt you have anything worth bringing to a presentation.
@teehoi: I think what was interesting about the presentation was that he showed that these "common sense" ideas (which few people follow in their powerpoint presentations, BTW) have a basis in fundamental ways that the brain works.
I personally already knew the stuff this great researcher just pointed out, like many computer science student or related field.
The 10/20/30 rule by Guy Kawasaki is a much better one.
+ Watch video
10 slides
20 minutes
30 point font minimum (text size)
Nice blog anyway ;)
@zeppelined: Yeah this Design 101 (hello, hierarchy of information!), tarted up in science drag.
"Even small differences guide your audiencfe to what's important."
Kinda like grammar mistakes? ;)
@reubencox: No, kinda like typos. Thanks.
Cool. I already do this, but with Keynote.
@Ben Zvan: I always suspected that Keynote might be more brain-compliant. Personally I use Open Office "presentation." Which is sorta brain-compliant.
I like Edward Tufte: [www.edwardtufte.com]
@MercuryPDX: Amen. Tufte explained much of this 6 years ago. Kosslyn does add valuable insight and data.
PowerPoint keeps evolving. Presenters keep devolving.
[www.edwardtufte.com]
This was worth the $7.
@hakubak: If you ever get the opportunity, make it a point to attend one of his seminars.
I went to one in '98 and loved it. A coworker went to one last year and also raved about it.
The 'Rule of Four' is especially dubious. Any experimental results that have led to a number that low have been based on images that are unrelated. Most slides have information that is related to other information on the slide. So sure: have one idea on that slide, but don't feel bad if you have a tableau of 9 images (or whatever) that can coherently present that idea.
The problem with a Tufte seminar is that someone reviewing your presentation prior to your giving it (if you have to use PPT even after he says it's, er, not optimal) is that someone is going to edit your work. The result will be the same homogenized crap - "more of this, more of that" - that you audience groans over.
Find ways of communicating your point while subverting the methodology to get the audience on your side. Laughter is more engaging than focusing on a numbing chair.
Had a CO in the service who would slump over in his chair after the umpteenth slide and claim it was "Death by Powerpoint." I did a presentation with a marker and a flip chart, got an "attaboy" and a three day weekend.
PowerPoint can be really effective. The problem is that the business drones have completely taken it over.
Your basic middle management type figures that because they can learn how to make a slide in a few minutes, any idiot can create an effective presentation in a couple of hours. So a presentation that might be better made another way gets PP'ed, and the responsibility gets handed to the most junior person in the office on top of their regular work.
Because everybody's used to lousy PowerPoint, nobody delivers the much-needed slap-down for a job badly-done. And yet another a project that depended on letting decision-makers know how important it was disappears into the grey goo of a hundred less vital ones that used the same default settings and the same bullet point lists with different data and different titles plugged in.
I saw three of these bloody things this past week and I can't recall a single thing about any of them.
Yeah, I know -and agree - that this appears to be another repackaging of the basic rules of Powerpoint(ing?). BUT, what it really does is exactly what Koslyn wants you to do: Take apart and reconfigure your info to make your message effective. Get the audience to do the work, not you.
I usually hate this kind of pseudo-MBA tripe, but Koslyn didn't just say "do this," he did a nice job explaining why you need to do it.
I agree with counterglow's comments (two up) delegation of presentation preparation to the office junior means that the manager's audiences have sub-optimal experiences.
Everyone who is fed up with boring presentations should watch the overview video on Aspire Communications' website [www.aspirecommunications.com.] This guy makes PowerPoint presentations into visually interactive experiences for the audience that, I think, deal with the objections most people have to conventional linear presentations.
I learned this stuff when I took graphic design, especially in typography class.
Count the amount of words on any well designed material with copy, and you will see that the lines averages close to 13 words across, including this blogs, anything above that becomes hard to read.
colour theory is another intresting subject.
To all the people saying "Don't use powerpoint" ... why? You might as well say "Don't use highlighters" or "Don't take notes in lecture class". The slides are a reinforcement of what's being said. If you can get the entire meaning of the talk from the slides, that's a problem with the speaker, not Powerpoint. You would be hard pressed to give any data-driven presentation without some sort of visual aid. If you use something dated like transparencies or projection of your desktop, you're convincing your audience that your grasp of technology is minimal, which will be a detriment to your pitch.
As for Keynote, I've tried both, and as much as hate to admit it, I have to give this one to Microsoft. Keynote may be prettier, but the workflow involve in creating slides is more difficult. To give a simple example, double-clicking the slide in PP creates a default text box -- extraordinarily handy. You can't do that in Keynote. The drawing tools are more feature rich, but more difficult to use than PP's. The Office 2004 palette is a little more intuitively arranged than Keynote's inspector. Keynote has fewer keyboard shortcuts for common tasks (there are tons, but none for really common things like "Text box". I'd love for someone to tell why me I'm wrong, by the way.
Comment on How Cognitive Science Can Improve Your PowerPoint Presentations I'd like to address some of the visibility issues brought up. I go back to the days of using 35mm slides (and before). The best rule for those was to make sure that you could read the slide held at arms length without any magnification. If you couldn't, the font was too small. (That comes close to what you see in Slide Sorter with Powerpoint on a normal monitor screen- if you can't read them in that format, the font may be too small) This also applies to data lines on charts. If they're not bold/thick enough, they're both hard to see and to tell one line from another, especially if (for whatever reason) the figure is in black and white. In color, it's best to use a complimentary color wheel to help make each line stand out - try yellow, cyan and magenta, they really pop. If a histogram or pie chart is more appropriate, use that instead. They're usually easier to read/comprehend, unless your data precludes that type. Again, overcrowding a 'slide' is the biggest no-no. I once saw a black and white chart with 40 (!!!) curves on it. To make it worse, it was in black and white, using dots, dashes etc. to show each. The legend alone took up almost one third of the slide, and even then it was impossible to read from the back of the room. I had one of those bosses who liked to put 'War & Peace' length text on a single slide. I had to fight to abbreviate his content, just so it could be seen when projected. Another space eater is putting some kind of company logo, along with a header or footer with repetitive information on each slide. Removing those can give you more space for enlarging your text. After doing manual cut-and-paste for overheads or photographing slide setups, or, learning arcane programming languages (for 35mm slide generators), both of which seemed to take forever and sometimes require external services/personnel, Powerpoint is much quicker and user-friendly. Is it the best ever? For now, it's convenient, until something better comes along.
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