At this year’s DIA 2019 Global Annual Meeting, SlideSource’s Bob Befus, along with Frank Carillo, CEO of ECG Healthcare, gave a session entitled Presentations as Listeners Like Them: How to Tailor Messaging.
The presentation reviewed Richard E. Mayer’s Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning and outlined, with useful examples, three techniques for reducing the audience’s cognitive load. These techniques, when applied to content during a presentation’s creation, can make it easier to process and more likely to stick in the audience’s memory. They are:
- Designing to help your audience focus on a slide’s content
- Not overloading the visual and auditory channels
- Leveraging space and time contiguity (when words and corresponding pictures are near each other, the audience can better hold them in working memory at the same time, and when narration and images are presented at the same time the audience can make better connections between verbal and visual representations)
More details can be found in Mayer’s classic Multimedia Learning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0-521-78749-9).
But let’s face it, most of us won’t look at every single option that’s on the menu searching for something that will satisfy the exact craving we have at that exact moment. Usually, we’re too hungry or in too much of a hurry or just jump to the old, tried and true choice even if it’s not exactly what we’re looking for. A lot of servers will tell you that regular customers usually only order one of a small handful of favorites and rarely try anything new.
At some point the “bug’s†starter went bad, so turning the key no longer started the engine. Being 17, all my extra cash and spare time was earmarked for far more import things so I adapted and made do because I still had places I needed to go and things I needed to do.
Controlling space is one of easiest and most effective ways you have of making your slides easier to read and comprehend.
To instantly make slides like this much more readable, simply increase the space between the top-level bullets and tighten up the spacing of the sub-bullets beneath each one so there is a clearly defined relationship that can be understood at first glance. Information that is of primary importance is clearly differentiated and it’s easier to skim over the supporting material in order to quickly get the big picture. (Quick additional hint: If you don’t have enough room to add this sort of additional space, you probably have too much on the slide and are courting death by bullet point.)
Let’s be honest. If you’ve spent any time at all working with PowerPoint, you know what it’s like to misplace a really important slide or presentation. Sometimes you can’t remember where you saved it. Sometimes you lost the thumb drive it was saved on. Sometimes you have the file but the slide you need was deleted or changed beyond recognition and you don’t have a backup.
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