You’re an expert in your field and you’ve gathered all the right info. Now you’ve moved things around, played with fonts and maybe adjusted the colours a few times.
So why does the presentation still feel so… well, hard to follow?
The problem may not be the information you’re presenting. It could be the way it’s being presented.
A great presentation helps your viewer understand what the important points are and what they should be taking away from the experience. When the structure isn’t working, even good info can be difficult to absorb.
Read on to learn a few things that can get in the way.
There’s too much information on each slide.
This is the most common problem I see when working with clients.
When you know a subject well, it’s tempting to squeeze everything about a topic onto a single slide. The trouble is, your audience has to read, listen and process all of that information at the same time. Oftentimes, you can lose an audience if they are busy reading while you are discussing.
The slide should support what you are saying with broad points or overarching definitions. If a slide is too packed with info, your audience can have difficulty figuring out what to look at. Consider breaking apart a too-full slide into 2–3 simpler slides.
Everything is competing for attention.
If everything is big, bold or colourful, then every item has the same perceived importance.
A good presentation will create visual hierarchy. That is just a fancy way of saying your audience can take a quick look and understand “What is the main point?” and then easily move to the information that supports that point.
So decide: what do I want people to know this slide is about first?
That is the item that is most important. The other information backs it up.
You’ve lost the plot.
A presentation can have perfectly good slides and still feel confusing as a whole.
Why is that? Your slides should have a natural flow together.
- Where are we starting?
- What does the audience need to understand first?
- What comes next?
- Why does this information matter?
- What should they know or do by the end?
If the presentation jumps from one subject to another without a clear connection, your audience is trying to mentally arrange it all themselves.
A little structure can make a huge difference.
The slides all look the same.
If every slide has the exact same arrangement, it can become tedious and your audience might start wondering, “Geez, how much more is there?”
It can also make different types of information feel equally important.
Don’t feel like your slides need to be identical. A consistent visual style can still have enough variety to help the audience understand what kind of information they’re looking at.
The design isn’t helping to explain the content.
Is your design helping to explain the content?
- A complicated process might be easier to understand as a diagram.
- A comparison might work better as a simple visual side-by-side.
- A statistic might deserve to be much larger instead of being buried in a paragraph.
- A timeline probably doesn’t need to be presented as five sentences in a row.
Good presentation design isn’t about decorating information. It’s about finding a clearer way to communicate it.
Looks good up close, how about from far away?
This one is easy to overlook when you’re designing on your computer.
Something can look perfectly readable on your monitor and become much harder to read when it’s projected onto a screen or viewed in a meeting room.
Tiny text and charts, light font colours on light or busy backgrounds can all cause problems. A slide that is difficult to read is distracting and, more often than not, will cause your audience to shut down.
Professional Presentations aren’t just pretty.
A presentation can have beautiful colours, polished graphics and lovely typography and still be difficult to understand. The real goal is communication.
“Is this presentation easy to understand?”
Sometimes that means simplifying, reorganizing or turning a bunch word salad into a visual.
Don’t let your presentation distract from your goals. Your slides should complement your knowledge and reflect the care that you put into your work.
Need a fresh set of eyes?
Honeybird Creative’s goal is to make presentations easier to understand, easier to follow and more professional from beginning to end.