Presenting
Page 5
One writing process I use is "stop-jot-share."
Similar to turn-and-talk, you lecture or present your material for a short period of time (around ten minutes). Then, stop. Ask students to jot down everything they remember (or summarize the material discussed). Finally, have students share their responses with a partner and fill in any missing gaps.
Here's stop-jot-share in action:
"OK, class, I just spent the last ten minutes going over the major differences between impressionism and modernism. Let's stop for a minute. Take this time now to summarize the most important points in a paragraph. I'll give you two minutes."
After students have finished, say, "Now, turn to someone next to you and read what you wrote. When both sides are done, I want you to plug in any gaps in your own notes."
Simply put, stop-jot-share takes turn-and-talk to the next level.30
Tapping (and Clicking). So far, I've discussed involving students through talking and through writing. The third idea to prompt whole-class involvement is through technology. Online tools like Quizlet (quizlet.com), Pear Deck (peardeck. com), and Kahoot! (kahoot.com) get students to respond using their digital devices (i.e., smartphones, tablets, or laptops). It's a fun, low-stakes way to assess students' understanding periodically and regularly.
Let's say during my presentation I described the differences between fact, opinion, belief, and assumption. I want to check in on students and assess their understanding. Using Pear Deck, for instance, I can pose a question on the overhead, such as:
"Breakfast is the most important meal of the day." What kind of statement is this?
Students see four options on their device and choose one by tapping (on their smartphone or tablet) or clicking (on their laptop). Responses can then be projected, as shown below:
Think of the resulting conversation. Students can defend their choices, build off each other's ideas—I can even address misconceptions on the spot (as opposed to waiting for students to make the same mistakes on a midterm exam). Think about how much more they would appreciate this.
Pear Deck, as well as other online assessment tools,31 offers options for open-ended responses, polls (see below for example), and even drawings, which make interactions more fun.32
Polling students with a scatterplot, as shown here using Pear Deck, can serve as a starting point for discussion
Other applications—like Padlet (padlet.com) and Flipgrid (flipgrid.com)—give students a chance to create content and share it with the class, rather than just answer quiz-type questions.
For instance, during one of my classes in mathematics methodology (which trains childhood-education majors to teach math), undergraduate students divide circles into equivalent portions freehand. This helps them experience the struggles children face understanding the concept of fractions and equal parts. Students then post their drawings—their best and worst ones—on the Padlet "wall" (see screenshot).
Tools like Padlet, above, get everyone to post their ideas
Imagine the possibilities. Aside from drawings, students could also post written responses, images, videos, and even audio recordings. Talk about full-class participation and engagement!
The key is to involve audiences at very specific times while presenting. That's why the outline template from Chapter 2 included diagonal boxes as part of the planning phase.
Here's a list of ideas to involve your audience (some of which I already discussed), along with descriptions or suggestions on the right. All of them meet the gold standard for involvement: 100 percent audience participation.
PRESENTING. THE BOTTOM LINE
When planning the content part of your presentation, think about involving every single audience member in some way. That's the gold standard for participation. The rules shouldn't change, even for conference presentations. Asking attendees to raise their hands for an informal survey or dividing into small groups to discuss their thoughts about a topic and then sharing with the rest of the audience (much as students would in a turn-and-talk exercise) can liven any presentation. Even if it's focused on research.
26 See Bunce, Flens, and Neiles (2010)
27 See Middendorf & Kalish (1996)
28 For more, see for instance Brown et al. (2014), Cranney et al. (2009), or McDermott et al. (2014)
29 Research in various fields supports this; see, for instance, Eagan et al. (2014), Stains et al. (2018), and Watts & Schaur (2011).
30 For details on stop-jot-share, see https://normaneng.org/introducing-stop-jot-share/ (Eng, 2018, April 23)
31 Popular tools to assess and engage audiences (some of which are mentioned in this chapter) include Poll Everywhere (polleverywhere.com), Mentimeter (mentimeter.com), Flipgrid (flipgrid.com), Kahoot! (kahoot.com), Quizlet (quizlet.com), Padlet (padlet.com), and Pear Deck (peardeck.com).
32 While free for basic features, these tools may charge for premium features
05
YOUR DESIGN
KEY INSIGHT:
CONSIDER THE "USER EXPERIENCE" (UX)
For this book, I almost chose the following cover design:
It's simple, elegant, and bold—as if it sprang from the pages of Communication Arts or IDN Magazine. Compared with the other options, this cover stood out.
But experience has taught me to always test assumptions, including what I assumed would make an effective book cover. So, I polled my students, my various online communities, professors, and, face-to-face, my friends.
In the end, this cover polarized voters. Critics felt like it was extra work to tilt their head to read the title, even though some agreed it was well designed.
Which, if I'm being honest, absolutely crushed me.
The point here isn't to poll audiences; rather, it's to consider what they think about and go through as they listen to your presentation. Are there areas that might confuse them? Turn them off? Require clearer examples?33
This is all part of the user experience (UX), a critical aspect of effective communication and relationship building. In business and design, user experience refers to the overall experience a customer has with a product or service. It might include the process of searching for and finding a book online, or checking out said book, or unboxing the merchandise, or, if necessary, returning it.
The UX asks: Was the experience easy or difficult for the customer?
Think about the frustrating experience I described in Chapter 3 in which I tried to return a defective refrigerator. Scheduling multiple service repairs, talking with customer service for months, and bouncing back and forth between the dealer and manufacturer were all obstacles that added up to a nightmare UX—a user experience that ensures I won't buy their products again.
Every time you present, you create a UX—whether you intend to or not. The questions then become:
Have you created a positive or negative user experience? Have you made it easy or hard for audiences to understand and engage?
Every time you present, you create a user experience —whether you intend to or not.
Often times, professors don't ever consider this.
And they wonder why students zone out.
The way you design presentations shapes audiences' user experience. But it's not about making beautiful slides. You don't have to be a graphic designer. Instead, the goal of design is to help audiences get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Removing the "friction" in your slides is one way to do this.
Remember: as presenters, we're trying to get past our audiences' first lines of defense— that croc brain that asks one question: Is it safe to ignore the message? If the content is boring, unnecessarily complex and/or abstract, irrelevant, too long, or too familiar, the brain will shut down. All to conserve calories and save energy.34
The goal of design is to help audiences get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Removing the "friction" in your slides is one way to do this.
So, anything that causes "friction" in the mind—a disconnect, a moment of co
nfusion, the need to exert/ expel unnecessary energy—will make it harder for audiences to understand your message. And the more friction that exists, the more likely audiences tune out.
What are examples of friction?
Complicated tables or charts
Blocks of text or too much information
Being too abstract
On-screen text that is hard to see
Slides that don't flow
Nina Kim, Associate Director at the Center for Digital Education at Washington University, agrees. She helps faculty members communicate lectures and presentations more clearly through design,35 so I consulted her expertise. Nina boils it down to three things:
SIMPLIFY.
COMPOSE.
CREATE RELATIONSHIPS.
SIMPLIFY.
Let's delve into each.
In theory, most of us know this. But we don't necessarily apply it. Usually, it's because we think one (or more) of the following:
1. College is supposed to be hard (we're all adults here!)
2. It takes too much time to make content simple and easy to understand
3. There's just too much material to cover
This mentality violates what we know about the croc brain. Reducing cognitive load is critical—which means minimizing friction. To help you simplify, Nina recommends remembering two words: distill and distribute.
Distill and distribute (D&D) are the two most effective design principles to instantly simplify and improve the way audiences respond to you.
Distill and distribute (or D&D, as I call it) are the two most effective design principles to instantly simplify and improve the way audiences respond to you. Our first task is to make sure that our content has been distilled to its most concise and clear form. When designing your slides, ask yourself:
Is anything repeated?
Can I say something with fewer words?
Would a picture make a better example than written text?
Let's take an example of a typical slide one might present on climate change:
While it's not the worst slide out there, it can be improved. Let's walk through the process to distill it.
First, make sure the slide only communicates one idea. Here, the point is that ice is melting fast, so I want to eliminate anything unrelated, such as the human factors (i.e., the first bullet point). That can go in the next slide. I want to keep this slide about that one overarching idea.
Next, eliminate the "fillers." This includes words like has or the. What are the most important words to keep? Simplified bullet points should look more like a newspaper headline, as seen here:
After you've deleted unnecessary words, think about distributing. Can you spread your points across multiple slides? Again, the goal is to have one idea per slide. Let's refer back to the climate change slide.
First, do we need the heading here? We use them in every slide because that's the default format in PowerPoint; from a design standpoint, however, the large type of headings draws the eye, and since it stands out, audiences subconsciously assign more importance to it compared to the body.36
While the heading ("Earth's ice is melting fast") is important, it doesn't need to be on every slide. Separate it into its own slide. Subsequent slides that fall under this section don't need reminders.
So, the header is in its own slide, and I've eliminated it from the rest. But we're not done. Next, let's tackle the bullet points. Is it necessary to display all three facts on the screen?
For every bullet point, every sentence, and every word you put up, ask yourself if it can be referenced out loud instead. Often times, it can. When audiences are forced to read on-screen text and listen at the same time, their auditory and visual channels compete to absorb information. And people lose focus. That's the redundancy principle mentioned in Chapter 3.
So, let's distribute each bullet point into its own slide, like the following:
By now, you've made tremendous progress—simply by distilling and distributing.
With the BEFORE version, too much friction exists. First, too many ideas are being communicated (four bullet points plus one heading). Second, the text is dense. And third,
the slide is uninteresting. All three issues guarantee the primitive croc brain will ignore the slide.
But the AFTER group of slides align with the croc brain's desire to conserve energy. It's simple, easy to read, and visually arresting. The message is clear. The friction has been effectively minimized.37
PRO TIP!
When using visuals, fill the whole slide with the image. Go borderless. Images then become much more vivid. It sounds obvious, but non-designers often don't think to do that. They subordinate the image to the text, which often leaves it as an afterthought. Think of the visuals used in documentaries.
RESOURCE ALERT: Looking for high-quality, free visuals? Check out the Q&A at the end of the book for my best recommendations!
By the way, it doesn't matter how many slides you have. Some experts recommend one to two slides per minute, whereas others say ten slides for every twenty minutes.38 While helpful, I would rather have twenty visually appealing slides that get your point across than five text-heavy slides that leave audiences confused.
Furthermore, this spaced-out version adheres to the "documentary" mindset discussed in Chapter 1: Each slide is highly visual and seamlessly supports the presenter's narration.
That's user experience.
COMPOSE.
After you simplify, consider the composition. Where you place things and how big they are in relation to each other has a big influence on how audiences interpret design. Nina believes that the goal with composition is three-fold: to create interest; to create balance; and to create a visual hierarchy.
Interest. The key is to vary slide compositions. Audiences grow bored when content is static (remember the croc brain?). Here are Nina's examples of an image with a small amount of text on a slide, including three arrangements that create interest.
Of course, not every concept will be as breathtaking to visualize as photosynthesis. The point is: Don't simply drop information into the template the way PowerPoint has it laid out for you. The next slide illustrates a typical way that novices might present photosynthesis.
Such presenters fill up empty spaces with multiple pictures. This merely adds noise by cluttering the slide. Unless you have a reason, stick to one visual and make it the "hero shot."39
While not as stunning as the first three, it's a vast improvement over the previous. Gone are the multiple images, the inconsistency, and the "drag-and-drop" feel.
PRO TIP!
Use the Eyedropper tool to match colors in your slide. That sense of cohesion reduces the friction and improves the user experience. To learn how to use the Eyedropper tool, search online with the phrase "use Eyedropper to match colors on your slide" or check the support site for Microsoft Office (support.office.com).
CREATE RELATIONSHIPS.
Finally, Nina recommends creating relationships between your design elements by using repetition, alignment, and proximity. Help your viewer make connections between your content both on individual slides and between slides. You can use repetitive design elements such as color, size, and composition to train your viewer to associate pieces of information. As an example, let's say that every time a key term appears in your slide deck, it's incorporated into a "callout box" similar to the one below.
As a viewer, every time I see a red callout box with a bolded word and definition underneath, I can quickly categorize that piece of information because of the repetition of design elements.
For most of you, the simplest tweak to create repetition is to match the text color with the image color. Take the previous photosynthesis slide: I could make the header and body text green to match the image via the Eyedropper tool (see Pro Tip in previous page).
Alignment is another key to creating relationships. Our brains automatically associate things that are aligned. As you build your slide compositi
ons, take the time to align objects. Nowadays, many slide-creation applications (such as Canva.com) help you align your elements with little grid lines that will indicate whether or not your objects are aligned.
Closely related to alignment is proximity. As with alignment, our brains automatically associate objects that are close to each other. In contrast, we disassociate objects that are far away from each other. Use proximity to your advantage, in conjunction with alignment, to indicate that your pieces of content belong with one another.
Balance. This can be achieved through symmetry and asymmetry. Symmetrically balanced designs, according to Nina, will use objects of the same size placed an equal length away from the center of the slide. Asymmetrically balanced designs will use objects of different sizes (say one large and one small) and offset these objects in order to create balance. Notice how both please the eye in the example below.
Use symmetry (left) and asymmetry (right) to create balance
Visual hierarchy. Finally, we want to use our compositions to create a visual hierarchy. It is going to tell audiences how they should interpret the importance of your slide's content.
Objects placed toward the top of your composition—for example, a slide heading—will be interpreted as more important. Elements larger in size will also be interpreted the same way. Make sure to use size and placement to your advantage to show your viewer how to interpret your design.
PRO TIP!
Consider removing your slide headings or making them smaller. It's interesting how PowerPoint (and other slideware) default to having a heading in each slide. Its large size suggests it's really important! Yet the body is often more important and therefore it should be upgraded, from a visual hierarchy perspective. Ask yourself, Is the heading even necessary?