There is a reason for saying a picture is worth a thousand words. Visuals convey information six times more effectively than words alone. With visuals, the main point is delivered more immediately and succinctly. Just compare the layout of these two PowerPoint slides:
In the slide on the left, you see there is text and indented bullet points, but there is no immediately clear message. In the slide on the right, you can clearly see this slide is talking about some kind of trend and you can guess that it is talking about some amount that is increasing. In order to see what is increasing and by how much, it is quite easy to just read the chart axes. By effectively using text and visuals, you can engage your audience and effectively communicate your message.
Plan Your Presentations Using Storyboards
Not only can you improve your message by using visuals during your presentation, but you can also improve your preparation for your presentation by using visuals as a key element to your planning stage. For every talk I have given, I have started with a mind map to understand the main ideas I want to communicate and I have used a storyboard to understand how I will tell my story to communicate these ideas effectively. Mind maps allow me to clearly understand all that I want to communicate and how all the ideas are related, while storyboards provide a visual way to show how I will deliver my story. In the workplace, storyboards are especially useful when you are planning a presentation as a team. You can easily share an electronic storyboard and have your team members edit it as they see fit. Rather than abstractly talking about what the presentation will cover and how it will flow, you can just show your team a visual!
In the past, I was incredibly inneficient in planning my presentations. My presentations were usually planned out using countless trees' worth of paper and it probably took me double the time to create the preentation that it should have. I used the same concept of mind maps and storyboards, but quite inneficiently. Using a program like SmartDraw allows me to easily change and share my presentation storyboard with any of my team members. Plus, I have an easily saved record of my presentation. If you want to skip the storyboard visual and get right to planning, SmartDraw has a PowerPoint builder that uses a storyboard design to build presentations. My storyboard above would look something like this:
Delete Those Bullet Points!
At SmartDraw, we recently teamed up with Rick Altman to understand how the "Death by Powerpoint" pandemic started and how to stop it. It turns out, the PowerPoint death stems from the way PowerPoint was designed. PowerPoint was designed to make it easy to enter text in bullet list form, visuals are difficult to create, and visuals are difficult to present. As a default, PowerPoint does not present visuals in a sequenced manner. By sequenced, I mean slowly building a visual slide by slide, as below:
It is our fault for succumbing to PowerPoint's formula, and so it is our responsibility to resist! The first step is to think outside of those text boxes and think more about what visual would better represent the message we want to convey on each slide of our presentation. To learn more, watch this video:
To check out the visuals I created for this blog post, you can download the SmartDraw filed using the links below. You will need a copy of SmartDraw on your desktop, so if you do not already own Smartdraw, download a trial here.
[Example] Presentation storyboard.sdr
[Example] Presentation PowerPoint builder storyboard.sdr
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