We've all been there, stuck in a tedious meeting. Graphs and bullet points crowd the screen and the speaker drones on. And now it's your turn to give the big presentation. You want to be informative. You want to reach your audience. You want to get your point across.
How do you accomplish that? Is an hour long enough to cover all of the vital information? How many PowerPoint slides will you need? Forty? Sixty? And that is exactly how all of those boring meetings get born; the need to thoroughly inform the participants, the fear of not doing enough to make your point well.
In TheWebinarBlog, Ken Molay talks about how people are moving towards smaller, more succinct ways to deliver information using Twitter and its 140 character messages—and how well that's been received.
Technology has increased the speed of our world, of business, and made it possible—and easy--to present incredible amounts of information in one sitting. But is it always a good idea to fill up that sitting?
There are two crown jewels in the web conferencing crown: bullet points and graphs. With bullet points, there is a great temptation to get as much information on the screen at the same time, especially when it all coincides with what is being said at that moment.
Instead, keep the font large, say 30 points. Only include the absolute highlights from your speech and don't be afraid to use more slides with fewer points on each. One choice word, alone in the middle of a slide and centered, will make more of an impact than a slide packed with sentences.
It should be the same with graphs. Keep them simple and only make one point per graph. If you can tell the whole story with a single line, do it. If there are multiple lines with multiple points have multiple graphs. And always label simply and label large.
If the knowledge in the bullet points is vital, but numerous, provide it in a document that they can take with them to study later. If a graph is complex, show a simple version during the presentation and provide a handout with the graph in its entirety.
The main motivation behind less is more is that you are doing all this to get your message clearly to your participants. Remember that the human attention span is short, and there is only so much information a person can absorb before they tune out.
