One of the most important lessons gained growing up is learning from your mistakes. An even better one is learning from other’s mistakes. That’s what this blog post is about; spotlighting some poor design choices for web conference slide presentations, and suggesting what to do as an alternative.
First up, slide animations. Movement catches the eye and can make a plain slide look pretty snazzy. But that’s how it looks on our computers. When sent over data lines to our participants, what is free-flowing to us may be choppy or frozen to them. And of course, Murphy’s law dictates that something freezes on the worst possible frame. Leave out the animations, go for a sweet looking still-photo instead.
Transition slides are a great concept... in theory. Why wouldn’t we want have an empty slide with just the next topic in big, easy-read letters? But what actually happens during the presentation when we get to these transition slides? Most of the time we either skip quickly past them, read the title and go, or feel we have to do a long introduction to justify having that slide.
Instead of introducing a section with a transition slide, it’s better to have a slide that has the section title, but includes other information on it as well. This lets us inform and orient our participants without slowing down the presentation.
Wipes and dissolves are like fun noises on a new phone or computer that sing out whenever we do something: they get old fast. But having a slide spiral out to reveal the next slide can be more than annoying on a web conference. It can be detrimental as well. What may work fine on our computers may not be so pretty on someone else’s. And like animations, the desired effect could be lost in transit.
Here’s something else to think about. We often go back to other slides to answer questions or revisit points. It doesn’t look too good if it takes us forever to go through two or three slides because of all the star-wipes.
These are some of the mistakes we’ve learned to avoid. What others would you add to the list? Leave a comment and tell us about it.
