Check out this great TED talk from Dan Ariely about human decision making. I personally love this kind of research. Though it can be a little disconcerting, it’s fascinating to learn about the brain and how we’re not always in as much control of our perception as we think.

Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist and the author of Predictably Irrational. From a presentation design standpoint, his talk is a perfect example of how a data-driven speech can be made captivating when combined with the magic ingredients — 1) good storytelling, and 2) visual slides.

Dan is one of these rare academics who bridges the gap between academia and the general public. His research is cutting edge in the scientific community, and he is able to share it (both writing and speaking) in a way that engages just about everyone.

I’ve had a chance to hear Dan speak in person several times and can say his presentations are always crowd pleasers. Enjoy!

Dan Ariely TED Talk

Sprint’s new ad campaign, What’s Happening, is making some serious waves. The ads are brilliant examples of effective marketing and great presentation design.

Sprint spent a lot of money building a new 4G network and had to figure out how to show it off. They could have taken the traditional approach and created a campaign that explains the network’s new features (e.g. “you can transfer so many megabytes per second on our new network!”), but in reality people don’t care much about features — they care about benefits.

My favorite example of selling benefits instead of features was when Steve Jobs first introduced the iPod in 2001. He didn’t describe the iPod as a “4GB music player”; it was “a thousand songs in your pocket”. Big difference.

Sprint clearly understands the power of selling benefits because instead of focusing on what their network can do, their campaign demonstrates what people can do on their network, and on an incredible scale.

The ads are slick examples of how proper pacing, dynamic visuals, and the right amount of humor can make a fact and data driven presentation extremely compelling to watch. You’ll definitely find inspiration in these videos for new, creative ways to present your data in future presentations.

Check out the ads below.

Overloading a slide with too much information is an all too common presentation design faux pas.

Bullet point after bullet point — one for each idea you want to express — clutters the slide and forces your audience to spend more time reading than listening.

People often try to reduce the clutter with animations, building one bullet point on the screen at a time, but by the last build it’s still a bloated mess.

Instead, break up your content and put each point on its own slide. It’ll give your messages some room to breathe, making it less likely for you to overload your audience with too much information. Your story will be easier to follow.

Splitting up your content helps you the designer see which points can be enhanced with an evocative visual. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand bullets — so why not use one?

Great slides help you tell your story. Bad slides distract your audience, or worse, force them to work harder to understand you. Avoid bloated slides. Break them up.

It’s not rocket science.

It turns out there’s a scientific explanation for why we don’t remember much from a bad PowerPoint presentation.

Scientists studying “cognitive load theory” at the University of New South Wales in Australia have published a report that has shaken up the way the world looks at presentations and learning.

Their research suggests the human brain is good at reading, good at listening, but not very good at doing both simultaneously.

Presenting someone with the same information verbally and visually (e.g. reading from a bad PowerPoint slide) makes absorbing the information much more difficult. Our brains can only take in and remember so much at once.

Professor Sweller, a researcher in the study, said, “The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster. It should be ditched. It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form.”

He has a good point. Public speakers have been putting audiences to sleep with PowerPoint for years, but that doesn’t mean we should ditch the application all together. After all, it isn’t fair to blame the tool for the craftsman’s mistakes.

Don’t make ‘em choose.

Effective presentations never make life harder on an audience.

Professor Sweller offers good advice when he recommends we speak to diagrams instead of bullet points, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Keep the text on your slides to a minimum, phrases that only take a few seconds to read. Instead of bullet points, use diagrams and images as the backdrop to your story. When you’re presenting a longer quote, don’t be afraid to stand silently while the audience reads the quote for themselves.

Ultimately, the key takeaway is this: Never force your audience to choose between listening to what you say or reading the text on your slides. You can’t expect them to do both, and you might not like what they choose.

Source 1 Article : Source 2 Article : Source 3 PDF

I recently read Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos. The book explores the dangers of a mathematically illiterate public in an era when a solid understanding of numbers is essential to comprehend the major decisions being made in society and politics.

Though I felt his writing was a little too academic and borderline pompous at times, Paulos’ Innumeracy is loaded with enough fascinating material to make it worth the read. I highly recommend it if you want to gain a better understanding of the probabilities and statistics you come across everyday reading a newspaper or browsing the internet.

Million Billion Trillion

Relating it to presentations, one topic the book explored was how poorly so many of us understand the magnitudes of big numbers like “million”, “billion”, or “trillion” — numbers that frequently get thrown around in presentations.

Do you think you’ve been alive a trillion seconds? Not even close. To illustrate the relative magnitudes of these big numbers, consider this excerpt from the book.

“For example, it takes only about eleven and a half days for a million seconds to tick away, whereas almost thirty-two years are required for a billion seconds to pass. What about trillions? Modern Homo sapiens is probably less than 10 trillion seconds old; and the subsequent complete disappearance of the Neanderthal version of early Homo sapiens occurred only a trillion or so seconds ago. Agriculture’s been here for approximately 300 billion seconds (ten thousand years), writing for about 150 billion seconds, and rock music has been around for only about one billion seconds.”

It’s interesting stuff, especially when you then come across figures like the estimated $10 trillion US national debt, or the nearly 3 billion people worldwide living in poverty. Sometimes it’s a little too easy to become desensitized to the true magnitude of these numbers.

What shape is your presentation? Flat? Round? Spiky? It’s an unusual question, but a very effective one for diagnosing the biggest problem affecting most presentations.

PowerPoint often guides us down a bad path from the very start. The built-in templates conform us to a very rigid structure — titles and bullet points on every slide. Essentially, they encourage us to create a series of isolated lists, which is an ineffective way to structure your presentation.

Hills and Heart Rates

Before PowerPoint existed, people thought of presentations as speeches, and we tend to approach speech writing differently from presentation design.

There aren’t any visuals to rely on in a speech, so it’s up to our words to make the content interesting. For this reason, speechwriters focus on the narrative, or the overall structure of the speech.

Speeches are round, like hills. They’re usually in the story-plot structure, which consists of an introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. If we abstractly charted a speech, it would look something like this.

Slide presentations look very different. The standard presentation format (template) encourages us to create an isolated series of lists (titles & bullets), and so we end up presenting our material as just that.

It goes something like this: After our title and intro slides, we toss up a slide with a single topic (e.g. “Competitive Landscape”). We say everything we can about the topic, then move on to the next slide with a new topic (e.g. “Market Size”), where we say everything we can about that. This repeats for about ten to twenty minutes until we come to a slide titled, “Conclusion”, where we abruptly stop talking and ask for questions.

Slide presentations are spiky, like the beeping heart-rate monitors you see in hospitals (EKGs). That spiky shape is the reason so many presentations are so boring to sit through.

Wired to remember

Humans love stories, and we’re all natural storytellers. Every time we chat with friends we’re telling each other stories, and we’re not usually reciting a series of isolated lists to one another.

Our minds are wired to take in and remember round information much better than spiky information. This is why you can remember the details of a famous speech or the plot of a good movie, much easier than you can remember the items on your last grocery list. Your brain processes round information better because round information is saturated with meaning, which is the key requirement for memory formation.

So when you’re working on your next presentation, remember to consider its shape. Bullet points aren’t the problem — the way we’ve grown accustomed to using them is.

Keep it round, avoid the spikes.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss some of the inspiration behind THIRST in an interview with Geetesh Bajaj from the Indezine blog.

View the full interview here.

Indezine is a comprehensive web resource for all things PowerPoint (tutorials, tips, downloads, and more). If you spend a lot of time in PowerPoint, you’ll definitely want to check it out.

I normally don’t like to bring up politics here, but this is a moment worthy of an exception.

History was made last night when Barack Obama won the 2008 US presidential election in a landslide victory. While I disagree with John McCain’s use of negative campaign tactics over the past several months, I congratulate and applaud him for his sincere and graceful concession speech. He nailed it, expressing a caring and appropriate message of unity that you can tell came from his heart.

Barack Obama’s victory speech, delivered to a crowd extending far into the night, was yet another one for the record books. Barack Obama is arguably the best communicator ever to be elected US president. He is an example of the tremendous power a strong, balanced, and confident person has to inspire and lead others. He is, without doubt, a role model to us all.

It is a very exciting time to be an American.

Presentation limitations

Have you ever opened a presentation someone sent you, only to find the text formatting too messed up to read? Chances are, the person who designed the presentation used a custom font you don’t have.

Custom fonts are a great way to make your slides more expressive, but they can cause serious problems when you try sending your presentation to someone else.

Presentation applications (i.e. Keynote and PowerPoint) don’t embed fonts into presentation documents. This means if you’re making a presentation you plan to send to several people, it’s best to use only universal fonts.

In the example below, I designed a simple slide using the custom font Trixie. The version on the left shows what the slide looks like on my computer, a computer with the font installed. The version on the right is the exact same slide, but on my friend’s computer, which does not have the font installed. Notice the difference?

If you use a PC, you don’t have much to worry about — almost all of the fonts that came installed on your computer are universal. If you use a Mac, you have to be a bit more careful. You have several great fonts on your machine that your PC brethren might lack.

Using type effectively is an art and a great way to make your slides more expressive. For presentations you’ll only deliver from your computer, feel free to go nuts using any fonts you want. But for presentations you plan to send to other people, remember to be careful with your font choices.

Note: PowerPoint 2007 for the PC does, in fact, allow you to embed custom fonts into your presentation. First, click “Save” and then click the “Tools” button. Select “Save Options“, and then click the “Embed fonts in the file” check box.

21 great fonts

If you’re interested in learning more about custom fonts, the link below highlights a collection of 21 of the most used fonts by professional designers.

It’s definitely worth checking out if you want to experiment with using a font other than Arial or Calibri in your next presentation.

InstantShift (via Monoscope)