Corporate Templates Still Don’t Work

Since my original post, I’ve received good feedback on this (thanks) and had 22 months of additional insights and frustrations. I am changing some of my original recommendations, but in general most corporate Powerpoint templates still have a long way to go to become useful and usable tools for their intended users. (I’ll consider corporate Word templates in another post.)

Why? There are many reasons, but I think they all have a common root cause: developers (those who make the templates) do not fully understand or appreciate their customers’ world (customers = users: people who use the templates). Some broad issues to consider:

• Too many cooks. Between Corporate Communications, marketing, IT, operations, HR/ training, and senior management, many enterprise-level template initiatives have way too many well-meaning but unnecessary people involved. It’s understandable, particularly in large organizations, but it has two unhelpful consequences: 1) templates designed by committee (see camel) where, 2) the committee is usually made up of staff people with little or no experience in the organization’s real product development, sales, or service delivery – that is, they don’t do what the company does.

• One size does not fit all. In many organizations, Powerpoint is used to produce lots of different types of outputs. At the least, most organizations would benefit by having one version for ballroom-style presentations and another for boardroom-style documents. When you also consider people’s individual skill level (e.g., ordinary vs expert), you could easily imagine a simple 2x2 (below). This suggests at least 4 different “base” templates.

	Ballroom	Boardroom
Expert user
Ordinary user

• Built as a tool, not as a system. To be effective, good template files need to be part of a larger system that supports your organizations’ visual identity and brand. Depending on the size and culture of your organization, this might include: training and support materials (e.g., video how-to’s, reference documents, central repository/ website, etc.), a network of trusted internal advisers/ experts, and a change management plan (i.e., keeping up with customer and technology changes).

• Application development, not design. Today, templates are as much dynamic software as a branding tool, yet few marketing, communications, or even IT groups are comfortable with the rapid and continued iteration necessary to develop and maintain useful apps. A useful enterprise template cannot be a static file (or group of files) that doesn’t evolve or continue to change based on feedback from its user community and their needs, including those who represent the organization and its evolving needs.

• Not meeting people where they are. Many corporate templates that I come across are either too complicated or too simple for their audience. Too complicated: people ignore all the embedded wisdom or maybe avoid using the template altogether. Too simple: people make up their own rules about what to do under every circumstance, undermining one of the reasons for having a template. This is the audience/ user side of “one size does not fit all” – developers of effective templates really need to understand their audience (i.e., “customers”) and the everyday worlds they live in. Even in small organizations it’s worthwhile to map the various users and uses.

Designing for the organization or enterprise is a complex and artful process, no wonder we see so few successes.

Diagrams without meaning

This is a real diagram I encountered:

It’s not wrong, it just doesn’t mean anything. It could have easily been a bullet list or some other collection of shapes and lines, but I assume that somewhere along the way someone wanted a graphic to “liven things up” so here it is – the ubiquitous Microsoft SmartArt graphic. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve drafted more clever but equally silly things in my life to help people inject variation into their presentations.

But it doesn’t work.

It may break up 51 straight all-text slides and make the presenter feel a bit better, but a gratuitous diagram doesn’t help communicate. It may actually confuse things.

Jakob Nielsen discussed this in November. He was talking about images on web sites but I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to include diagrams too. Louis Sullivan said form follows function,* and that sure applies here.

Useful diagrams reveal something better than just words alone, but a diagram doesn’t automatically have value just because it’s not words. The diagram needs to add something to the idea, something beyond the words. N.C. Wyeth talked about illustrating scenes that the author didn’t necessarily describe, and his illustrations were something beyond the words. So it is with a diagram.

Two resources:

1) Dan Roam has good ideas on developing good pictures. (Hint: start with paper and pencil.) His Visual Thinking Codex is very useful.

2) Andrew Abela has developed a great chart chooser as part of his Extreme Presentation Method.

* I have seen this quote attributed to three different people. The Wikipedia entry seems to make sense.

Good photos = useful ones

Jakob Nielsen’s latest research shows that users pay close attention to photos and other images that contain relevant information but ignore fluffy pictures used to “jazz up” Web pages.

Seems to me this also applies to presentations:

• Maximize use of images that carry relevant information.
• Minimize images that are just there to be pretty.

Full post is here.

(I’m sure I have drastically over-simplified things, but this just seems so inline with Tufte, Raskin, earlier Nielsen, etc.)

Maine and emotions

I’ve been reasonably quiet online for the last five weeks in part because I’ve been on vacation, one week at a Delaware beach and another on the Maine coast. On my return from Maine, I sat through a presentation almost entirely devoid of emotion, and it got me thinking about the deep feelings the Maine coast elicited in me and why it seems so hard for many to bring that kind of emotion into their presentations.

The emotionless presentation in question was given by a man who cares deeply about the topic he was presenting, but that passion didn’t come out. And for me – someone who is usually not the most emotionally sensitive guy – the contrast was huge between the strong feelings I had on the Maine coast and the lack of feelings I had listening to this presentation.

I work with lots of engineering types, and it seems like many have gotten this idea in their heads that passion and emotion don’t belong in their presentations – that only well-structured facts and logic are how one creates a speech. And it shows. Again and again I see too-long slide decks that seem to reflect too much thinking about evidence and logic, and not enough on emotion and story-telling.

I’m not suggesting technical people turn into touchy-feely therapists (think Stuart Smalley), or insert fake emotion into their presentations at the expense of facts and evidence, but some honest positive emotion can make a big difference in getting your message through (think Al Gore). And like any skill, it takes practice (especially for those of us who see ourselves as technical experts, where emotion is a secondary skill at best).

Some quick thoughts, more later:

1) For a given presentation, what do you care about? (If you don’t know, or you don’t care, neither will your audience.)

2) Why do you care about it? It’s not necessary that your audience know this, but it helps if you do.

3) Look through your presentation. As you rehearse your delivery (you do practice, right?), do these things come through?

Most US students think Beethoven is a dog

This year’s Mindset list is out:

http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2014.php

In addition to being humorous and potentially depressing, it’s also a great list for presenters (or any author, really), reminding us about the continually changing nature of audiences and the assumptions one makes. Of course, this was the point of the original list. And though it was originally developed by professors for professors, it’s a useful touchpoint for anyone who is trying to communicate with people who are not you (see implicit assumptions).

It also helps demonstrate the fine art of headline writing. This blog post’s title is from rawstory (who may have lifted it from somewhere else). Others:

• Class of 2014 Can’t Write in Cursive, Considers Nirvana ‘Classic Rock’ (Wall Street Journal blog)
• Email is too slow and wristwatches are pointless for college freshmen (CNN)
• The College Mindset List: No Cursive Skills or Cold War Fears (PBS Newshour)

Imagine having a similar headline in big type to open your next presentation.

(Interestingly, as I look through other headlines from Google News, there are lots of less-than-compelling headlines about the list – what a great opportunity for you to perfect your headline-writing skills, your great opening.)

Why corporate templates don’t work

An interesting thing, corporate templates.

The majority of Word or Powerpoint templates I encounter from our clients fall into two broad classes:

• Those designed by administrative or IT staff, so they’re designed to be easy to use (sort of), but they don’t look good and they rarely reflect the way real people actually work. Or…
• Those designed by designers or ad agencies, so the templates look great, but ordinary people can’t duplicate the examples because they’re not designers, so results based on these templates are usually disappointing (or worse).

Ok, so let’s forget about the first group altogether – well-meaning IT or administrative staff are not who you should be trusting your message to. They have other gifts.

The problem with the second group – templates-by-designers – is that (most) designers will create templates and related guidance for use by other designers, not for ordinary people. Compounding the problem is the curse of knowledge: designers creating the templates know a lot more about creating good-looking slides (for instance) than the people who will be using the templates.

Embed more knowledge.

One solution to this problem is to create richer templates that include much more detailed examples that people can use as-is, instead of abstract guidance.

If you are a designer creating templates for other people to use, include as many examples as you can where people can literally plug in their content (words, numbers, movies, etc.). Instead of just a single generic chart on a PP slide, include one page each for a column, stacked column, bar, stacked bar, line, area, doughnut, pie, etc. Not only a bullet slide (if you must), but also a two-column layout, a title, a few image-only slides with real images people could use, a table, maybe a few different table examples, a photo with a caption, a movie, an animation, etc. And don’t be satisfied with the Powerpoint default layouts – is that really what you would do? Get rid of the layouts that don’t make sense for your situation. You know your users, if they’re not going to use a vertical slide master, then delete it from the template.

If you are hiring someone to create a template(s) for you, be an advocate for your users and test things until they break. Use the tools yourself: if you receive a template that is difficult to use or doesn’t make sense, push back and keep pushing back until you get something that you can actually use in many different situations. Good designers will relish this challenge (no, really), they will see a committed client who cares about getting it right, about solving the real problem. And you’ll get a better result.

There are companies that get this. I’ve seen examples of well-done corporate PP templates that had over 30 slides, where people could literally copy their information into a template’s slide layout. And don’t confuse this with those idiotic presenting bad news templates that come bundled with PP, I mean files that have many different format examples for thinking people to duplicate and use to better illustrate their own well-considered presentation.

Of course, there is another approach: just turn the projector off.

May 2012 Update:

Since I published this in July 2010, I’ve had additional thoughts and revised some of my recommendations. See my newer post.

Minard, Tufte, Zelazny et al

An interesting discussion for information and presentation design geeks going on around Andrew Arbela’s recent post highlighting Gene Zelazny’s commentary on the Tufte favorite chart by Charles Joseph Minard documenting Napoleon’s march on Russia.

For those unfamiliar with the players:

• Andrew Arbela, author of The Extreme Presentation Method, created a very good framework for the two fundamentally different styles of presentations: ballroom style vs. conference room style. He has plenty of research to back-up his ideas, and doesn’t get caught up in the quasi-religious debate around Powerpoint. 
• Gene Zelazny is the Director of Visual Communications for McKinsey & Company and has written two presentation-related books. Up until now, his advice has usually been pretty good, especially as related to professional service firms, even if his graphic style has been underwhelming at times.
• Edward Tufte is the eclectic statistician and Professor Emeritus at Yale who has written and self-published several seminal books on information design. It is difficult to overstate his influence on information design and the visual display of data (he teaches a one-day course, highly recommended). He is famously critical of Powerpoint.
• Charles Joseph Minard was an obscure French civil engineer (1781–1870) who was one of the pioneers of information graphics. The particular diagram in question is an 1861 drawing that Tufte noted “may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.” Over time, the amount of energy spent discussing this one graphic and Tufte’s original comment is amazing (read: silly).

Anyway, Mr. Zelazny wrote an essay (3.6MB pdf) to “concentrate on the virtues of PowerPoint as a tool,” presumably leaving the philosophical debate to others. He correctly points out how quickly one can create reasonably good graphics with the tools in PP, and reminisces about how labor-intensive creating these sorts of things used to be. So far, so good. He then poses an interesting question (essentially): how would one translate the chart into a presentation today (sort of what would Minard do?). Then things get weird:

1. Mr. Z seems to fall into the all presentations are the same false logic that Arbela argues against. I find this strange as I’ll bet most of McKinsey’s own presentations and deliverables are much more like conference room style presentations (or what we used to call documents) than the examples that follow in the essay.
2. The example slides in the essay are the very sort of thing that anti-Powerpoint zealots (like Tufte) point to as illustrations of what is so wrong with the state of presentations today (with the possible exception of the cartoons by the Archie Comics’ AD, which are at least humorous if not necessarily effective).

To me, the irony in much of the discussion, opinion, and alternatives about the original Minard graphic is that in his original 1983 book, Tufte discusses this graphic in the context of graphic excellence. The idea that graphical displays should reveal information clearly, precisely, and efficiently. They should start with good information and be well-designed, and they should avoid falsehoods (e.g. graphical distortions) and meaningless distractions (e.g., clip art).

I have a small poster of this on my wall. When people comment on it I remind them that it is essentially an anti-war poster. Napoleon left Poland with 422,000 men and returned six months later with 10,000. Is any treasure worth 412,000 souls? Isn’t that the story Minard was telling?

Are presentations a new type of media?

Think about it. Presentations are evolving into something that looks a lot like its own type of media experience. Neither speech nor document, they increasingly draw on multiple media skills:

• Public speaking
• Storytelling
• Event planning 
• Theater
• Visual communication, 2D design
• Document design
• Web or online design 
• Typography
• Photography
• Audio
• Video
• Animation

Thirty years ago, a speech was a speech. If you wanted to add additional elements (35mm slides, video, handouts, a survey beforehand, etc.), then you needed additional time and resources to get it done. It just wasn’t feasible for many ordinary people or organizations to create TED-like presentations with the skills and tools at their disposal.

(Yes, I know, you still needed the technical and creative skills, but you also needed access to the tools, and those tools all came with some non-trivial cost: either time, money, or both.)

Today the tools are ubiquitous. Not just Powerpoint, but almost everything necessary to create a great presentation (read: event) is widely available. And yet most presentations are so bad (bad to listen to, bad to watch, bad to look at).

It’s easy to blame Powerpoint, but maybe another explanation is because, as a new media form, presentations are still young. Early photography tried to copy painting (not so well), early movies copied theater (not so well), early television copied radio shows (really not well) – so maybe one reason that so many presentations stink is because the form is still trying to figure itself out.

Not an excuse to do a bad job, but if you do a great job, maybe you’re a pioneer in a brand new type of media experience.

The Kalashnikov as good design (and good story-telling)

A great post by Dave Gray, not only making the case for the AK-47 as a great example of good design (designed for the real world), but also explaining how talking about an assault rifle probably makes for a better presentation than some less-dramatic example.

Happy new year, present well

Hoping this post finds you well, and that you are looking forward to a new year.

For many of us in the modern working world, who are blessed with:

• Love of our family and friends
• Good health
• Freedom of expression and religion
• Lack of want or fear
  
• Steady employment
• Health insurance
• [insert the thing you’re thankful for here]

... the winter holidays bring some time off, and a chance to reflect on the past and consider the future. And so I ask you to reflect on the most important presentation that you made in 2009, and consider what you might change if you had a similar opportunity in 2010. What thing or things would you love to change, if you could? Would you:

• Research more?
• Prepare and practice more?
• Use less slides? Or more slides?
• Use more pictures and less words?
• Use real objects instead of pictures?
• Take the whole thing more and less seriously?
• Turn off the projector?
  
• Ask for help?

Whatever it may be, I hope 2010 brings better things for you and your loved ones.

More legibility = less boldface

If you have single slides with lots of words on them (such as a paragraph), don’t use bold type. Or all capital letters. Or worse, combine them (bold all capitals). It makes your text very difficult to read.

Here’s why:

Roman (or normal or regular) type is designed to be read and is at the core of all text faces.* Bold type usually has less white space, both inside the letters and between letters, and so the letters visually blend together more than their roman counterparts. The result is big white or black perceptual masses with less distinct letter shapes, and so your readers need to slow down to recognize letters and words. And if your audience is spending more mental energy processing text shapes, that’s less mental energy available to pay attention to you and your message.

Traditional typography sets most text in roman type with italics and bold reserved for specific uses or headlines. (And bold italic faces were rarely seen before the 1980’s). These conventions exist because they work. Roman type is easier to read, especially in larger blocks of text. Even projected, medium weight letters read better than all bold ones.

Here’s another, more practical reason not to make your slides all bold, all the time (or all-cap, all bold, all the time – shudder). If you start with bold all-caps, how do you emphasize something? Make it bigger, brighter, even harder to read? There’s nothing left.

So, if you have slides with bunches of words that looks similar to paragraphs, then this applies to you:

• If you are designing slides in PP to project to a large group, it would be best to remove most of the words from your slides. Then you can feel free to use bold for the remaining 4 words on the slide.
• If you are designing a slideument (a document that will be printed and may be projected), please “unbold” all that bold type (you’ll use less toner when you print, too).

Your audience will thank you.

* Display faces – those that are not designed to be used for entire paragraphs of text – usually don’t have many variations, if any.

“Filling space”

I encounter many aspiring designers in my work. It seems that some of them aspire to fill troubling white space with stuff. Extra text, cheesy clip art, blurry photos. You get the idea. Here is a tip on how to use photography in PP files to “fill space.”

Don’t.

Ok, I know many of you just can’t do that. The draw is just too great. Like some universal force, you - must - fill - the - space. So give in to the dark side, but do it with style. Choose a single image, not many. And make sure it’s a good one. Here are some tips:

• If you are discussing many ideas, you don’t need to have an image to represent each one. Really. Especially on the same page. A single image can be remarkably effective, and is usually better looking than a whole bunch of little images. It’s also more efficient. You can spend less time looking for one really great image instead of more time gathering a bunch of mediocre ones.

• Look for imagery in unusual places. If you have a digital camera, you may already have some good images lurking around. And you can always take some more. Get really close to things or frame usual objects in unusual ways. Clouds, landscapes, ordinary objects around the house are all potentially great images.

• Crop. Do what professionals do, crop an image so that it becomes more interesting. For example, a typical snapshot often has the subject perfectly centered in the middle of the frame with lots of space all around. Boring. If you crop the image so that the subject is off-center (Google rule of thirds) and that some of the subject is cut off by the frame, the same image can become more dynamic.

• You don’t have to be literal. If your topic or business is not particularly photogenic or doesn’t lend itself to naturally stunning images, then go for beauty over fact. Many of us work in businesses that are either visually boring (or downright ugly) or so intangible that visualizing key ideas is fraught with the peril of cliché. Resist. In the context of filling space, beautiful images can stand on their own with no hidden meaning.

• Avoid clichés. Think beyond what first comes to mind. For example, a crystal-clear picture of a diverse group of people sitting around a conference table with their sleeves rolled-up is a crummy expression of teamwork. What about a motion-blurred photo of an 8-person rowing crew?

• Repeat. There is no law that says you can’t reuse the same image over and over again. In the context of filler images, combined with interesting cropping, a single image can easily be used throughout a presentation. As noted earlier, this also has the advantage of being more efficient.

Again, if you are filling space, consider why the space is there in the first place. Some professional designer probably intended for the space to be clean. But if you must alter the design, try to do it well.

Son of presentation landscape

In July, Nancy Duarte created a great visualization she titled Presentation Landscape. I really like her diagram, but as I showed to a few people there were questions about the X axis, particularly the slideument-preso continuum.

I thought about my own experience helping non-designers deal with the world of documents, slideuments, and presentations. The way that good visuals often start life as sketches on napkins or whiteboards, and the way those ideas often need to flow back and forth between different forms over the life of a project. (And the way that once something gets into Powerpoint, it often seems to get trapped there.)

When you think about the journey of an idea and how projects often evolve, it seems like it’s difficult to resist using existing slides that may have been fine for a working thinkpiece, but are really not up for the important presentation or executive briefing. And sometimes PP is not the right tool for making documents. And sometimes (gasp) no documents or paper are necessary at all (yikes, what am I saying?). Picking up on Nancy’s original point, the same slide or deck may not be worth fighting for one day, but may be ill-suited for a higher stakes presentation later in the project.

Anyway, this little diagram is trying to visualize what I was thinking, maybe build on Nancy’s brilliant original. I hope she’s not offended.

(Geek alert: you can hide the path layer to just see where different forms map.)

LO Presentations

I just sat through another LO presentation (Lost Opportunity). It could have been interesting, even emotional and moving. Alas, it was ordinary and message-less.

It’s not that there wasn’t information in it (there was plenty), it’s that it lacked a core message – nothing that we (the audience) needed to know, believe, or question. I still don’t know what the problem was, why I should care about it, and what, if anything, I’m supposed to do about it. A lost opportunity.

It is frustrating to participate (or at least be the passive audience) in these events, and it is reasonably easy to avoid with a smidge of planning.

For most sorts of communications, before you open any software, get a single piece of paper and writing device (seriously, don’t open Word):

• Who is the audience(s) for this?
• What is the problem or issue?
• Why is it important (to that audience)?
• How does it impact them? (If it doesn't impact them, why should they care?)
• What (if anything) can they do about it? (If they can’t really do anything, why should they care?)

Answer each of these with one sentence or less. Save that piece of paper and put it next to your computer when you start developing the presentation. (More on using paper to develop good presentations later. Hint: don’t start in PP.)

Seductive Technology

A few months ago Garr Reynolds asked for suggestions for his upcoming book on design – I sent him a version of this. Garr is a passionate advocate for good presentation design, writes a useful blog, and has authored a good book about the same ideas. There is a deep wisdom, insight, and self-knowledge at the core of his design principles, but I’m not sure all the important stuff always translates well for everyone.

I work in a global consulting firm of about 3,000 people and notice that only a small number of those professionals have the self-knowledge to go with less: less words, less talking, less on-screen, fewer pieces of paper, etc. As technical people, they have usually been taught to build methodical augments with lots of facts and conclusions at the end. This bias for facts (more facts = more proof), usually means more stuff to try to buttress the (not always well thought-out) argument.

While I could pick on my colleagues as engineers, they demonstrate habits that I see many people use when constructing presentations. There is a seductiveness to the technology that seems to overwhelm otherwise smart, thinking people. Three major areas in particular:

Really seeing things from the audience’s perspective. Part of this is what the Heath brothers call the Curse of Knowledge, but part of it is the classic design challenge: getting your clients (or yourself) to leave their (or your) assumptions aside. This effects everything about a designing a presentation, from where to begin to how much to cover and how. This also includes mundane things like actually testing slides and colors on the equipment and in the venue you will actually use (and planning to do that, and allowing time to change things if they look like mud).

Thinking about the presentation as an event. In my business, a “presentation” can mean everything from an intimate conversation with 4 or 5 people to a lecture in a room of 400. But what I notice (and relevant to design) is how people usually only focus on the Powerpoint file, not the overall event stream: the context of where those slides (or pieces of paper) will show up. Again, this raises all kinds of potential design issues, for example: what do you say, what do you project (onscreen), and what might you hand out (and how and when). Or how long do you really expect people to sit still – have you thought about biology and biorhythms (e.g., a warm dark room + 3 pm + 2-hour presentation = bad idea), what are you not going to cover, etc.

Limiting the bias toward cool. By “cool” I mean things that the author thinks are cool when they are creating them. Things like complex and gratuitous animation, a flow chart with impossible-to-read colors, way too many (bad) typefaces, a scan that nobody can read, a metaphoric image nobody understands, movies or sounds that don’t play, etc. My experience is that when many folks take on the role of presentation producer, they forget all the things they know as a presentation consumer or (worse) draw the wrong conclusions. For example, I work with a man who has a tremendous ability to read a room, and is naturally enthusiastic about his subject, but he also uses animation a great deal (maybe too much). I have seen people try to emulate him by copying the animation, not by paying attention to the audience or being excited about their topic. They can waste a great deal of time trying to create a clunky animation instead of really focusing on what the heck they’re going to say while the animation plays (or doesn’t, as the case may be). By worrying about the technology and other off-topic diversions, they and their presentations can become overly focused on widgets instead of the message.

Peak-end rule and presentations

Noble prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman coined a phrase: the “peak/end rule” to describe how we remember things (I’m sure I am drastically over-simplifying it.):

• What we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experience is largely determined by: (1) How the experience felt at their peak, (2) How the experience felt when they ended
• We use this to summarize the experience.
• Then rely on that summary later to remind ourselves how we felt.
• These summaries, in turn, influence our future decisions.

This suggests some ideas for avoiding dull presentations (or at least presentations that people will remember as not being dull):

• Include interactive elements in your presentation – places where information passes both ways (not just from the presenter to the audience).
• Tell interesting stories. People remember stories more than facts, so it might be worth it to polish a few good (and relevant to the topic) ones.
• Start strong. Studies suggest a speaker has 30-90 seconds to get the audience’s attention, so don't waste it by ramping up – get right into it.
• Finish strong. Save something for the end. If Q&A is at the end, consider a 2-minute prepared closing that leaves the energy high, instead of fizzling out when no one has any more questions.

Lewis Black and clutter

Saw Lewis Black last night, reminding me of this great bit at the 2007 Emmys.



Clutter, whether on a TV screen or a Powerpoint slide, is an enemy of good communication. More stuff only gets in the way. And it gets in the way of the very reason you’re (hopefully) using Powerpoint in the first place: to communicate an idea or two.

So what can we learn from TV-screen clutter and Lewis Black’s rant?

• More visual stuff competes with each other and (more importantly) with you speaking.
• Your slides should complement what you’re saying, not compete with it.
• People tune out (at least part of their brain) when they encounter all that clutter. Why make your job harder?
• Don’t read bullet points (or is it: don’t use bullet points?).
• Network executives have short attention spans.