Use Less Text

A few weeks ago, I introduced 2 Design Changes that Follow All Brain Rules.

Use Less Text

Everyone has heard the phrase, "A picture is worth a thousand words." Turns out, it's true. Written language has evolved over the years from cave drawings and paintings. Indeed, text is nothing more than a series of very simple pictures. For this reason, the brain takes considerably longer to decode strings of text (i.e. bulleted sentences) than it does single words or short statements. In other words, pictures are faster at conveying information than words – at least when we're talking about concepts and ideas (detailed data is difficult to convey via words or pictures – which is why scientific papers turn to tables and charts).

Here are two steps you can take to use less text.

1. Whittle your titles. Take the time to reduce slide titles down to their core meaning. This will remove clutter and superfluous information that can confuse and distract your students. Use short, concise titles to get the main point across. Then fill in the gaps while lecturing. This allows the student to understand the context which aids in better retention of the details you provide.

Oftentimes, I find a lot of redundancy in slide titles throughout a lecture. For instance, "Using Peer Mentors to Drive Students Toward Deeper Learning and Productive Reflective Writing" could become "Peer Mentors Improve Learning."

"What Do Professional Learning Communities Have to Do With Factoring A Trinomial?" could become "Math and Society" or "The Role of Math in Society."

"A History of the Culture of Tea in Britain" might be simplified as "British Tea Culture."

2. Remove bulleted text. Bullets on a slide often serve only as lecture notes to prompt the professor and are not necessary for the students. Sure, they need to know the information, but you're going to explain the important concepts during the lecture. If you need those notes while you're presenting, cut and paste them into the Presenter Notes in your slideware. You can then print off the slides as lecture notes or use Presenter Mode while in class. Remember, guns don't kill people, bullets kill people.

Makeover: Steven Baugh, Honored Alumni Lecturer

Every year, each college at BYU selects an Honored Alumni to return and speak to current students and faculty. Last fall I was privileged to work with Dr. Steven Baugh in preparing his presentation as Honored Alumnus of the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. Dr. Baugh is director of the CITES department of the McKay School of Education, and has taught math for a number of years. His interest with mathematics began with his father, who was also an accomplished mathematician and high school teacher. Working with Dr. Baugh was easy from the beginning, not only for his humility and willingness to accept suggestions, but also for what he provided me with as an outline. Unlike most presenters, Steven had not not yet created a set of slides. Instead he had simply typed up an outline of the things he wished to discuss. This made it very easy for us brainstorm the most effective presentation and create slides that best illustrated his message.

I have included a selection of slides as well as an animated version for you to view below.

Steven Baugh Honored Alumnus Lecture

2 Design Changes That Follow All Brain Rules

Dr. Medina's Brain Rules are fascinating. Not in the same way that Brian Greene's eloquent description of The Elegant Universe is fascinating. No, it is much simpler than that. In fact, Brain Rules are fascinating because they are simple. While they are based on years of complicated scientific research and their implications are far reaching, Dr. Medina's rules to survive at home, work, and school are so simple that it is fascinating that we didn't think of them earlier. In a similar way, it is nearly laughable to me that PowerPoint slides are still designed in a complicated and counter-intuitive manner. Due largely to the misused hierarchical organization techniques that are the foundation of Microsoft's templates, professors, lecturers, and students continue to fill their slides with line after line of boring, bulleted text.

Fortunately, the steps to improving lecture slides are as straight forward and obvious as are Brain Rules. In fact, there are two design changes that can be used on any slide deck to instantly improve it's effectiveness.

  1. Use Less Text
  2. Use More Images

In upcoming posts, I will explore each of these in more detail and give practical examples of how they can make an impact. For now, see how you can apply them to your lecture slides.

Slide Makeover: Mentoring Workshop

I was asked just a week and a half ago to help two faculty members prepare some slides for a conference they would be presenting at in Montreal. I knew it would be a challenge, but after hearing a little bit more I was very interested and agreed. Then I gathered a few more details. They were presenting a 4-hour workshop in under 2 weeks! I realized this would be a much larger project than I anticipated. But it has been a great learning experience.

Pat Esplin and Dr. Stefinee Pinnegar were great to work with. They were excited about their work and accepting of my suggestions and changes. Pat openly admitted to me upfront that she used PowerPoint as her notes. "We have too much text and too many slides! I know we're going to have to cut something out." I was excited to hear that because it meant we were on the same page. Even better, when I asked why they called me, they said it was because they both had seen my work at the ELL Symposium a month or so ago and wanted their presentations to look similar.

Here is a sampling of the slides before and after the makeover.

Mentoring Worshop Before

You can see an animated version of the final slides here:

Mini-Makeover: Chemistry Lecture

I was studying for my chemistry class when I got the sudden urge to see how difficult it would be to redesign just a few slides from a recent deck on Acids, Bases, pH, etc.

pH Lecture Original
pH Lecture Makeover

Altogether, this took around 20 minutes to recreate the 2 slides (which then became 5).

I began searching for images on iStockPhoto.com but then realized I should try looking in Flickr's Creative Commons library. It was so easy! If I have more time, I will continue to do mini-makeovers of my lecture slides or other presentations I come across.

Slide Makeover: Utah's Changing Demographics

I was involved in the preparation for the first annual English Language Learners Symposium at Brigham Young University, which was held three weeks ago. My job was to redesign the PowerPoint presentations of the keynote speakers for Friday's session. I couldn't have been more willing, especially because the man in charge of the symposium told me he wanted the presentations to be beautifully designed, with a lot of visuals, a lot like the TED Conference. As you probably know, I am a huge fan of the TED Talks and have read Slide:ology, which is the presentation design bible written by Duarte Design, the master design firm behind many of this year's talks.

I redesigned three presentations for the ELL Symposium, and will post some of the slides here. I was unable to see the presentations – or even speak with the presenters – beforehand. In some cases I was able to communicate with the presenters during the redesign, but to varying degrees.

[All of the content (ideas, data, etc.) in these presentations is the property of the respective speakers and is not to be copied in any form. The images are from iStockPhoto.com or otherwise licensed to be used in these presentations.]

The first is a presentation by Dr. Pam Perlich of the University of Utah, who spoke about the changing demographics in Utah. She is an excellent speaker with a great deal of experience. I am pleased to say that she embraced my design ideas and changes.

BEFORE:

Perlich Before
View more documents from Nathan Cashion.

AFTER:

Perlich After
View more documents from Nathan Cashion.

The How

I imported the original PowerPoint file into Apple Keynote. For most of the slides, I simply applied the theme I chose, and made some additional tweaks. However, for many of the charts, I had to either re-enter the data into a new chart in Keynote, or copy the graph itself from PowerPoint, paste it into Keynote, and then apply the theme.

The Why

1. In general, I removed any unnecessary text from the screen and relocated it into the notes which would show on the presenter's display, like this:

Picture 1.png

This would allow the audience to focus on Dr. Perlich as a speaker, rather than let them be distracted by all of the text that just begs to be read.

2. I also used stock images that exemplified the point she was trying to make.

3. Lastly, I redesigned the graphs and charts to have a similar feel and to be less distracting to the eye.

Stroke of Genius

The one slide that still gets me excited is title slide. I searched and searched for an image that represented the demographics of Utah – maps, county maps, even forest trees sprouting up from a map of Utah – but couldn't find anything satisfactory. I decided to just start over, and this idea came: I opened Google Earth, exported an image of a view of Utah, then asked one of my co-workers to highlight the border using PhotoShop. While the image doesn't represent demographics per se, I think it is a subtle yet attention-grabbing visual.

Lessons Learned

The importance of working with the speaker was made very clear to me. Dr. Perlich had some specific reasons for designing her original slides the way she did, and actually taught me a few things about working with charts and data.

Since I wasn't able to see Pam present before designing the slides, I wasn't familiar with her pace and timing. After seeing her present using my slides, there were a handful of changes that I would have made. First, I would have used different transitions. Her pace was such that the Dissolve transition that I chose really slowed her down. It is probably the least distracting transition, but when the pace is picked up it can be severely handicapping.

Second, some of the most important points she made (which could not have been represented by data) were not in her slides at all, but were poignant stories she told. If I had been aware of this, I would have inserted a blank slide to draw the audience's focus to her, or perhaps put up another powerful image that illustrated her anecdotes.

More to come soon.