Is PowerPoint evil?

23 September 2009

The feature article in Research (June 2009, Issue 517 www.research-live.com) on advice for presenters is full of good, if pretty standard fare on what makes a great presentation. It draws from many sources and includes an interview with Hans Rosling which I have written about before.

Amongst all the points made (for example, “the focus of any presentation should be the audience”), there is not much mention of chart design in the article beyond an early reference to ‘death by PowerPoint’. Edward Tufte, the visualisation guru, coined this phrase along with ‘PowerPoint is evil’. While he talks about PowerPoint as the primary reason behind ‘chartjunk’ that can be ‘smarmy, chaotic, incoherent’ , I think he does the software a huge disservice. Read one of Tufte’s articles here.

PowerPoint is criticised unfairly by people because they see the software as the problem when I believe it is the person designing the presentation who is at fault.

When I started out in research my first employer had only just started using software to show simple histograms or pie charts where previously protractors and coloured pens were used to show data on acetates. The article in Research prompted me to look back at a sample of charts from about five years ago to see what I was doing (I couldn’t face going back 15 years). I’ve changed the text for confidentiality:

It’s not pretty. Compared to the charts we use today, they couldn’t be more different (which is probably a huge relief for clients). In comparison, this is a slide from our paper on Virtual Ethnography at this year’s MRS Conference:

I recognise these two examples were designed for different purposes – one shows lots of data, the other makes a single point. That said, I would never have produced a chart like the commonality one 5 years ago. Back then, ‘Act on the commonality’ would have been a bullet point amongst several others, with accompanying metrics with statistical differences highlighted. All in very, very small text.

The point is that chart design can easily undermine an important message. We’re often shown work by our clients that other agencies have conducted on their behalf. Absorbing the content without the benefit of the author/ presenter is always tricky, but some stand out from the others because care has been taken to think about the way the content has been put together to support an argument. Central to this is design. It’s clear to see which companies take design seriously and which don’t (or at least don’t consider it). This isn’t just the world of research. Slideshare is a great way of uncovering people’s ideas, but it’s also a great window on how people put their slides together.

We don’t have the benefit of engaging design agencies to do our data visualisations for us such as Duarte Design (she helped Al Gore put his brilliant visuals together for ‘An Inconvenient Truth') but as an industry we have to take responsibility for what we show to help create memorable debriefs.

This short presentation by Jacek Utko at TED explores not only how design can improve newspapers, but also your product or brand. The impact of design on newspaper circulation is really interesting and has strong parallels with where I think we often go wrong as an industry.

In the UK, the research industry has a fairly poor reputation amongst outsiders (actually even insiders…). I would suggest that this is in part driven by the materials we use to get our messages across. No-one wants to look at 50 pages of complex data charts but it still happens. Squinting to see text that is written in 9 point italics is hardly a pleasure yet it still happens (see above).

Research magazine really missed a trick by not emphasising the importance of what people see from their agencies. This isn’t to say the look of a deck is the most important thing, but a great presenter can be seriously undermined by crappy visuals.

Patrick Massey
Posts: 12

RE: Its the presenter!
Reply #2 on : Sun October 11, 2009, 08:27:18

Hi Ray - I didn't want to misrepresent your piece in 'Research' so thanks for the clarification. And yes, it does start with the presenter! Thanks for posting.

Ray Poynter
Posts: 12

Its the presenter!
Reply #1 on : Mon October 05, 2009, 20:52:20

Great post Patrick.
One quick point about the Research article, it was the feedback from a survey of what audiences felt was needed, not what I felt, and their number one priority was the presenter, not the presentation.

That being said I agree with most of your points above.

My starting point for any presentation is to assume that you will present it without any visual aids. From there, decide which bits would benefit from something extra, then put the something together.

I am a great believer in rehearsing material. A process which should result in changes to both the presentation and the way it is presented.

Write a comment

Required fields are marked with *.