Why Your PowerPoint Slides Are Irritating Your Audience

Many business presentations today engage in an audience-unfriendly practice of using slides that are overloaded with text. It’s tempting to think that this could be helpful to an international audience. But for the majority of internationally mixed audiences whose language skills are only sufficient enough to follow along with the speaker,  using text simultaneously will be a distraction.

More precisely, we know from our own experience that reading bullet sentences while trying to follow the speaker’s talk at the same time is a difficult exercise. That’s because text projected onto a screen is not really “visual support” per se, even though we’ve come to think of it as such. Indeed, there’s nothing visual about it at all.

Text, at its most basic level, is a symbol (letters, sentences) of another symbol (spoken words). In essence, reading requires the mind to decode symbols at two layers of abstraction with each subsequent layer moving at a slower processing speed. Objects we see (i.e. a tree) travel to our eyes at the speed of light. Spoken language arrives at our ears at the speed of sound, and then needs to be decoded into what is known as meaningful sound (i.e. language). Reading is extremely slow compared to both seeing and hearing. That’s why during a presentation, looking at image-based visuals is effortless, because it moves the audience upward into its fastest cognitive processing mode. Showing text does the opposite. It moves the audience down into its slowest processing mode, which makes it nearly impossible to keep up with the speaker.

It is helpful if the words we read create a fluid mental picture in our head, which is what a story in a novel does. But most business presentations are a collection of fragmented ideas, written as bullet sentences, that the audience has to read while following the presenter at whatever tempo he speaks. Most of us can’t do it. We either listen or read but not both.

In addition, text slides can be just awful to look at. Even our own slides are probably not designed for the listening audience in mind. In most cases we use them as a script for ourselves, reducing the presentation to an absurd exercise in PowerPoint karaoke.

So what can we do to help our audience? To begin with, we need to tightly structure our presentations in a way that flows nicely and possesses a coherent storyline. This alone will eliminate most of the need for using text slides. This also means that we need to learn the key points of our own story, and not rely on text slides for our talking notes. This is not to say that good speakers do not use visual support. When they do, however, they are genuinely visual (i.e. diagrams, charts, relevant pictures).

We can also follow two very simple guidelines for designing slides offered by graphic designers. First, we begin by asking ourselves where we will really need them. Where will it be absolutely necessary to help the audience understand a point? Usually, it is needed to make some complex or complicated idea easier for the audience to understand. In other cases, slides can be used to show the audience a compelling example of what you’re referring to (i.e. a cut rainforest, a blanket of smog over a city, or a before-and-after comparison). Whatever the content, it will be easier for the audience to process and remember your idea if they can see it – and not just read about it. All consider if your slides are attractive to look at.

Next, you will need to ask if will be able to illustrate the idea effectively or whether you’ll need to get help. Visuals should not be too complicated themselves – in a way that stresses the viewer. When looking at a visual, typically a PowerPoint slide, it should quickly provoke an “aha” effect, a “now I understand” response. If it doesn’t fulfill this simple criterion then there’s a good chance the slide(s) needs to be redesigned or even discarded.

Again, text slides are fine as handouts and should be given to an international audience for later reference. But the text is a distraction during your talk. It will sabotage an otherwise powerful presentation. In the end, it is best to stick with an old Chinese saying when it comes to using visual support: a picture is worth a thousand words. Inverting that formula only leads to confusion and irritation – in everyone’s culture