When you prepare to provide your next PowerPoint presentation, your audience need to be very first on your list of considerations. Regrettably, also a lot of presenters annoy their audiences. An on-line survey of 688 people today who frequently see PowerPoint presentations revealed the following top rated annoyances (item and what percentage of the respondents cited that item as one of their top three annoyances):
The speaker study the slides to us 62.%
Text so little I could not study it 46.9%
Slides tough to see for the reason that of colour choice 42.6%
Full sentences as an alternative of bullet points 39.1%
Moving/flying text or graphics 24.8%
Overly complicated diagrams or charts 22.2%
The best four annoying blunders are the exact same as a related survey done in 2003, suggesting that presenters are not getting a lot far better at presenting clear information and facts in an appealing manner.
The survey also asked for written comments in addition to the ranking and 415 men and women wrote in with extra concepts. PowerPoint-Agentur covered a wide variety, but most popular had been 3 regions:
1. Delivery of PowerPoint Presentations
Lots of audience members wrote to comment on how the delivery of the PowerPoint presentation was a huge difficulty. The areas of greatest concern had been:
a) The use of PowerPoint when yet another communication technique would have been better. Also numerous times it seems that PowerPoint is the default communication system and people have forgotten that a simple memo or 1-on-1 conversation would be a lot better.
b) The presenter is not familiar with how to deliver the presentation utilizing the gear. Comments cited the lack of expertise of several presenters on how to smoothly commence a presentation and maintain the flow going for the duration of the presentation when using PowerPoint.
c) The presenter is not ready to add to what the slides say. This seems to be brought on by the presenter not realizing the topic effectively sufficient, or the mistaken use of PowerPoint as a teleprompter where the speech is read to the audience (echoing the top annoyance in the ranking).
two. Poor Slide Design
Even when the presenter is prepared and knowledgeable, poor design and style of the slides causes confusion among audience members. They focused on these areas as the ones of most concern:
a) Poor selection of colors and fonts make the slides really hard to see. While a personal computer has the capability to make millions of colors and hundreds of fonts, not all of them must be applied together. Colors will have to have sufficient contrast to be observed and fonts need to be clear and basic in order to be read when projected. If the audience can not figure out what is being projected, the visuals are of no use.
b) Misuse of the Slide Master and Slide Layout leads to inconsistent look of slides throughout the presentation. Audiences are searching for consistency in the course of the presentation in the appear and basic layout of the slides. This tends to make it much easier to follow the presentation. As well frequently they are guessing as to what the subsequent slide will look like and forced to search on each and every slide for the relevant concepts.
c) Backgrounds should be clean and not distracting. Audiences find backgrounds that contain a lot of graphics, symbols and text distract from the data that is supposed to be central to the slide. They also commented on how stark black on white slides are also vibrant and require some uncomplicated colour and design to make them appealing.
three. Overuse of PowerPoint’s functions
Each version of PowerPoint seems to include much more and a lot more capabilities made to make it less difficult to add flashy graphics, animation and multimedia to presentations. And too several presenters assume that just for the reason that the function is there, they should really be making use of it. Audiences have been clear that use of animation to entertain rather of inform or adding multimedia audio or video segments to show off the presenters talents were unnecessary and absolutely took away from the message becoming presented.
Millions of Dollars Wasted on Annoying Audiences Every single Year
The respondents to the survey were also asked how a lot of presentations they see and how prevalent these annoying mistakes have been.. Just more than half of the respondents (54%) see 100 or a lot more presentations per year, creating them well qualified to identify how frequently these problems take place. And the news from this group of frequent presentation audience members is not very good. A single third of this group mentioned that additional than half of the presentations they see endure from these annoying products and another third of this group said at least a single in four presentations have annoying components. This suggests that a substantial percentage of the estimated 30 million PowerPoint presentations performed every day fall in to the annoying category. An annoying presentation wastes the time of the people today attending and causes massive rework as concepts are not clearly communicated. This wasted time adds up to tens of millions of dollars each and every year. And this is cash that can be saved by creating and delivering greater PowerPoint presentations.