Designing slides to manage the audience's cognitive load

Slides should be designed to let the audience get the content with minimal processing; presenters need to do the extra work to make sure their design minimizes the cognitive load.

I have already posted some thoughts on using information design techniques to create slides. This post is an elaboration collecting a few videos I've made on the subject. I don't like generalist "presentation training," for reasons I already explained, but these are very specific information design ideas.

Guiding the audience's attention. When there are multiple elements on a slide, one of which is being discussed, there are many ways to single out that element. I prefer to deemphasize the rest of the slide, though keeping it for context:

(Added on Feb. 17, 2012) Occasionally I use a magnification animation in conjunction with the the highlighting (instructions here):

An elaboration on this idea of guiding attention, with the added element of pictures as metaphors or complements to the main point:

Progressive builds. I think that there are too many builds and animations in presentations, but sometimes they are warranted. In response to Les Posen's request for ideas, I proposed the following enumeration of business inputs:

Rationale for these builds: (1) each type of business input is given prominence separately, allowing the presenter to discuss that type of input in turn; (2) by keeping two of the other inputs as context (though deemphasized), the audience keeps in mind the idea that inputs are used in conjunction with each other.


Slides to support handout-based presentations. I disagree with Edward Tufte on whether to use projected materials to support handout-based presentations. My position is that using slides as a chorus of the handout-based presentation helps make the presentation event robust to intermittent audience attention. In other words, people who space out of the discussion for a while can get back in tune with the rest of the audience by looking at slides that emphasize the important part of the handout.

Other posts on presentations in this blog.

Other posts on presentations in my personal blog.