How do you make PowerPoint more visual?
They say a picture is worth a thousand words and research certainly shows this to be true. Visual information is 3 times easier to remember than oral information. What’s more, visual and oral information used together is 6 times easier to remember.
Why is it important to make PowerPoint more visual?
- Three days after hearing a piece of information we will only remember 10% of it. Add a picture and we can remember up to 65%.
- 90% of information transmitted to your brain is visual. Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster by the brain than text.
With research like this in mind, using both imagery and text in your slides is essential. It can help your viewers to retain more of the information that you are presenting to them.
If your presentation is full of slides packed with bullet points and blocks of text, your audience’s attention can drift. They’ll either read and ignore the presenter. Or skim read and not do either listening or reading very well. With lots of text, you risk losing your audience’s attention, and perhaps for good.
The better we are able to visualise something the better we will be able to remember it in the future. So using visual information alongside the main points of your message with help the audience to visualise the content later on.
Of course, keep pictures relevant to the subject matter and not distracting from your message. This is vital if you want your audience to follow and be able to recall the message! Adding visuals for the sake of it or just to make a slide look pretty can confuse your audience and make them wonder why the visual has been used in the first place – ultimately distracting them from what you are trying to say.
Creating the right visual information and using your visuals in context can greatly impact the effectiveness of your presentation.
It’s recommended to make one point per slide: and therefore we need to harness the power of the right visual for that one point.
Certainly, delete surplus text from all your slides, but it isn’t always easy to create the perfect visual. That’s where expert help can come in. Photoshop, Illustrator, such manipulations of vector infographics or photographs can be essential to craft the right visual for your slide.
Make PowerPoint more visual by avoiding lists
Let’s return to deleting surplus text. Once filler and puff words are gone, you might want to consider laying out any remaining text in a format that isn’t a list.
Read ways to avoid bullet points article for some simple layout alternative designs.
