examples of very bad powerpoint presentations

examples of very bad powerpoint presentations

Analyzing the Pitfalls of Very Bad PowerPoint Presentations

1. Introduction to PowerPoint Presentations

First Impressions is a free newsletter about how we develop and communicate our ideas through a talk, a presentation, a speech, or a demo, by the co-founder of Catalyst, the leading speaker training company for startups, influential companies, and TED speakers. Each issue tries to help you nail the first 60 seconds, explain why the hard stuff is easier than the easy stuff, and start a conversation about better ways to tell stories.

So, what makes a powerful presentation? I believe that such a beast doesn’t exist. A presentation is a conversation, and it gains its force not from the correct intonation or the perfect phrase on slide three but from a relationship between the people talking. This structure is a detailed look at the BIG MISTAKES people make when giving slideshows. Broken down into elements, illustrations, and strategies, this structure will give anyone willing to use these ideas and techniques a head start on effective, fascinating, spellbinding presentations.

How should you begin a presentation? Will people love you if you thank them for introducing you? Will you win friends by telling the audience that they’re a great audience? People have questions about how to handle the middle of a presentation too. Some of them have questions about bullets, others want to know how to put stories to work. Do people really care about what makes an effective close, or are they really asking, “Can I make an exciting presentation that’s only one slide long?” And sometimes the audience is thinking they really should use slides, but they want to know how to use them well.

2. Common Mistakes in PowerPoint Design

Despite being a leading tool in the business world, PowerPoint is often blamed for ruining presentations at a number of venues, such as college classrooms. It is said to decrease student interactivity, increase the focus on lecturing, and reduce student attention. A significant number of critiques have been made concerning the software from a pedagogical perspective, and empirical inquiries supporting the instructional claims of educators who are passionate about teaching are uncommon. Based on evaluating 56 empirical investigations from the past six decades, we prove that there is no true or false principle regarding using PowerPoint in a college classroom. Many studies examine possible pedagogical and ethical variations as a result of an instructor’s use of technology-rich slides.

Phenomenal amounts of change have occurred since PowerPoint was first released in 1987 and when Edward Tufte and Guy Kawasaki penned the “10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint.” However, when opting for the software as a vehicle for your shared narrative, analyzing mistakes in design is the best place to start. Far too often, people are quick to create a presentation in PowerPoint due to the aesthetic convenience and curated templates. This approach often contains overreliance on the software’s novel features, i.e., bullet points, bold color scheme, pictures, over text, Quickstarter, 3D models, etc. More often than not, the presentations are impersonal and filled with jargon and clichés to save face, but in an attempt to connect and inspire, more damage is caused due to that genre. With this in mind, the habitual features are a convenient starting point in laying bare the deficiencies in a presentation made in PowerPoint.

3. Ineffective Use of Text and Visuals

Ineffective use of text and visuals: The most common form of causing cognitive overload in a PowerPoint presentation comes from making text-heavy slides. The presenter includes far more text on a single slide than can be processed, distracting listeners who are trying to process both the words and what the presenter is going to say next. Other slides are presented with just a few words followed by several bullet points, which again draws listeners’ attention away from the speaker and the presenter’s speech to scanning to see what might be next on the slide. Limiting the number of points and examples on a slide with just enough words to help the visual learner stay attentive can encourage the listener to grasp the key points made by the presenter. The use of text and visuals in a slide presentation is often a difficult balance for presenters. Visuals such as icons, pictures, and photos are effective in presentations if they are relevant and support the point of the speaker. Conversely, the use of decorative visuals that have no relevancy or a stock photo used as a space holder can be a distraction to the presenter.

Stock photos are used to titillate, rather than contribute relevant information. They can backfire and “represent the lowest form of misuse of the image element in a presentation, possibly nailing the coffin on your ability to effectively communicate and persuasively sell your story.” Lines, textured backgrounds, and 3-D graphs with no shadows can also, though visually interesting, detract from the key points the presenter is trying to make. The use of a visual inconsistent with the speaker’s words, referred to as conflicting message cues, can jar the listener’s attention away from the speaker to the inconsistency on the slide. In the end, a speaker should plan accordingly when needing to include a visual during oral communication. Balancing between text and images will be situational.

4. Poor Organization and Cluttered Slides

Some presenters sabotage their own PowerPoint presentations in ways that can prove catastrophic. Audiences cringe at some presenters’ unavoidable, awkward gaffes, and no one wants to be that presenter. This is especially true of presenters who make these gaffes intentionally, shocking or puzzling the audience with content that’s virtually impossible to understand or follow. Some presentations are intentionally incomprehensible. These presenters have turned making bad PowerPoint presentations into an art form. They demonstrate their intentional awkwardness at meetings and competitions. While amusing, their hijinks are extraordinarily effective teaching tools.

Poor organization can impede audiences’ understanding of the presenters’ messages. With nine nodes, numbered a through i, the organization of this example is poor. The nodes may represent key points, and the presenter may state them clearly, but a, b, or c are not sub-points of any entry point. Instead, the presenter should establish a clear and simple structure. Whether chronological, problem/solution, or for/against, the structure should provide a guide to help the audience follow the presenter’s logic. And with no fewer than 341 words on a handful of slides, the content of this example is impossible to comprehend. Bullet points and sentence fragments illustrate a disjointed thought process. The presenter should instead animate or segment the slides and reduce the text.

5. Lack of Engagement and Interactivity

Audience Involvement

A very bad thing is to be a PowerPoint or Keynote audience member and not be engaged. We miss out on understanding, we are drained—and it must be even worse delivering and not knowing if our audience is catatonic or just plain checked-out. Overhead projection was also an inspiration to an emerging class of performing artists in the mid-1960s, and a new cultural form called PechaKucha was developed in Tokyo in February 2003. In general, engaging the audience has always been a good strategy in teaching the craft of oral presentation. Engaging the audience in your talk, however, can be as difficult for professional presenters as it is to teach.

A surefire way to fail in “engaging customers in your answers” is to rely entirely on lectures, no matter how “good” the presenter might be, or on ex-cathedra manipulations both narrative and cognitive, no matter how suave. The recurrence of this approach implies an overall lack of understanding of how to design and deliver effective and productive information. Using PowerPoint as the basis for a speed-talking narrative—a sales pitch, abstract, advertising, good news or bad—is based on a cognitive strategy structured to monopolize attention, reduce the spatial aspect of transmission, and elicit unsolicited answers to questions that were not sincerely asked. Note to presenter: Please desist from asking rhetorical questions more than once in a conversation because you quickly start sounding like a politician in full spin—purposeful or naive. Interaction, rather than unchecked reciprocity, does tend to build quicker bridges to understanding, assuming one’s goal was not to isolate, diminish, or alienate.

6. Conclusion and Strategies for Improvement

Conclusion

In general, while people delivering presentations are not professional designers, they deserve better PowerPoint guidance. Designing a PowerPoint presentation is not just an art but also a science, with empirically validated, evidence-based determining factors. Instead, because they are given a resource that seems as though it ought to be intuitive, students are being left to their own devices. Both students and potential employers should understand the pitfalls that have been outlined here to be aware of where commonly used techniques fall short and what could be improved upon. This will help in discourse about strategically utilizing PowerPoint.

Recommendations to Improve PowerPoint Effectiveness

Design Strategy: Remove the word “never” from a guiding principle like “never use bullet points”. We offer ideas in place of coercion. Aversive, fear-inducing content may make learners less receptive to considering other practical guidelines. But blending informative theory with eye-catching graphics, formatted text, and suggestion structures is instructive and engaging. If students walk away with nothing else, it should be that PowerPoint design extends beyond transfer of information and alteration of text settings. Many users falsely believe that what “looks good” feels good. Text format blends into visual feeling and seems perfectly acceptable. Visual learner theory dismisses the fact that 90% of the population is not truly “visual”. You need text. People need to see what they are hearing, and hear what they are reading. Finally, PowerPoint display and design features should be used to draw unnecessary portrayal attention, change color, or emphasize important “take-away” points. Make good use of your time. Keep it simple. Save PowerPoint in-depth for another time when you’re presenting the meaning of each statistic, figure, and graph. Early career practitioners who hope to quickly develop six months’ worth of working knowledge about PowerPoint presentation glue may find the advice contained in this paper wonderfully useful.