The Three Slide Rule

http://blog.jgc.org/2011/09/three-slide-rule.html

by jgrahamc • 15 years ago

86 38 15 years ago

blog.jgc.org

skrebbel4• 15 years ago

Love it. However, I think that this does not apply to every situation. It's fine for presentations at conferences, or presentations designed to convince an audience of a certain view or standpoint.

But if you've been asked to research a set of options for viability, for example, things are different. You'll need bullet-points with highlights, tables with totals, and conclusions that summarize the main differences. Such things are very well presented with slides. I believe that this is the kind of stuff Powerpoint was originally invented for.

Similar stuff if I'm going to explain Coffeescript to a room full of C# programmers; I want examples, on slides.

There's probably more examples like these. The moment you want the audience to make up their own mind (which option do I prefer? do I want to use Coffeescript?), you need to present facts, not just a story. I strongly doubt just telling people how cool Coffeescript's => operator is will get the point across very well.

If my audience wants hard facts, I'm going to put it on slides, whether or not my CEO has a 3 slide rule.

struppi2• 15 years ago

You don't ever need bullet points. Also, I don't really like lots of code on slides (maybe one or two lines are ok), better code live in those situations (yes, this is possible, I have done it a couple of times). You should always have a story, even if you tell facts.

skrebbel4• 15 years ago

> You don't ever need bullet points.

This intrigues me. How would you present summaries or pros/cons of options?

I'm talking e.g. a presentation that compares various web UI frameworks for a to-be-developed project that involved multiple parties / departments. Not the typical startup situation no, but common nonetheless.

lloeki2• 15 years ago

> It's fine for presentations at conferences

Even then, the approach taken by Lawrence Lessig (hundreds of slides, very rythmic), makes the point across. Yet the slides alone are worth nothing without the presenter.

The biggest mistake is to think that the slides contain the message, a mistake often shared both by the presenter and the audience. How many times have I heard "can we get a copy of those slides?". If I ever hear this question it means I have failed as a presenter.

It's useless and missing the point to ask for the slides. Slides are not the vector of the argument, you – the presenter – are; Slides are merely here to outline the point.

Nobody reads the bullets and listen to you at the same time. Nobody will read those tables projected on that small screen at a jittery resolution. It could be bogus data and no one would care yet their mind will focus on it instead of what you say. You built a table to compute a total, so only the total matters. Guess what? Just show the total. Your discourse will expose what the bullets say, your discourse will sum up what's in the tables. Then you nail it by showing the total slide. If people do want the table to check values then its place is not in the slides, it's in a report. A document with content that you hopefully provide when it matters. Slides on the opposite should basically have a very low content ratio in contrast with your speech, or people will simply be distracted from you and read. Worse, they will unconsciously wonder why they're here listening to you when they could just as well read the content by themselves, and end up getting bored.

fsniper2• 15 years ago

"The biggest mistake is to think that the slides contain the message, a mistake often shared both by the presenter and the audience. How many times have I heard "can we get a copy of those slides?". If I ever hear this question it means I have failed as a presenter." I can not agree more. A presentation must be a tool to support your ideas, your information, your thoughts. Not the way around.

skrebbel4• 15 years ago

You're really kicking my leg here. I see your point and cannot refute it, but it feels bad.

snowtiger• 15 years ago

3 slides? too sharp... however, author expresses nice opinion - we tend to work way too much for technical stuff and waaaay too less for the actual content and message of the presentation

friggeri• 15 years ago

I have a similar rule, but my metric isn't slides but words: for a 20 minutes talk, I try keep the word count in my slide deck under 100 words.

More generally, I strongly believe that slides are only here as an illustration of what I say, they shouldn't be that useful without me talking in front of them.

As an example, here is a slide deck I used for a talk I gave at the MIT a few months back: http://vimeo.com/24471964

alexholehouse• 15 years ago

I feel like slides should almost act like a prompt to me (the speaker) as opposed to presenting critical information. I am also a feverish believer that throwing out a huge amount of technical content in a presentation is (often, though obviously not always) pointless. Unless you're speaking to a very specific audience, numbers should be presented in a graphical form which makes it easy to get the gist in a single glance.

This is just my experience, and admittedly is largely limited to the academic world, but when someone stands up and has a table with five columns, five rows, and numbers to eight significant figures I immediately switch off!

trocker• 15 years ago

Excellent article. Its so true - these days people concentrate on increasing the slide numbers to make it appear as if there is a lot of content in it.No wonder, people hate most of the presentations these days.

'Words' and 'Expressions' along with a meaningful message are the best ways to communicate yourself across to a room full of people. Some visual material is as much important but only 'useful' material.

Rather than wasting your time on thinking 'how to fill N number of slides', it will be a lot more useful if we know our material, practice our material and choose our words carefully. Practice how to engage audience, than trying to make awesome visuals to enchant them with your slide making skills.

Why 'three slide' rule?

Lets make it a 'one' slide rule! :)

hm2k• 15 years ago

If you employ a 3 slide rule what will happen is people will cram everything onto 3 slides.

The best presentation I ever did followed these steps:

1. Type out everything you want to say. Learn it. It should be easy to learn because you should know your subject.

2. Type out prompts as bullet points for each point your need to get across. Learn them, you should only refer to them if you absolutely need to.

3. Use slides to illustrate your point. You should NEVER be reading directly from or using slides as prompts.

You are the presentation, not the slides.

rnadna• 15 years ago

I used to use powerpoint for my classes. A few years ago, something messed up, and I could only use the blackboard. Guess what? Best. Class. Ever. Now, my scheme is to teach the way people taught 100 years ago. I talk to my students. I write important things on the board (at, it should be said, the exact same speed as they can take notes). I have a stack of slides with illustrations of things that are too complicated to draw on the board, and I select from this stack occasionally. (Those slides are also on the course website, so students can print them if they want to insert them in their notes.) All of this works very well. At first, the students are freaked out by the fact that they have to attend class, and pay attention, and take notes. But, in the end, quite a lot of the class reviews point out that the blackboard is much better than powerpoint.

skrebbel4• 15 years ago

I wonder whether all this would have been different if a ppt file (and similar) wasn't commonly called "a presentation" but e.g. "a deck".

mixmax• 15 years ago

A presentation is someone telling a story. it's an emotionel Endeavour, not a presentation of facts. if it was you could just write a report or send out a memo. As a presenter you need to bear this in mind.

Like any other story it should be engaging, interesting, fun and memorable. It should also have a beginning and an end. If you think of your slides in this context things change. Their goal is to amplify your point, make a technical point clearer, or something Else to underline what you're saying. The main focus should be the speaker, not the slides.

If you want to see a true Master look at some of Steve Jobs keynotes. There are three kind of slides:

- pictures to show what the product looks like.

- short bullets to give an overview (a phone, an iPod, an internet communications device)

- simple graphs to show a point or a trend.

hugh3• 15 years ago

Not always. For instance, a scientist gives oral presentations at conferences, and goes to see oral presentations by others, because verbal communication with visual aids is a more effective form of communication than written. I can get a better idea of what someone else is doing by having them explain it to me for ten minutes than by spending ten minutes reading their words on paper... even though I can read words far faster than they can speak 'em.

I hate being overwhelmed by slides, so I've tried adapting some of these sorts of techniques to scientific talks, but I just can't. I'm not selling something, I'm trying to communicate huge slabs of information in limited time. A talk with visual aids has a greater information bandwidth than one without.

Besides, redundant text on your slides is an important insurance policy, to make sure you don't forget to say something. If you've got time to practice your talk over and over then this isn't important, but if you write your slides two days before the talk and practice it once in your hotel room then they're helpful.

shithead• 15 years ago

Otherwise, it's like writing the introduction to a book before you've written the book.

Isn't that the standard operating procedure?

fsniper2• 15 years ago

I really liked the idea, "a presentation, being about content, not about slides". But enforcing 3 slides per presentation is ridiculous.

A presentation should be balanced between content and visuals. Content should be presented in a manner supported by visuals. You liked the graph because it was essential and supporting the information being transmitted to you.

Also, filling a presentation with unnecessary information and talk would turn the audience off and bore them.

So stopping and thinking before doing any writing down or creating any slides is good behaviour leading good presentations.

omegant• 15 years ago

I have noticed something, when I watch a movie with subtitles ( I am from Spain) even if it is in english, if I pay attention to the text I " disconnect" from the cinversation taking place. My attention gets focused in reading and I find difficult doing both at the same time. I don't see it as a good way to learn a language. I never thought about powerpoints though. It is an interesting idea....

NY_Entrepreneur• 15 years ago

The main advice is old: "Typing is no substitute for thinking."

dhimes3• 15 years ago

jgc has two articles on the front page of HN, and both are sweeping generalizations that, in essence, miss the point entirely. In this one, about presentations, he fails to understand that how you present is not to be separated from what you present. I too have heard lectures where somebody reads from notes. They are often awful.

Without writing my own tome (which would obviously be flawed), I'll simply implore you to consider the following question when putting your presentation together: Are you trying to teach or to persuade?

If persuading, keeping it entirely verbal may be effective (if you are good at such things). However, if teaching, most evidence points to opening up as many sensory channels as possible to get the information across. Usually, that means verbal and visual.

The most important thing is to structure your talk so that the audience's mind is engaged. A simple trick to help is to ask questions (even if rhetorically), then reveal the answer.

In other words, it's how you use the slides, not whether you use the slides.

Same with pie charts, btw (the other offending article).

EDIT: emphasis

jgrahamc• 15 years ago

The teaching vs. persuading argument is very interesting, and I'd urge you to write about these thoughts even if they are, to use your words, flawed.

dhimes3• 15 years ago

Briefly, and off the top of my head, if you are trying to persuade, you want people to only consider the information you present. You are trying to show people a single line of reasoning that leads to an outcome that, by the time you get there, will seem "obvious." It actually works in your favor if they can't keep all of the argument in their head, because then they'll only be focusing on what you are saying right now (and jumping to the conclusion you've compelled) and not looking for ways to examine the veracity or any limiting conditions of what you are saying.

On the other hand, when teaching anything with a conceptual framework (that is, not just showing people how to install Wordpress), it's good to show not only the result, or examples of "truth," but also counterexamples. It's often useful to help define a concept by also saying what it is not. You want people to see all of the evidence and to be able to provide their own reasons as to the conclusion. You are clear, open, and even emphatic about assumptions or limiting conditions (at least to the point where it causes no harm to leave out and would only increase confusion if included).

If you happen to be so lucky as to have a room full of people who all share the same conceptual framework and vocabulary, then standing up and telling a story can also be an effective teaching tool. Mostly, however, we are being introduced to the vocabulary as we are being taught, and multiple channels of reinforcement are very helpful.

jonnathanson• 15 years ago

If a presentation can be fit into three slides, then why use slides at all? At that point, it seems better suited to a one-page Word doc. To wit: one of the most effective short-form idea communication tools I've ever seen is the infamous "P&G Memo" used by Procter & Gamble. It's worth Googling, absorbing, and pressing into service. You'd be amazed at how pretty much any complex idea can be condensed into a single page -- not to mention how much more readily it will be received and digested, which is the entire point of communication.

As for Powerpoint and Keynote, reserve those for actual presentations (i.e., delivered live in front of an audience). Try to avoid them as handouts or passed-around documents, unless requested by the recipient (And even then, politely push back if possible; most people have been conditioned to ask for PPTs when they don't really need, or even want them).

Game_Ender• 15 years ago

The "P&G Memo" is very similar to Toyota's "A3 Process". The whole idea is to clearly and concisely explain (with visuals) a complex technical point. In Toyota's case it's so that at a meeting everyone can just spend a few minutes reading the report, instead of 30-60 minutes in front of a presentation.

DanielBMarkham• 15 years ago

I've become a big fan of Beyond Bullet-points.

I had a large client where I was doing a lot of Agile training. As part of that, I created a series of workshops around putting together a backlog when starting a project. There was no text -- it was simply pictures and me telling a story with them.

Two very interesting things happened. First, the students loved it. I'd talk/present for ten minutes or so, then we'd do stuff. Repeat and rinse. There was never a big wall of text for them to absorb, and I never read from anything. They were always doing stuff. And since it was stuff related to their specific project, even better.

The second thing was completely unexpected. The customer had a very mixed response to my material! It seems that they wanted something with a lot of text so that they could "teach" it themselves. A narrative, story-focused presentation that was integrated into the team's work was simply too difficult. They wanted a presentation that read like a textbook.

As far as being a good consultant goes, I'm not sure if I did a good thing or a bad thing in terms of the customer's long-term goals. But as far as the people I'm helping? I'm sticking to pictures and stories. Nobody wants to live through another Powerpoint hell, and I have no desire to put anybody through it again.

scott_s• 15 years ago

If I'm presenting my research (which is what I do almost every time I present), then I need to do two things: teach the audience about what I did, and show it was worth it with performance results.

As dhimes points out, teaching is different than persuading. If I'm going to teach something, I need figures. Words alone are not enough. In high school and college, my teachers would fill black-boards with figures and equations while they explained things. The first thing my intro to physics professors would always do is draw a picture. That's what I'm doing, except I don't draw my figures one-the-fly as they did. Think about when you first learned the various sorting algorithms. Would you have understood them without watching someone work through examples, moving numbers around as the algorithm progressed? This is very much the same thing.

As for performance results, I need to show multiple graphs that test various aspects of the system to give the audience the impression that everything works as advertised. (Just an impression is enough - they'll read the full paper if they're interested in being thoroughly convinced.) Just showing the graphs isn't enough, of course. I always take the time to explain what the experiment was in the first place, what the axes are, what each plotted line means, and which direction is "good" (for example, if it's scale-up, high is "good"). Finally, in case none of that sinks in, I explicitly tell them, "What we learned from this graph is: ___."

These things are probably going to require more than three slides.

eldina• 15 years ago

I majored in a different field, but am now in the last part of an education in software design. At my present school, I have come to despise slides for anything but short presentations. In particular, the use of slides as the main ingredient in lectures is a disease. It is a general rule, rather than an exception at this place, that lectures consist of flipping through slides being almost verbatim copies of the material in the used text book at a rate of 0.75 slide/min on average during 90 minutes of lecture. Lectures add no value this way, but it seems like lecturers use "producing" slides as an alibi for having prepared a proper lecture.

neonkiwi• 15 years ago

A great read on the topic exists in book format, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, by data visualization expert Edward Tufte.

Part of this book is freely available, discussing the involvement of PowerPoint in the Columbia disaster:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

The entire book is short, and only $7 from the author:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp

michaels0620• 15 years ago

One of the major issues with slides is that too often they are designed to be usable without the presentation. Often times they are emailed to people who were not in attendance.

You end up in the worst of both worlds: a presentation where the presenter is nearly irrelevant (I can read slides too) and notes that are spread across too many slides to be useful.

It takes extra work, but developing one slide set for presentation and another set of materials (not necessarily slides) for reference works 1000x better.

skmurphy• 15 years ago

An article or other write-up is a better "leave behind" alternative. You can include all of the points you made that were not on the slides and even a FAQ to substitute for audience questions.

rzezeski• 15 years ago

I agree in general with the sentiment but don't like rule of an absolute # of slides. To this day one of the best presentations I've ever seen had 500+ slides and is an example of what a good presentation looks/feels like.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/archaeopteryx-bowkett

enduser• 15 years ago

I thought this was going to be an article about a new kind of slide rule. As in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule

moderation• 15 years ago

My no longer maintained list of the the impact of Powerpoint is at http://sooper.org/misc/ppt/

The Three Slide Rule

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