Why use visual aids?

Research has shown that visual aids:

• increase your persuasiveness

Presenters using visuals conduct meetings in 28% less time; increase audience retention up to five times and get proposals approved twice as often.

• heighten retention

When visuals are added to an oral presentation, retention increases by about 10 percent.

Students learn vocabulary twice as well when the instructor uses visual aids.

• improves understanding

People comprehend about seven percent of information delivered verbally but they comprehend 87% when the information is delivered both verbally and visually.

Tips for successful visual aids

1. Try to limit visuals to about 40 words and use large, bold letters that can easily be seen from the back of the room. Sans serif fonts such as Ariel and Comic Sans MS are more readable than serif faces such as Times New Roman. Feel free to use italics, boldfaces and colors to embellish points. And remember, consistency counts.

2. Your language should be punchy and concise with "you" appeal. Try "Opening Your Own Business" instead of "How to Open A Business." Condense paragraphs into sentences, sentences into phrases and phrases into key words. Use bullets to highlight key ideas. Avoid using a full stops at the end of your bullets except at the end of quoted statements.

3. Use a pictures or designs to quickly and colourfully convey an idea. The advent of clip art has made conceptual visuals commonplace but don't throw in clip art just to have clip art.

4. Charts and graphs are useful to show relationships among variables at a glance. Whether you use a line, bar, pie, organisational, flow or table chart, remember to focus on the message, not the numbers. A descriptive title such as "Sales results show significant rises" will be much more effective than "Sales 2000." Using action words such as "grow," "decline" and "trend" effectively show change over time.

5. Once you have compiled your presentation, check it and double-check it. Little undermines your credibility faster than typos, misspellings and factual errors.

6. When your presentation is finished, it's time to start practicing. Pace yourself. The average time a slide should be on screen is 40 to 90 seconds. And keep in mind, the average attention time span of an audience can be as low as 8 minutes.

And one final way to ensure your messages leave the meeting room - have hard copies of your presentation available as handouts.

Helpful Hints

• Keep your visuals simple. Avoid clutter. Use large, bold fonts.
• Check your presentation room beforehand.
• Use clip art judiciously.
• Proof-read and edit with care.
• Have hard copies of your visuals available as handouts.
• When making a PowerPoint presentation, have a backup of your visuals printed on transparency film to insure against unexpected equipment problems.

 

For more information on our other PowerPoint presentation skills pages click on the links below:

PowerPoint presentation course agenda

PowerPoint presentation tips and techniques

Using visual aids in PowerPoint presentations

How to use transitions in PowerPoint presentations

http://www.tsuccess.dircon.co.uk/presentationskills.htm

http://www.tsuccess.dircon.co.uk/presentationcourse.htm

http://www.tsuccess.dircon.co.uk/presentationnerves.htm

http://www.tsuccess.dircon.co.uk/presentationtraining.htm

Back to TOP