By Lindsay Lamb
Recently, Andrea and I were asked to create a mini-course on survey design for a virtual conference. Given our years of experience creating, researching, administering, and analyzing survey data, this seemed easy enough. We decided to call it Survey design 101. We were excited –this presentation was going to be fun! (Okay, that is nerdy, but we have to find things that motivate us these days!)
I got to work on the PowerPoint, and boy did I have a lot to say! I remembered all I have learned from my data viz heroes Tufte, Stephanie Evergreen (who just posted a great blog on changes to make to your powerpoint to take it form looking great in-person to looking great in a webinar), and Ann Emery. I used color purposefully, only included points I considered integral to the presentation and trimmed my content. Then I trimmed again.
I was also motivated to keep the presentation short. I wanted to ensure there was ample time for questions, and wanted to have some time for interaction – at least interactions over chat. I sent a draft over to our colleague to review and her feedback was clear, and also a little unexpected: remove bullet points (maybe have one or two per slide, but no more), and if bullet points are important, make them their own slide. Oh, and add more images and icons.
The icons and image piece was fine (you all know how much Andrea and I love icons and images) but I was worried about making my presentation too long by pulling apart the bullet points. It felt a little weird only having one sentence or thought on a slide, but what the heck. As always, Andrea helped by adding some flair to our slides.
Here is how we took one slide and pulled it apart.
…And here is how some of our slides looked after the revamp.
Importantly, all of the information is the same. The only difference is that the information in the first slide is pulled apart so each point can stand alone. If the point couldn’t stand alone, we removed it. We kept the ‘title’ of the slide (Pitfall #1 of surveys – Too long!) the same for consistency in all 3 slides.
Although I thought adding more slides to the presentation would make the presentation itself longer, the amount of time we spent discussing each point was the same.
As a final note, pulling apart information into multiple slides is even more important now as people are passively watching webinars rather than actively participating in-person during conferences. Unfortunately, our attention spans are even worse now that we are working from home (and if you are anything like me these days, you are likely watching a presentation while also helping your 5 year old with school, keeping your two year old from turning your dog into a Jackson Pollock painting, and ensuring everyone is quiet while your husband talks with state leaders), so keeping your presentation moving at a relatively fast clip will help with this issue… Maybe 😉