I start every “Presentations That Drive Action” workshop by asking participants about their presentation pet peeves and best practices. Often the pet peeves are simply the opposite of the best practices. But asking for pet peeves lets the PowerPoint haters get it out of their system! A typical Zoom Annotate session looks like this:
Here are the top 10 design pet peeves, taken from a sample of over 1,000 students, listed from highest to lowest frequency. Each pet peeve generates noise that interferes with your signal and increases the cognitive load required to digest your material. You will recognize these pet peeves in the presentations you’ve sat through. How many are you making your audiences sit through?
- Having Too Many Words
We call these slides “walls of text.” When your audience sees these slides, they either tune out because it’s overwhelming, or they stop listening to you because they are reading the text. Too much information makes it difficult for your audience to keep up, and clutter detracts from your point as listeners struggle to pin down relevant information. “Using few bullets that illustrate main takeaways” was tied for the #1 most identified best practice, which demonstrates the importance of focusing on the vital few words to emphasize your point.
The key to avoiding this pet peeve is to “word diet” your text. Ask yourself these questions: Do I need to include this information to communicate my point? Can I make this point with fewer words?
To make your writing leaner:
- Just cut. Prioritize your bullets and cut from the bottom. If cutting causes you pain, move those bullets to your speaker notes.
- Create frameworks. If you have more than 5 or 6 bullets, group them into categories and put them in a framework. That way, your audience can get the high-level concepts then decide if they need to digest the sub-bullets. Frameworks have the added benefit of creating an engaging visual.
- Use efficient styles. Use active voice (Bob turned on the TV) instead of passive voice (The TV was turned on by Bob). Replace weak verbs (The team is focused on product development) with strong verbs (The team develops products).
- Shorten common phrases. “To” means the same as “in order to.” “Soon” means the same as “in the not-too-distant-future.” Avoid tautologies like “general consensus,” “advanced planning,” and “end result.”
For more on word dieting and other ways to reduce noise, see If It’s Not Communicating, It’s Irritating.
- Inconsistent Formatting
Inconsistent formatting distracts the eye and wastes time. We use formatting to draw the audience’s eyes to the critical parts of our content. If formatting is inconsistent, our audience may focus on less important elements. We use consistent formatting to tell our audience that similar elements are related or are in the same hierarchy. Because humans pay attention to patterns, when similar elements have inconsistent formatting, our audience may wonder why you broke the pattern.
To ensure consistent formatting:
- Leverage a standard template. Make sure the template has a good “bone structure.” Most corporate templates I encounter look great, with fancy cover slides and decorative elements evoking the brand. But they don’t always build the essential design elements into the slide master, like line spacing, hanging indents, and a title block with sufficient space for a precise sentence title. If you’ve ever had to worry about page numbers showing up on all content slides consistently, you have a flawed template.
- Build a slide library. As part of the template or a separate document, collect examples of clean layouts so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel with each new presentation. If everyone starts from the same three-box framework slide, you ensure a consistent format and save time.
For more on leveraging templates and slide libraries to create consistent, professional-looking presentations, see What Amtrak Can Teach Us About Presentation Standards.
- Jargon or Acronyms
You can’t assume that everyone in your audience is familiar with your topic or industry. While acronyms and jargon act as a time-saving shorthand for the in-crowd, some in your audience will spend mental energy wondering, “What does that mean?” The probability of confusion increases when your presentation is forwarded to someone who was not in the meeting.
To ensure jargon doesn’t confuse your audience:
- Use language that is accessible to everyone. Put yourself in your audience’s non-expert shoes. If you can say it without jargon, you should.
- Recruit a proofreader. Have someone less familiar with your subject matter review your presentation.
- Define acronyms (and jargon terms) the first time you use them. For example, “John Polk & Associates (JPA).”
- Hard to Follow, Overly Complicated Storyline
If your audience isn’t clear about your key points, it’s far more likely they’ll draw incorrect conclusions or tune you out entirely. “Using a cohesive storyline” and “incorporating story elements” ranked as the #7 and #10 best practices, respectively. Having a villain (the problem), a hero (your idea as a solution), and a climax (how your solution will solve the problem) within your presentation will make your presentation clear and engaging. The #5 best practice was “choose a headline that summarizes the key point.”
To keep your audience tracking and engaged:
- Choose storylines that lead with your answer. If you don’t “spill the beans” by giving your recommendation early, your audience is spending mental energy guessing where the story is going.
- Use sentence titles that summarize the main point of each slide. Clear, concise sentence titles ensure your audience gets the main point and remembers it. Also, the act of writing clear and concise sentence titles will help you strengthen your story and your strategy.
For more information on effective storylines, see Don’t Make Your Audience Guess “Whodunnit?” For more information on using sentence titles, see Death to the Category Header.
- Unaligned Elements
Misaligned text boxes, graphics, and bullet points make your presentation look unprofessional. As with inconsistent formatting, unaligned elements distract your audience from the content and increase the cognitive load to digest it. The less forgiving in your audience may assume you lack the software skills to align objects, or you just don’t care.
Here’s a text from someone who worked on my team illustrating this point:
To ensure your objects are aligned and distributed with consistent margins:
- Turn on guidelines. Set guides for right, left, top, and bottom margins. Then make sure all elements are within the guides. Also, set guides for your title block, so it’s always in the same spot.
- Use the “align” & “distribute” tools. When moving objects, the red auto-align lines pop up to help ensure alignment. However, these lines are imperfect. If you’re not careful, an object can shift as you release the mouse button or line up on a different element than you intended.
- Move the “align” & “distribute” tools front and center. Unfortunately, PowerPoint buried the alignment tools in the menu hierarchy. Customize your ribbon or Quick Access Toolbar to make them easier to access.
- Gratuitous Pictures or Charts
We’ve all heard the cliché, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” What we should say is, “A relevant picture is worth a thousand words.” Tied for the #1 best practice was “using impactful visuals that support the conclusion.” “Use one image per slide/one main idea per slide” came in 8th for best practices, which shows that separating your ideas into simple slides can make them easier to understand.
To ensure your pictures and charts are relevant:
- Only choose pictures that directly communicate your point. It’s not helpful to use pictures just because they’re not words. Your picture of well-dressed professionals around a conference table is not helping your audience understand your key points.
- Avoid “giraffe” charts. A giraffe is a chart that is interesting to look at but doesn’t give information relevant to the story. Sorry for the diss, giraffes. I didn’t invent the term!
- Go big. For slides with a picture and minimal text, take the picture to the edges. If there is no text or a solid color space for text, have the picture take up the entire screen, like this:
- Flashy Animation and Transitions
Keeping things simple is more important than trying to “wow” your audience with a crazy transition or moving gif. Motion is the most overt way to draw your audience’s attention. But then they can’t pay attention to you. And with much of our presenting life on Zoom now, motion is problematic when video connections are weak. With video delays, the motion looks jerky, not smooth.
To use motion effectively:
- Keep animation simple. For complex slides, I use the basic “appear” animation to bring in slide elements to make them easier to digest.
- Avoid using transitions. Checkerboard transitions or slides that fade into each other are typically gratuitous noise. There are two exceptions to this rule. A transition can illustrate an analogy. For example, a client used the “shatter” transition when making a point about breaking the glass ceiling. The “morph” transition in PowerPoint can highlight that you are zooming in on a section of your diagram.
- Stop the gif. After a few cycles, have the motion stop, so your audience can focus on your speech.
- Too Many Fonts
By setting standard font sizes for titles, bullets, and text boxes, you can minimize distractions that make your presentation look unprofessional. “Simple, clean design” came in 3rd for best practices, which applies to many pet peeves on this list. “Readable font” came in 9th, so skip the comic sans font for something that is accessible to everyone.
To simplify your fonts:
- Set consistent font types and sizes in the slide master. See Pet Peeve #2.
- Choose one font type. Many templates and style guides recommend using different font types for title blocks vs. text. While this can help your audience distinguish the two, it creates a massive standardization challenge. Besides, font size and color do a fine job differentiating titles vs. text.
- Use software tools to eliminate non-standard fonts. In PowerPoint, “Format/Replace Fonts” can find and replace fonts across all pages. The “Format Painter” lets you copy formats, including fonts, from one element to another. Unfortunately, Google Slides does not yet have a similar function. Two PowerPoint add-ins have more powerful font management features.
- Power-users has a One Font feature that lets you standardize on, you guessed it, one font.
- Slidewise identifies all the fonts in your presentation, including fonts embedded in the template that you haven’t used, and lets you change them individually or all together.
- Typos
Coming back from lunch during one of my workshops, I noticed I had misspelled a word on a flipchart at the beginning of the session. I asked the group how many people noticed, and half the participants raised their hands. I asked, “And what did you think?” A guy in the back of the room said, “I thought you were an idiot.” Not exactly the first impression I’d hoped to make. Even if your audience doesn’t think you are an idiot, typos leave the impression that you are sloppy, and then your audience will question your spreadsheet or your recommendations.
To avoid typos:
- Read your text out loud. Reading will slow you down and help catch issues.
- Use grammar checking tools. Always spell-check your work as the last step, and use tools like ProWritingAid or Grammarly to catch issues built-in spell-checkers don’t.
- Have someone else proofread your work. Unfortunately, no grammar checker is perfect, and you are too close to the material to catch the typo you’ve skipped over for weeks.
10. Bad or Too Many Colors
There are many ways that color can cause problems for your slides. Using too many colors is distracting. Arbitrary color choices mean your audience is looking for meaning where there isn’t. Bright/neon colors grab attention, causing distraction. In one of my workshop exercises, I show the “before” version of a graph. The noisy element that gets the most visceral reaction is a thick, neon red border. One participant said, “That border is literally giving me a headache.”
To ensure color helps your communication:
- Use the same color for common elements. See Pet Peeve #2.
- Align color choices with meaning. Don’t use red unless you want your audience to think, “This is important” or “This project is off track.”
- Use a simple color palette. Choose one or two colors for standard template elements. I like to use a primary dark color, like blue, and a secondary light color, like gray. Color palette generators like Adobe Color Palette or Coolors make it easy to create a color palette compatible with your core brand colors.
The data from this exercise illuminate the presentation design mistakes that your audience notices every day. You may have dismissed some of these items as “no big deal.” “If my audience can understand my points, these things shouldn’t matter.” You’re right. They shouldn’t matter. But they do for the thousand people who contributed data to this exercise. I think calling them “pet peeves” makes them sound insignificant. In French, “pet peeve” is “bête noir,” literally “black beast.” That’s a better image of the effect these issues have on your audience.
When you’ve added these best practices to your design repertoire, you will have presentations that look polished and professional, so your message shines through. The next step is to deliver your presentation. I will share the presentation delivery pet peeves and best practices in a future article.
This article first appeared in four parts on PresentationGuild.com
Thanks to Rachel Zeeve for collating the data for this article.