What Does Research Say About Good Slide Design?
By Scott J. Allen & Maria Soriano Young
We all want to design presentations that stick—presentations that live in the minds of our listeners and stick with them. One aspect of how well this works (or doesn’t) is how your slides complement or detract from this objective. And, as usual, this concept connects directly back to the choices you make during the design process. So before you begin putting your slides together, ask yourself: “What do I want this presentation (both what I say AND what I show on my slides) to accomplish?” There are a few directions you can take.
The Assertion-Evidence (AE) approach to slide design suggests that slides with an assertion should be accompanied by a graphic or image. This approach juxtaposes the Common Practice (CP) approach to slides, which in large part relies on the default settings of the software (e.g., bullet points, header/title).
In one study, an audience who viewed an AE-designed presentation displayed “superior comprehension and recall of information,” as opposed to an audience who viewed a CP-designed presentation (1).
In another study, scholars found that “having slides with large amounts of text is one of the main signals that the visual aid is not helping the presentation. The number of images (TNI) is the second most important feature. The impact of this feature is positive, meaning that a large number of images correlates with better slides. The number of tables (NT) is third with a negative relation (more tables, lower grade) and the Maximum Font Size (MAXFS) is fourth with a positive relation (larger font, higher grade)” (2). In other words, excessive text and tables limit impact, and images and large font correlate with better slides.
To explore this topic in greater depth, we suggest that you take a look at the following resources:
We hope this quick post opens your eyes to some of the research behind some of the popular notions that “pictures are better” or “less text is good.” These assertions undergird the work of experts like Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte. We encourage you to spend more time investigating this topic on your own!
Citations
Garner, J. K. & Alley, M. (2013). How the design of presentation slides affects audience comprehension: A case for the assertion–evidence approach. International Journal of Engineering Education, 29(6), 1577.
Luzardo, G., Guamán, B., Chiluiza, K., Castells, J., & Ochoa, X. (2014, November). Estimation of presentation skills based on slides and audio features. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM workshop on multimodal learning analytics workshop and grand challenge, 41.
We explore this topic and others in our book Captovation: Online Presentations by Design.