The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint

1. Introduction
2. Literature Review
3. Methods
4. Results
5. Conclusions
6. Citations

Conclusions

Users proved to be proficient using PowerPoint tools. They chose from PowerPoint templates or created their own. Users both drew in PowerPoint and imported their images to illustrate their content. They changed the font type and size. They changed the background colors and images. They introduced transitions to set the pace of their presentations.

However, the quality of the content and the structure given to the information failed in several ways:

1. The resolution of pictures, images and charts was poor.
2. When data was provided, it was not contrasted or compared to help the audience to understand it. (58.3% didn't use any sort of contrast)
3. The majority of the users (53.3%) preferred a list of bullets instead of full sentences when explaining their points. According to Shaw (ref) this practice removes context and analysis thereby introducing ambiguity and reducing detail, thereby impoverishing the communication process.
4. Careless organization of hierarchies (bullets and headings) confuses the audience about relationships between different aspects of the information.

PowerPoint slide templates have a very consistent structure with a title and body where the body can be either textual or graphical. Text in PowerPoint is automatically formatted as bulleted lists on most of the slide layouts it provides. In this sense, PowerPoint forces the user to structure their content around lists of short statements (as we saw in our sample slides). If the presenter uses this layout to create his presentation, there is little incentive for them to provide the audience with additional informational value. However, moving beyond this trap is as easy as selecting a new slide layout. Tufte argues that PowerPoint forces people into using bullets, this obscures the fact that PowerPoint also lets the user present and even create graphics to support their content.

We saw that users were familiar with the tools that PowerPoint provides; learning to avoid those that reduce the quality of their presentations requires only that they recognize their bad habits and correct them. PowerPoint in no way forces users into bad presentation styles, but it does make it easy.

PowerPoint users need to be aware of their audience and the information they want to present. They need to choose the presentation format that connects the audience to their content. Sometimes this means using bullet lists, sometimes this means using charts and graphs, and sometimes this means not using PowerPoint at all.

In a sense, one of problems with PowerPoint isn't the tool itself, but rather the expectation that the tool should always be used when giving a presentation. The primary criticism of PowerPoint experts is that it is used as an outliner rather than a presentation tool. In essence, PowerPoint is used to aid the presenter rather than the audience. If there wasn't the expectation that PowerPoint would be used for a presentation, we might see fewer of this type of presentation which provides no additional information to a presentation but merely duplicates the content of the presentation.

PowerPoint is a good tool when it is needed, but many times it used merely because it is expected to be used.

What we would do differently?

There are several things that we would do differently to make this a more meaqningful comparison and evaluation of PowerPoint:

• The sample should include a better variety of PowerPoint users. SILS students and faculty could be considered as moderate to experienced users. While Tufte makes no distinction in his criticisms with regard to user experience, it is possible that the problems he mentioned are more likely to be made by PowerPoint novices then experienced users.
• Analyze if cultural background is an important influence in the construction of information structures. Linguistic and cultural differences could have an effect on the way that users organize the information in their presentations.
• Broaden the spectrum of the experiment and ask the users to create a presentation based on piece of information we provide. This would let us see how the users approach the creation process.
• Improve the correlation between expert's guidelines and questionnaire. Our goal was to have evidence about best practices and actual practices, but our questionnaire and our guidelines did not correlate as closely as we would have liked.

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