To help us to identify the source of the problem we decided to contrast what the experts had to say and actual user practices. Following this line of reasoning, we reviewed the literature and created sets of guidelines from each expert. These guidelines included the main practices to be followed and to be avoided according to each expert.
| Edward Tufte | |
| Use sentences, not bullet lists | |
| Avoid deep hierarchies | |
| Relate data and analysis | |
| Use sentences and paragraphs | |
| Use consistent terminology and units | |
| Don't use conclusions as titles | |
| Use enough space to explain your ideas | |
| Use a minimum of template junk | |
| Doc Searls | |
| Use graphics | |
| Use numbers to make lists memorable | |
| Research thoroughly, source abundantly, give examples | |
| Make comparisons | |
| Richard Mayer (via Cliff Atkinson) | |
| Use pictures and brief text to support narration | |
| Avoid redundancy in audio and visual presentation | |
| Keep information on a slide to one topic | |
| Avoid extraneous material | |
| Write a clear headline that explains the main idea of every slide | |
| Break up your history into digestible bites | |
| Move text off-screen and narrate the content | |
| Use visuals with your words | |
| Remove anything that does not support the main idea | |
| Gordon Shaw et. al. | |
| Set the stage | |
| Introduce the dramatic conflict | |
| Reach resolution | |
To complement these guidelines, we created a questionnaire that asked users about the reasons they used PowerPoint, their public speaking experience, and their familiarity with PowerPoint’s features.
We gave the questionnaire to classmates on April 5th. We had 20 replies, two of which weren’t considered for our analysis because the participants had not used PowerPoint.
From March 29th to April 14th we collected sample PowerPoint presentations. We sent an email to the SILS community asking them to share their PowerPoint presentations with us. In our message we requested people to select a presentation that could be considered as representative of their regular work. This had the purpose to mitigate the bias when selecting a PowerPoint for submission; however we are not able to measure this. Our request also included 4 questions about the age of the presentation and the time spent on its preparation.
We received 15 submissions. Eight of them (53%) were prepared in 2003 or before. We consider this as an indication that people actually looked for them in their archives and selected what they considered a proper one. From the answers we could also know that the time admitted for preparation ranged from 1 month to a “couple of hours”. And the average presentation length was 28 minutes.
Finally, we proceeded to contrast PowerPoint samples against our experts’ guidelines. We performed 3 types of inspection: run the PowerPoint as in an actual presentation, inspected it in the editing mode and reviewing the tools used, and printed a hard copy for analyzing the information structure.
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