Edward Tufte's original comments began with an evaluation of the presentations made by NASA engineers to the Columbia flight staff about the ramifications of the damage that occurred to the Columbia's wing at take-off (8). This evaluation revealed a presentation almost systematically designed to confuse the audience about the severity of the damage to the Columbia's wing. Tufte expanded this analysis into a general critique of PowerPoint in a self-published work titled "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint".
In this work, Tufte argues that PowerPoint breeds bad presentations that are overly-general, prone to misleading statements and confusing hierarchies, and generally poorly suited to presenting statistical data. His primary attacks are on bullet lists and the low resolution of powerpoint slides. In his view, PowerPoint bullet lists compact statements to the point that they become overly-general, ambiguous in their meaning, and devoid of analysis and context (5). In addition, the low resolution of PowerPoint means that statistical data must be presented in such small chunks that related information is presented out of context and without meaningful analysis (16). Finally, Tufte decries PowerPoint "Phluff," the decorative "chart junk" that is found in many default (and user created) PowerPoint templates. He argues that this Phluff takes away valuable space in an already impoverished information medium (19).
Tuftes recommends that PowerPoint users keep their slide designs minimal, avoid bullet points, and try to use PowerPoint as little as possible. He reccommends paper handouts as the solution to low-resolution PowerPoint slides for conveying statistical information and high-resolution images. Finally, he asks PowerPoint users to refraing from reading from their slides, as this merely reinforces the information paucity in PowerPoint presentations (23).
Tufte's article produced a number of reactions from various groups and experts. One expert was Cliff Atkinson, a corporate media consultant who works with PowerPoint. Atkinson solicited the responses of several well known usability and media experts and published a short article "Five Experts Dispute Edward Tufte on PowerPoint" that summarized his interviews with them. For this project we reviewed two of these in particular: Richard Mayer, and Donald Norman.
Atkinson interviewed Dr. Richard Mayer, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara about his article "Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning" and his reactions to Tufte's article (Atkinson). Mayer's work looks at how cognition affects the design of multimedia learning tools, and in particular how the brain processes video and audio stimuli (Mayer et al 44). He reccommends taking advantage of the dual-channel processing ability of the human brain and using visual and speech to support each other (45). This means supporting a spoken presentation with representative visuals instead of repeating or summarizing information form the presentation in text. Mayer also reccommends keeping slides simple to avoide stressing the audience and priming them by providing contextual clues in slide headings to promote active cognition.
Atkinson also interviewed usability guru Donald Norman (Atkinson) who was critical of Tufte's article, arguing that Tufte was blaming PowerPoint for the lack of skill of its users. Norman argues that PowerPoint is about summarizing information, not analyzing it, and that it is well suited to this task. He shares several of Tufte's criticisms about bullet lists, but argues again that these are indicative of poor communication skills on the part of the user rather than a problem associated with using PowerPoint.
In his article Tufte cites an article from 1998 on corporate planning at 3M that touches on several of his points. In particular, this article details the "PowerPoint culture" at 3M and the effects bullet points have on communicating business strategies. The authors then discuss a process they developed for using narratives for presentations in place of PowerPoint (Shaw et al).
To round out our group of experts (Tufte, Norman, Mayer, Shaw et al) we selected an essay by Doc Searls (Searls) about creating good presentations in PowerPoint. This choice gave us a view that was unrelated to the debate over Tufte's article.
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