| Please, can we kill Powerpoint's Beanie people once and for all - now! | | Date Created: 28 Jun, 2006, 06:28 PM |
 It's conference season around the world.
There have been so many tech conferences this past few weeks with more to come, and now as far as academia is concerned, the season is about to start in the Northern Hemisphere summer.
Australian academics will soon take their limited leave and get out of our rather cold winter this year, and head off to conferences in the Mediterranean and the US.
I've lately found myself giving workshops and helping individuals with their presentations for these conferences. I've been sought out to help them stand out from the crowd, their having seen me present in my own Apple Keynote-inspired way, heavy on the graphics and movies, light on text.
This approach, which will be familiar to you if you've visited the blog before, remains startling to most academics who are far more comfortable dealing with bulleted text, charts and graphs to get their message out, rather than the more expressive visual images. The fact that they likely created their presentations on a device using a graphical user interface (GUI) is probably lost on them.
Powerpoint, and to a limited extent, Keynote still encourages users to create bullet points. Open any Keynote theme to create a new file, and the second slide invariably has two elements of text, which I reproduce below for your entertainment: |
|
This is Slide 2 of the stack that Keynote creates in one of its provided themes, and almost without fail all of the themes' slide 2 which Apple offers are the same: you get a Header and a single bullet point, the latter in the style selected to match the theme, which can be changed via the Inspector panel.
My thought is that there is still a demand for bullet points on slides.
I did a little research on bullet points, and apart from slideshow presentations, you're more likely to see them used in magazines and newpaper advertisements which are pitching or selling a product or service, and extolling its virtues in the least amount of visual real estate as possible.
Take a look at the slide below, which I used in a recent workshop to help people begin the weaning off process from bullet points. I wanted to give them permission to think differently about their slides and their messages.
By asking them to compare their high end research outcomes or idea generation to the selling of domestic products, I was hoping to have them pause from reflexively employing bullet points for all slides, and save their use for a better context, say at the end of their talk where they may be making recommendations for future research. |
|
I actually brought this slide into my talk after showing a random Powerpoint stack which was like a battlefield, so filled was it with bullets flying in and out.
So I brought it forward and allowed Keynote to bring in the yellow text in one go, and then tick each line every few seconds automatically.
I think I made my point as the group asked how else to present complex ideas which was the subject of the rest of the talk following my brief introduction to the history of slideshows and how new technologies are helping to change this history.
|
 Now if there is one other "hand-me-down, let's not question it" aspect of Powerpoint apart from bullets and awful animations and inappropriate sounds that really gets to me - and screams out the presenter hasn't studied presentation skills - it's the ubiquitous beanie people.
This comes to mind as I help a colleague prepare for her presentation in September in New Zealand. Her ideas are complex, and not easily presented as text on slides. Instead, we've discussed her just presenting with occasional pictures and headers in large text on her slides.
But Powerpoint has her by the throat and she wants to do it her way, the way she is most comfortable. Fair enough, but while I've been able to help her simplify some her slides, there in the middle of the stack when we get to her theories of the current so-called epidemic of depression in youth, they appear - the beanie people.
|
|
| You've seen them before so here's another one, used to advertise a whole expensive collection of them, complete with human characteristics. as if you need to be reminded. |
If you ever catch me using one of these in a slide show - other than to beat the crap out of it in a talk on presentation skills - you have my permission to shoot me.
My colleague is using a gathering of beanie people to illustrate increasing numbers of young people suffering depression.
To my eyes, it diminishes the importance of her message. I really can't take seriously any slide that contains beanie people. Now you might be different and indeed enjoy seeing them in all their various poses and positions, but to my eyes, they convey emptiness of imagination, and dare I say it, intellectual laziness.
When there are so many new sources of free and inexpensive high quality images available to use with advanced search engines to help track them down, and where apps like Keynote exist to easily manipulate the images to better match our ideas, there is no excuse for insulting the audience's capacity for imagination by using beanies to represent people or ideas.
|
Now, if you've come here looking for beanie people you might be dismayed to see me so disliking of the critters. Perhaps in your eyes, they're cute and always bring a smile to your audience.
In which case, we direct our presentations at very different audiences. But the truth is that many people do like using them on their slides, and perhaps they're also the same people who use the collection of clip-art which comes with Powerpoint for both Mac and Windows. I also abhor the use of clip-art, as you might imagine, but not quite to the same extent as I detest the beanie people.
|
 So lots of people like the beanie people, whose official trademark name is ScreenBeans. Invented by former Microsoft employee Cathleen Belleville, they are now part of her company, A Bit Better Corp, which she heads up along with Dennis Austin.
On their company homepage, they describe Screen beans thus:
"Those lovable Screen Bean characters have a knack for illustrating your ideas with just the right touch of insight and humor!"
Dennis Austin's name might be well known to you if you know your Powerpoint history, having designed Powerpoint 1.0 when it was owned by Forethought Inc. prior to the company's purchase by Microsoft around 1987. Back then it was called Presenter and only available for the Mac. Later, Forethought, which had employed Bob Gaskins to develop the concept of a visual presentation tool and who himself had hired Austin, took Gaskins advice and renamed it Powerpoint. I bet no one back then knew just what would happen to Powerpoint once it became part of Microsoft Office in 1990.
It eventually became Microsoft's most profitable acquisition, its first of many.
Gaskins maintains an exceptionally interesting homepage here, and is a must read for those wanting to know more about the history of presentation software.
|
If you go looking about the web you'll start to pick up on the backlash against mindless repetitive presentation giving.
And a newish interest in better ways to present data, ideas, concepts and information. Sans bullet points, clip art and bean people.
The commercial world is learning that learning is more than whacking an audience with huge slabs of text, supported in part by the "humour" of bean people to drive home the point the text itself can't.
... as if...
To my mind, the sooner we do away with bean people, having acknowledged they managed to get our attention in the early days of slideshows, the more likely we are to see an improvement in presentation style, and move one stop closer to killing Powerpointlessness.
Doing away with clip art would also be another step forward.
Clip art makes the audience work harder to decipher what the art is depicting, if there are any hidden meanings, and if it matches their way of making meaning of the world, or at least the curent slide they're appearing containing the drawing.
In contrast, vivid, accurate pictures convey meaning immediately, yet can then be studied and deconstructed according to the presenter's agenda. They create a far greater sense of audience presence and immersion in the presenter's story telling than clip art ever could.
It's possible you might have seen the picture before, but it's how the presenter places it in context that gets you to view the picture afresh. I don't think the same can be said for clip art, where the audience is more likely to comment on the presenter's lack of imagination in using the same old art seen in dozens of other slide shows.
|
One last thought about presentations, where I am happy to admit I got something wrong during a recent presentation and learnt something in the process.
As I was going through a recent presentation skills workshop, I made up "rules" as I went along. When I showed a Powerpoint stack from an Asian Aviation conference in order to demonstrate how NOT to present (you know, heavy on the animation, text in ALL CAPS and serif fonts, tiny yet pixellated images, etc etc), I skipped though to the end where I showed the expected "Thank You" slide.
I suggested a rule that such a slide not be included. But then one group member suggested that in Asia, it might be considered impolite to not formally thank the audience for their attention. Others who had presented in Asia agreed, and so we all agreed that travellers to lands other than their own ought to consider cross-cultural differences when presenting, and ask the symposium leader for the protocol associated with presenting.
I also suggested thinking about closing one's show with a "Any Questions?" slide. Is this a good thing, or again, one steeped in cultural differences. No harm I suppose in including one but not necessarily using it. |
 Here's one image you might want to think about putting on your last slide. Again, a vivid clear picture can convey meaning more rapidly and pleasantly than text, and this example (left) is one I found searching Google for images and the keyword "Questions".
Personally, I'd prefer to blank the screen, and turn to the symposium leader and simply state, "I'm happy to take any audience questions." |
|
|
|
