Google CEO - How to Make Simple, Stunning Presentations

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Google CEO Sundar Pichai advises to focus on the visual presentation of information and leave as little text in the presentation as possible.

“Stories are best told with pictures, so we try to avoid slides with lots of text and bullet points,” Pichai told Google's annual developer conference.

In his own presentation, the abundance of free space on each slide, the absence of unnecessary numbers and words, is immediately striking. This presentation of the material greatly facilitates perception.

Less words. More pictures

Cognitive scientists have discovered that we're not as good at multitasking as we think we are. Our brain cannot do two things at the same time with the same high quality. We cannot read the text on the screen and listen to the speaker without losing some of the information.

University of Washington biologist John Medina, who studies how the brain processes information, advises adding fewer words and more pictures to presentations. “Our visual memory works amazingly well. Just hearing some information, after three days we will remember only 10% of it. And if there was a picture with her, we will remember already 65%,”he writes in his book“The Rules of the Brain”.

Shrink and shrink again

When you want to create a visually appealing slide, the less is better rule of thumb.

Presentation design guru Nancy Duarte advises to rely on the so-called rule of three seconds. According to him, if the audience did not understand the essence of your slide in three seconds, the presentation was made too difficult.

Each slide in your presentation is like a roadside billboard. When we are driving, we have only a couple of seconds to take our eyes off the road and perceive the information on the shield. The same is true for your listeners: they will only look at the slide for a few seconds, so the information on it should be presented as simply as possible. Think about it, when was the last time you saw a billboard with a bulleted list?

Of course, lists in PowerPoint are the easiest to create, but they are no use at all. TED curator Chris Anderson recommends making a separate slide for each item on your list in his book. Moreover, from the point itself on the slide, there should be only one sentence or in general only a picture.

So cut, cut, and cut back on your presentations. This method works for Google - it will work for you too.