What Annoys Audiences About PowerPoint Presentations?

When you prepare to deliver your next PowerPoint presentation, your audience must be 1st on your list of considerations. Unfortunately, as well quite a few presenters annoy their audiences. An online survey of 688 people who consistently see PowerPoint presentations revealed the following prime annoyances (item and what percentage of the respondents cited that item as 1 of their best 3 annoyances):

The speaker read the slides to us 62.%

Text so smaller I could not study it 46.9%

Slides challenging to see since of color selection 42.6%

Full sentences as an alternative of bullet points 39.1%

Moving/flying text or graphics 24.8%

Overly complex diagrams or charts 22.2%

The top rated four annoying mistakes are the identical as a comparable survey completed in 2003, suggesting that presenters are not finding significantly superior at presenting clear info in an appealing manner.

The survey also asked for written comments in addition to the ranking and 415 people today wrote in with extra tips. The comments covered a wide variety, but most common have been three regions:

1. Delivery of PowerPoint Presentations

Numerous audience members wrote to comment on how the delivery of the PowerPoint presentation was a big issue. The locations of greatest concern had been:

a) The use of PowerPoint when one more communication technique would have been greater. Too a lot of occasions it seems that PowerPoint is the default communication system and individuals have forgotten that a uncomplicated memo or 1-on-1 conversation would be substantially superior.

b) The presenter is not familiar with how to deliver the presentation utilizing the gear. Comments cited the lack of expertise of numerous presenters on how to smoothly get started a presentation and keep the flow going throughout the presentation when utilizing PowerPoint.

c) The presenter is not ready to add to what the slides say. PowerPoint-Agentur seems to be triggered by the presenter not recognizing the subject properly sufficient, or the mistaken use of PowerPoint as a teleprompter exactly where the speech is study to the audience (echoing the leading annoyance in the ranking).

2. Poor Slide Style

Even when the presenter is prepared and knowledgeable, poor design and style of the slides causes confusion amongst audience members. They focused on these places as the ones of most concern:

a) Poor selection of colors and fonts make the slides hard to see. Even though a computer system has the capacity to create millions of colors and hundreds of fonts, not all of them really should be utilized together. Colors ought to have enough contrast to be observed and fonts want to be clear and straightforward in order to be study when projected. If the audience can not figure out what is getting projected, the visuals are of no use.

b) Misuse of the Slide Master and Slide Layout leads to inconsistent appearance of slides in the course of the presentation. Audiences are hunting for consistency in the course of the presentation in the appear and simple layout of the slides. This tends to make it easier to adhere to the presentation. Too typically they are guessing as to what the subsequent slide will appear like and forced to search on each and every slide for the relevant suggestions.

c) Backgrounds really should be clean and not distracting. Audiences discover backgrounds that contain various graphics, symbols and text distract from the data that is supposed to be central to the slide. They also commented on how stark black on white slides are too bright and will need some simple color and design to make them appealing.

three. Overuse of PowerPoint’s capabilities

Every single version of PowerPoint seems to include more and additional options created to make it easier to add flashy graphics, animation and multimedia to presentations. And too quite a few presenters believe that just mainly because the function is there, they should really be employing it. Audiences had been clear that use of animation to entertain as an alternative of inform or adding multimedia audio or video segments to show off the presenters talents have been unnecessary and certainly took away from the message becoming presented.

Millions of Dollars Wasted on Annoying Audiences Every Year
The respondents to the survey were also asked how lots of presentations they see and how prevalent these annoying errors were.. Just more than half of the respondents (54%) see one hundred or a lot more presentations per year, creating them effectively qualified to identify how normally these problems occur. And the news from this group of frequent presentation audience members is not very good. One third of this group mentioned that much more than half of the presentations they see endure from these annoying items and a further third of this group stated at least one in four presentations have annoying elements. This suggests that a significant percentage of the estimated 30 million PowerPoint presentations completed each day fall in to the annoying category. An annoying presentation wastes the time of the folks attending and causes enormous rework as tips are not clearly communicated. This wasted time adds up to tens of millions of dollars every single year. And this is money that can be saved by producing and delivering much better PowerPoint presentations.