Steven Kosslyn outlines 3 goals you should strive to attain in any successful online PowerPoint presentation:
- Connect with your audience
- Direct and hold their attention
- Promote understanding & memory
Goal 1: Connect with your audience. Do not include too much or too little information and select information and use language appropriate for your particular audience.
Goal 2: Direct and hold attention. Attention is drawn to areas that are perceptibly different, so leverage design principles in your online PowerPoint presentation by using contrasting colors and images where appropriate. Make differences big and obvious. People will naturally tend to group similar elements into a single unit, keep them focused on the topic at hand.
Goal 3: Promote understanding and memory. Messages are easier to remember when they are clearly understood. For example, the word Red presented in green text violates this principle as would a graph about the homeless population in Los Angeles, decorated with a background image of people playing with their healthy dogs. Remember that people expect any change in your online presentations, such as a sudden interjection of a joke or a story, or a visual change in slide color or an animation, etc. to have meaning, and when they don’t have meaning this becomes noise and distracts them from being able to remember the message. Audiences can only retain a limited amount of information in an online presentation, so limit the amount of messages within a presentation.
