Summary: To make your audience remember your key takeaway, draw them in with easy and clear ideas that make them willing to put in the effort, but when you get to that one main point—your key—make them work for it.
Being a business student, I see more than my fair share of horrible presentations. Students tend to use Power Point as a building tool, using titles as place holders and then filling in the pages with bullet points until the slides look full enough. Very little thought goes into design, or layout, or font, or story - unless there’s one person that’s willing to sacrifice their own personal time to “pretty it up”. The result is a lot of text heavy presentations that no one wants to sit through, and certainly won’t remember.
Since I spend a lot of time trying to simplify ideas in my presentations so that my audience will actually pay attention, enjoy, and maybe even remember what I’m trying to say, I was particularly interested when I read about perceived effort in Alexei Kapterev’s book “Presentation Secrets”.
In one experiment, two groups of students were presented with instructions for an exercise. One group received the instructions in an easy-to-read font (Arial), and the second group in a difficult-to-read font (Brush Script). After reading, each group was asked to estimate how difficult they thought the exercise would be and how much time it would take. Readers in the first group assumed that the exercise would take on average 8.2 minutes to complete, whereas readers in the second group though that it would take nearly twice as long, 15.1 minutes. There first group also thought that the exercise would flow quite naturally, and the second feared that it would be a drag.
In this specific case Alexei is referring to fonts such as the common comparisons between serif fonts (those with flourishes at the end of each line) versus sans-serif fonts (those without flourishes), but the idea expands to most visuals. How we present our information has an important effect on the amount of effort our audience is willing to put in towards following along. So simple is better, right? Well there is another side to consider.
Research on depth of processing has conversely told us that we’re more likely to remember something that we had to put more effort into. i.e.: we learn more doing something than simply being told about it.
So our style effects our audience’s perception and actions. If they find it challenging, they’re less likely to put in any effort, but more likely to remember it if they had. Conversely, if they think it’s easy they’ll remember less, but are more likely to pay attention. We can use this knowledge to our advantage.
Draw your audience in with easy and clear ideas, that make them willing to put in the effort, but when you get to that one main point that you want them to take away, make them work for it. Consider repeating the idea after each section, or make them say it along with you/for you, or give them an acronym with multiple humorous interpretations and have them contribute their own. In order to accomplish both objectives we can use the balance between ease and effort as a design tool.
todd j. al
(Erik Gould, courtesy of the Fleet Library at RISD, Providence, RI..)
