Three Simple Things You Can Do To Improve Your Zoom Slideshows
If you’re reading this you are likely someone who has been forced to work remote due to the ongoing Covid crisis.
As such, you are likely on a lot of Zoom calls.
If you’re on Zoom calls there is a decent chance you are sharing your screen, and might even be using slideshows to make your presentations.
Use More Slides
You are likely making this in a rush, but hear me out.
If you use more Slides, it will help you keep your audiences attention. The more times you click and something changes, the more likely they are to pay attention to what you are presenting.
We are far beyond the Go Go 90’s folks, and attention spans are shrinking by the day. Your audience is at home, likely looking at their phones. Maybe they’re reading, or preparing their lunch.
Every time the screen changes, though, it will draw their eyes back to your presentation.
Which brings us to the next point…
Fewer Words Per Slide
When they look at the screen, don’t bombard them with information.
I know, in your hurry to get your presentation done by Friday at 1PM for the call with the entire dev team, who are based in every North American time zone, you may have written a slide that looks something like this…
Despite my own hilarious contributions to the content of the above slide, it is terrible for a presentation. You know it, I know it, and your audience knows it. Every slide you’ve ever seen like this is awful.
How are you going to convince your stakeholders to approve whatever it is you need if they can’t focus on your presentation?
You can not afford to lose their attention.
Reduce the number of words per slide dramatically. Write through every slide as long as you want once to make sure you get all your points out, but then go back and edit it down.
There are a lot of people who will tell you different amounts of words, but I turn to an old rule from animation and film. If you put a word on screen, you need to give your audience a full second to read each one.
Reveal Slides By Line
So you’re using more slides, and have reduced your word count per slide to something manageable for your audience’s attention span, which means you need all those extra slides.
Now we’re going to ensure you keep the audience’s attention with you by only showing them one line or image at a time.
If you show the audience three bullet points and a graphic, they will read ahead of you. This means they process what you wrote without hearing you, and what you wrote is not the whole story. Those are details meant to reinforce your point.
Oh, I should mention this as well… the secret fourth trick.
Do Not Read Your Slides
Your slides are content to reinforce your overall presentation.
The slideshow is a supplement to your presentation, it is not the presentation. If you need to get yourself fired up, think of this as you giving a speech to the world about something — except you get to have a slide show that helps communicate.
That is the point of a slideshow. You can speak, so your audience is hearing you, but you can reinforce your points with those slides. Use your bullet points to drill home the most important details, the memetic turns of phrase, so that your audience won’t forget them. Use images and graphics to tie it all together, so you are activating every part of their brain.
Any Questions?
A classy way to end any presentation, assuming you have time and the ability.
Don’t be scared off by questions. “I don’t know.” is a perfectly reasonable question, if you follow it up with, “But I will find out.”
And if you, yourself, have any questions about implementing these changes come find me on Twitter. I’m happy to talk.
