The Corruption of PowerPoint

I've been on a little bit of a communication kick lately, having against all reason actually enjoyed presenting at GLBIO. In truth, representing data visually is just a subset of the task of communication. Through visualization, we transfer data from a medium to our brains via the sense of sight. The peculiar custom of transferring data through standing in front of a crowd of strangers and talking for an hour or two is curious, but similar in many ways.

A few months ago of my co-workers was kind enough to direct me to the work of Edward R. Tufte, a critic and theorist who specializes in visual data representation. I am ashamed to say that until she literally put a book of his in front of my nose, I hadn't seen any of his work. I have since remedied this.

Among his writings, there exists a well-distributed, crabby critique called 'The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint' that I've recently taken to heart. By taking it to heart, I mean that I've used its principles to utterly dismantle the PowerPoint presentation I put on at GLBIO 2012. I redid that presentation in-lab today with the following set of basic rules:

1. Only use slides for things that slides are good at.

If you ask Tufte what slides are good at, he would tell you 'very little'. He spends a great deal of time discussing the many ways in which PowerPoint slides, and particularly their templates, just plain suck at communication. Data is parceled out in 10 to 20 line chunks, forcing the presenter to unnaturally partition their narrative. PP graphs are low resolution, illustrating only the most blunt of points, and used in places where a simple 'and then X happened' would have sufficed from the presenter. For the most part, a standard template for a PP presentation serves less as a means of communication than as an assistance device to organize the presenter, albeit within the bizarre constraints of 'one slide per topic' regardless of the scope or complexity of that topic.

With all of this in mind, I looked at the slides I had, and I started to pick them apart. Immediately gone were organizational slides. Unless a slide could communicate a concept more effectively than speaking alone, it was scrapped too. Out of 27 original slides, I kept 8, and those were severely cut down and held almost nothing but graphics.

8 slides to represent an hour long portion of my talk.

The results of this cull?

Twofold. 

The ugly side of this was that I had underestimated the usefulness of PowerPoint as an organizational device. Stripped of a hierarchy of bullet points, I realized at midnight before I was to present, I had lost my narrative. The mess of bullet points that I transferred to five pages of printout were a poor substitute for a rehearsed talk. I stumbled over what should have been a flowing exploration of graph visualization practices.

Though this resulted in a few uncomfortable moments, it drove home a point Tufte made often in his critique: giving presentations is hard. Having PowerPoint, at best, turns a poor presentation into a boring one. Instead of spending hours of my time culling my slides, I should have invested that time into practicing my narrative and ensuring that the more efficient form of data transfer, the 150 word-per-minute speech, was as well-oiled as it could get.

The second result of my re-formatting was that I saw how effective a good graphic could be. If anything saved the presentation, it was this slide:

This horrible, horrible slide.

This slide was an illustration of bad visualization practices. It comes from this article in Nature, which is, ironically, about improving graph visualization. I have seen many different versions of the same concept repeated over and over again in graph visualizations: people misunderstanding the purpose of graph visualization entirely. Graphs excel at communicating to the viewer information about relationships between objects. In this example, none of the graph edges are remotely traceable, the relationships between the implied complexes are indistinct and there is no evidence to suggest WHY any of the complexes should exist. There is NOTHING achieved by this graph that could not have been done more elegantly with tables of protein names. It is the Michael Bay of graphs.

"...and then the protein complex transforms into a DEATH JET
that shoots FIRE while Megan Fox SWEATS PROVOCATIVELY!"

The effect of showing this graph was immediate: the entire room groaned. They understood, very quickly, the concepts I had been stumbling across in my unpracticed narrative. Including the slide was to my advantage. It saved my ass.

So, two lessons learned.

In closing, I'd like to leave you with something that kept me sane while I experimented with dangerous presentation techniques. The following is the first part of a lecture given by Louie Simmons, a trainer and competitive power-lifter. I listened to this lecture in between editing sessions to remind me that a good presentation doesn't need ANY slides. It needs content and a presenter capable of communicating it.

Do not mock Louie. He will destroy you.