PowerPoint and psychology: how to remove the obstacles

Building a good PowerPoint comes down to one deceptively simple idea: remove, completely, every obstacle your audience might run into. The rule is this. The fewer the obstacles, the longer the attention span and the higher the motivation. Lovely. The only puzzle left is working out what actually counts as an obstacle for the person in front of you.

And that is trickier than it sounds, because the research on PowerPoint itself is, sadly, rather thin. So instead we turn to what we do know: research on classic human-machine interaction and on websites, and we ask what we can borrow. Combine that with some honest neuroscience on learning and memory, and we get a good way forward. It points us straight at the obstacles that can, and must, be torn down. Here are a few tips worth keeping in mind.

Number of objects

Why, and when, do we grow tired of a layout or a design? Let us try a little experiment. Find yourself around ten pens, ask a colleague to drop them in front of you, and count them as fast as you can. Now have your colleague drop fewer and fewer pens, until you notice the moment where something changes: the difference between counting the pens and simply seeing them. For most people that line sits at around five or six. Below it, you just see the number. Above it, you have to count.

What does this have to do with PowerPoint? Everything. If you present a slide with too many objects on it, more than about seven, you sharply increase the risk that it will feel heavy and complex. You know the feeling already, from those endless presentations where overstuffed bullet lists both bore us and send us to sleep.

Size

Whether we like it or not, our eyes are pulled towards whatever takes up the most space. Which means the layout itself must never register as an object, because the moment it does, it joins the list of obstacles. Everything else on the slide then needs to be prioritised by size, with one clear principle guiding you: biggest equals most important.

Contrast

Beyond size, there is the matter of contrast. High-contrast objects will inevitably grab your audience's attention, whether you meant them to or not. So if you have built a layout that carries more contrast than the content sitting on top of it, you have failed. The same rule as before applies here: highest contrast equals most important. There is a simple way to check this. Step back a little from the screen and look at your slide through half-closed, squinting eyes. If the most important objects are still the ones that stand out most, your layout has done its job.

Three levels of obstacle

The people receiving your PowerPoint will apply three levels of judgement as they try to interpret and understand it. First and foremost, they reach for level one: recognition. If they recognise the symbols, the images, the order and the structure, they feel satisfied, a small wave of relief, and a genuine appetite to keep looking.

If your layout has failed and they are forced down to level two, recall, it means they now have to learn and remember how your presentation works. And if the layout is really poor, you have pushed them all the way to level three, where they must use pure logic to puzzle out what all your symbols, images, lists and words are supposed to mean. Level three is the last and the worst, and at that point most people lose focus within two or three minutes. Your whole job, then, is to keep them living happily on level one.