The Future of Search: 7 Search Engines You Should Try

The most popular search engines, Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask, continuously tweak the user interface to provide more useful and relevant details. But essentially the user still has to scan a lot of text before reacting. According to some sources, 80-85% of users don’t navigate past the first page of search results. Read more

Make Great PowerPoint Decks Not PowerPoint Dreck

I write many PowerPoint decks each year. When I start a new one, I shut the office door, light candles, draw a pentagram on the floor then summon the Beast to glide my mouse and guide my fingers across the keyboard.

When the smoke clears, I emerge with a twenty-slide document of digital dreck.

Feeling frustrated, I dug out something I remembered by Seth Godin. (Seth is a marketing subject matter expert that I’ve followed since the 90’s.)

Here are Seth’s five rules you need to remember to create amazing PowerPoint presentations:

• No more than six words on a slide. EVER.
• No cheesy images. Use professional images from corbis.com instead. They cost $3 each, or a little more if they’re for ‘professional use’.
• No dissolves, spins or other transitions. None.
• Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never (ever) use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have.
• Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They’re emotional, and they won’t work without you there. If someone wants your slides to show “the boss,” tell them that the slides go if you go.

I used to have this mentality that as a document, it needed to act like documentation - citing every detail for historical reference. Truth be told, I’ve improved, but I know I can do much better.

In real world practice, I realize that the clients I present to are so overwhelmed that they never open the document again. Sometimes never at all to begin with.

So here are my PowerPoint writing tips:

• Write, re-write and re-write again. Brevity is key. Be ruthless to distill down your thoughts to a simple sound bite. Embellish with spoken word.
• Come up with creative ways to display your ideas graphically instead of as bullets — A chart, graph, funnel, Venn Diagram — whatever it takes. Edward Tufte is an excellent source of inspiration for expressing details in a visually comprehensive way.
• Have a cover sheet with a title, date and name of the person(s) it’s for. It drives me crazy looking at old decks and not having a clue who they were for.
• Include a Next Steps slide with specific action items, dates and responsibilities.
• Include all the contact information for the relevant team on the last slide. That makes it easier for the client to figure out who to talk to.

Please add your suggestions and let me know if you find this useful.
Thanks.
-Roland

Visualization example

Here’s another interesting example of visualizing information for users. In this example, News.com fits top 15 headlines into a square area. The color of the box demonstrates how recent the article is, while the size demonstrates the popularity of the article.

Article: Reasons to not create a Splash Page

This is a must read article: How to Convince a Client They Don’t Need a Splash Page

I’ve had this arguement many times. Plain and simple, putting a barrier between your visitor and the Web site creates a bad user experience and impacts your ability to index properly for natural search.

-Roland

Visualization

The challenge of vizualization is to tell your story as clearly as possible, in an interesting manner, without overwhelming your user with too much detail.

Several months after 9/11, I came across an article that left a long term impression on me. It described how the FBI went about connecting relationships between all the terrorists involved in executing the plot.

The investigators began to feed all the data they had into a software program. The data included all the communications between the terrorists, their in-person interactions and transactions. This began to create a visual chart with lines showing the relationshops. As the investigators tweaked the data based on confirmed data or strong assumptions, different relationships and leadership began to become apparent.

I found this absolutely fascinating and have described this often to colleagues in the years that followed.

In the last few months, I’ve came across similar applications of this visualization method. For example, News.com has certain subjects defined in their “The Big Picture” feature. They color code stories vs topics vs companies that are all related to the core news article you started on.

Live Plasma is an interesting visualization tool that allows the user to search on musicians/artists, actors, movies. Here’s an example of a search for relations to the movie “.”

I’ve also had the good fortune of being exposed to teachings of Edward Tufte. Check out his Web site for many interesting examples of how to present complex information. Better yet, attend his training course.

The point to all this is to start thinking in different ways. Consider your audience. Think about the story you want to tell. Examine your data and come up with a creative way of presenting the information.

Enjoy the challenge!
-Roland

10/13/2006 update: Check out these visualization videos of air traffic flight patterns over the U.S., elapsed over time and set to music.

10/31/2006 update: Check out 3D Weather Data Visualization in Second Life.

Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.

©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.

Next Page »