Use Cognitive Science to Improve Your Presentations

The scifi fan site io9 is not only a great place to keep up with your favorite geekdom, it also has great and useful articles for your career, like this one: How Cognitive Science Can Improve Your Powerpoint Presentations

The four basic points are:

The Goldilocks rule

Include only the data needed, nothing more.  Anything else is distracting from the message.

The Rudolph Rule

Do something to make the important data stand out- a different color, size, seperate it, anything, just make it different than the rest.

The Rule of Four

The human mind can visually capture about four pieces of visual data at a time- so keep your slides broken down to four batches of data or less.

The Birds of  a Feather

Organize like information in groups.  It will help people process those groups of information like a single piece of information, better enabling them to intake the information in question.

Great stuff.  Try it in your next presentation!

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About the Author

This blog is written by me, Stacey Douglas, an analyst, project manager, systems designer and executive in the software industry. You can learn more about me at my website, http://www.staceydouglas.com.