Slide Makeover: Making a Short List More Visual

Christine Haas & Colette Ruden

Let’s say you have a short list of three, four or five related details you want to share on a slide. They might be features of a product, benefits from taking an action, or even results from a project.

What I see most people do is make a bulleted list of these details on the slide, such as in the example below, where the presenter was talking about how her bike sharing company tracks bugs in their mobile app by capturing information in a Shake Report.

When something doesn’t work as it should in the app, users can shake their device. This sends what they call a Shake Report to the bike sharing company about the error. The Shake Report captures a number of items. Those details are listed under the heading “Captures.”

To make this list of items captured in the Shake Report more visual, we can instead start with a picture of the product we’re referencing. In this case, the bike share app on the phone.

Then, we can put the list of items captured in the Shake Report to the right of the phone. The lines indicate that these are related items or features of the visual we’re showing on the left.

I’ve shortened these items to be only a few words, so that the audience can scan them quickly and return to the presenter’s spoken content. When presenting this slide, I’d recommend having each item appear as the presenter speaks about it in more detail.

Notice also that we put visual left and words right. It helps an audience to see visuals first, words second. This is similar to how we read articles or newspapers — we see the picture, then the caption underneath.

Finally, I removed the phrase “Shake Report” at the top of the slide. The sentence provides more meaningful information than the phrase. We’re saved the time of reading a redundant phrase and instead go straight to the important point.

This technique can be used with so many different content topics. Here are a few more examples to inspire you (or put you to sleep, depending on how much you like slides).

This slide describes the forces driving UPS’s sustainability goals. Watch this video to see another way to design this slide.

You don’t have to include the lines between the picture and the words to see the association. I happen to prefer the lines , but you do you.

Even the most challenging items to visualize work with this method. This presentation discusses the operations for microgrids at an electric utility.

Try this technique on one of your slides. Let us know how it goes, or share other tricks you’ve found helpful to make slides more visual, in the comments below.