Eye Movement for Your PowerPoint Slides

Eye Flow Test

Check the design of your slides with the eye flow test.

1. Where is the first place the eyes of your audience will go when the slide appears?

2. After a few seconds where do the eyes go next? 

3. With a well designed slide you should know the third place their eyes go to.

If you are not sure where the eyes go when the slide comes up – then you don’t know where your audience is looking or what they might be thinking. How can you be on their wavelength if you don’t know their wavelength?

If your slides don’t pass the eye flow test, go back and redesign or remove that offending slide.

How do you know where the eyes go? Test yourself. Look at advertisements in magazines. Notice where your eyes stop first. Ask yourself “why?” Eye flow is easy to predict because of important principles that determine how our eyes move.

Some things to understand about our eyes

• They jump from point to point.
• They are attracted to light.
• They are attracted to motion.
• They tend to start at the top left of the screen/ page because of the way we learned to read.
• They look to images before text.
• They seek familiar patterns.
• They notice the unusual.

You can learn more about simple graphic design from the book, "The Non-designers Design Handbook" by Robin Williams. This book explains four fundamentals of graphic design which are essential to creating effective visuals.

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