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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Come on. Speed it Up!

What does that really mean?

Imagine that you are speaking to a group. You are speaking slowly because you want to be understood. You are using pauses because you learned that that is an effective way to create drama in your presentation.

You think that you are doing well with your presentation. Then someone says, “Hey! Can you speed this up?” And you notice a few other people nodding their heads in agreement.

You might feel tempted to speak faster. Don’t do that. That is not what that person was asking for.

Most likely, what they are really saying is, “I get it. I’m with you. Now explain to me how to do this. Let’s move on”.

A normal flow to a presentation is to first explain the background, the issues and the goal. Then you might talk about the history of your organization. Perhaps you are trying to bring every uninformed person up to speed before you address the point of your presentation.

So if one or a few people say, “Let’s speed it up” what they really mean is “Yeah, we know that. What do you suggest? Or how do we do this?”

They are not saying “speak faster”. They are saying, “leave some of this boring stuff out”.

I experienced this frustration when I attended a workshop on the topic of humor. The speaker was a qualified humor writer. I was there to learn “how” to be funnier when I spoke. Yet he wasted the first half of the session explaining “why” humor was important to a presentation. I put my hand up and asked him to speed it up – when what I really meant was “Skip the crap. We already know that it's important. Start talking about how to do it”.

Unfortunately he ignored my request and his time ran out before he got to the "how to". I was disappointed with this presentation because he didn’t appreciate what his audience really wanted.

When your audience pleads with you to speed it up, what they might really mean is:

• We are past that stage – move on
• You’re speaking fluff – say something more meaningful
• Your words haven’t challenged me yet – when will you get to something interesting?

Speed it up really means that you need to better engage and challenge the thinking of your audience. It does not mean to speak faster.

By the way, I tend to speak slower than many speakers and I use the pause more effectively than most. Other speakers have commented favorably to me about both these techniques and no one has asked me to “speed it up”.

Speed it up does not mean - speak faster. It means you need to say more meaningful things. Say things that make your audience think. They are challenging you to make them think.

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The Gettysburg Address

If you want to be a more powerful speaker learn from other powerful speakers. Take the best lessons and find ways to apply those in your presentations. Don't copy them. Instead ask yourself, "Why does this work so well?" and "How can you use that principle or technique?"

Lincoln's Gettysburg address is known as one of the most powerful speeches of all time. What made it so powerful? Listen to it below. It's about two and 1/2 minutes.

No, it's not Lincoln speaking. Listen to the words, structure and style.





What do you think made this speech so powerful?

I suggest that it was the precise words, the rhythmic phrasing and the short phrases. Some of the sentences are long but the phrasing makes it easily digestible.

There are no wasted words or confusing tangents. The imagery is graphic and the message is clear. The poetry of words is captivating and memorable - "four score and seven years".

This is an example where the success of the speech was determined by the care in writing the words.

And the best part - it was less that 150 seconds.

Imagine if every boardroom presentation was limited to 150 seconds.


Below is the text of the Gettysburg address.

--------------------
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.


But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.



George Torok

The Speech Coach for Executives

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