One Thing at a Time

OKAY, IT'S ONE OF MY MANTRAS — use graphics to help tell your story. But that doesn't mean that any image works. This is particularly true with diagrams or pictographic representations of technical matters. You've probably seen these — wild collections of boxes and circles and cylinders, washed over by text and arrows and a varied assortment of colors. They're visual nightmares, at least for the audience.
        And that's where the disconnect happens. To the person who creates images like that (or directs others to do so) (often with the charge of "There's still space on that slide. Fill it up!") (like an old boss of mine, who actually said that) (but I digress).
        So someone creates an image that they feel is the perfect encapsulation of a process or technical set up or a "solution" to a problem. It has all the elements that need to be considered — except how the audience is going to absorb it.
        What may seem "perfect" to the presenter is often a sensory overload for the audience. Too many things to divert one's attention. No hierarchy of elements. No big-picture context in which to arrange the details that fill out that vision. No parsing or sequencing of steps to help develop the story. It's all just barfed out on one slide. And after the audience recovers from their initial, visual battering, they struggle to follow the presenter's descriptions of this visual hash.
        Ugh.

So what do you do?

One approach is to choose a central element and build your story around that. Is there a critical part of the process where things are breaking down, or where your "solution" makes everything right again? Establish that as the key element, so they get the context, then go back to what leads up to that, and what follows beyond the central point. Layer in the pieces only when they're needed, and this will be a much more manageable and effective experience for your audience.
        Another approach is to show how things are today (in as simple an arrangement as is possible), and then show how things can/should evolve in the future. This is the approach suggested by Bruce Wyman in his post, Simplification of Things, Part 1 of Some (hat tip to Brad Feld for highlighting Bruce's post in Why Does This Slide Suck?). Bruce converts an overly complex slide into a Before/After sequence with far fewer elements. His makeover is clean and simple, and far easier for an audience to follow.

Here are two other ideas to consider:

1) Have all the elements you need already visible, but gray everything out except the central piece. Don't make any of the text elements visible yet either. Then, as you go through the story and highlight different parts, bring those pieces into full-color view (with text labels as needed). This requires extra work to achieve such a build, but your audience will get much more out of this approach (versus barf-it-all-out-there-at-once).

2) As a variation on the last idea, make each of the visual elements a clickable zone, so you can jump around to different parts of the "story". This makes the discussion far more interactive, since you can focus in on those elements that matter most to your audience. Taking this approach requires even more time in preparation, since you have to set up which slide each element links to, but it's really effective in establishing a dialog — and a shared depiction of what matters most.