Bite-Sized Content
You’ve heard the statistics…
Our attention span is less than a goldfish (8 seconds, by the way), we only remember 50% of what we hear an hour after a presentation and 25% a week later, and if you present in the drowsy-after-lunch time slot, you can expect your audience to stay engaged with you for about 5 minutes.
If those statistics aren’t harrowing enough, attention span drops precipitously for virtual presentations where audience engagement is even more difficult.
With our ability to pay attention going in the wrong direction, you must partition your content into bite-sized portions if you want people to retain the information you’re presenting.
Instead of trying to put every morsel of information into your presentation, think about what’s most important, what information is critical to your audience, and what does your audience need to retain for your presentation to be successful.
Beyond those big-picture questions, here is a menu of tips to help you make your next presentation more digestible:
1.The Rule of Three
The human brain is wired to have what neuroscientists call pattern recognition capability. The brain loves patterns. The simpler the patterns the easier it is to retain and recall information. To capitalize on the brain’s built-in pattern recognition capability, reduce your presentation to three main points. Continue the pattern by sticking to the Rule of Three anytime you need to include sub-points. This will make your content more digestible.
2. Keep it Short
Cognitive psychologist Carmen Simon performed a study examining memory and information retention. She concluded audiences only remember the content from 4 slides in a 20 slide presentation. To make matters worse, ⅓ of her research subjects, after 48 hours, didn’t remember the presentation content at all.
To help your ideas and information stand out, don’t bury them in an avalanche of nondescript text and detail. Take a look at the following slide:
Too much text, no clear takeaway, and nothing to visually reinforce the content. It’s unlikely to engage an audience let alone have them remembering key information 48 hours later.
Instead, consider this more digestible version:
You would then elaborate on each of your points in your spoken content.
3. Be Visual
Be visual with your slide deck and convert written information into simple graphs and easy-to-read infographics. Use bold colors, illustrative imagery, and high-quality design. Also be visual in your language. Paint “word pictures” that allow your audience to visualize your content. Visual images and visual language will help make your information more digestible.
4. Engaging Titles
Your presentation and its content areas should have engaging headlines. Having memorable headlines helps people compartmentalize your content, and cleanly partitioned information is easier to remember. For example, if you were preparing a presentation about improving your audience’s writing, instead of titling it “Ways to Improve your Writing,” consider the more catchy version, “Five Tips to turn your writing from Snore to Score.” Additionally, if one of your five tips is to keep paragraphs short, your section headline could be “Powerful Paragraphs: Get to the Point.”
Headlines matter. Design them to make your ideas stick.
When you have your next presentation, whether virtual or in-person, rethink your information. Make your presentation half the length, twice more organized, and reinforce it all with memorable headlines and illustrative visuals. Including everything will guarantee that your audience remembers nothing. Instead, opt for bite-sized content.