Designing effective visuals

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From the course by The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

English for Effective Business Speaking

94 ratings

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

English for Effective Business Speaking

94 ratings

Course 3 of 5 in the Specialization Business English for Non-Native Speakers

This course aims to improve your Business English speaking skills by developing your use of vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, spoken communication skills within a Business context, and your ability to deliver professional business speeches for specific purposes. Skills learned in this course will be used in the cross-cultural communications course and help prepare you to deliver the professional business presentation in the Capstone project. After completing this course, you will be able to: - delivery effective job interviews - give persuasive business pitches - delivery informative business presentations - speak persuasively in English - adapt content to purpose, context and audience - use appropriate style and tone of writing for business purposes

From the lesson

Business presentations

Welcome to Week 5! This week we will cover Module 5 where we introduce you to presentations skills you may need in the workplace and effective visualizations. You will also be introduced to vocabulary and language skills common to business communications.

The differences between written and spoken English8:37

Preparing and planning presentations9:16

Designing effective visuals6:03

Engaging the audience6:00

Meet the Instructors

Sean McMinn
Senior Instructor
Center for Language Education
Kin Tang
Instructor
Center for Language Education
Delian Gaskell
Instructor
Center for Language Education

A picture is worth 1000 words.

When you use properly designed visual aids, they're a great asset for

your presentation.

Well designed visuals attract attention, help the audience retain key points, and

facilitate understanding.

Visuals can also be used to keep you organized and add polish and

professionalism to your presentation.

Helping you to create clear, effective visuals is the aim of this presentation.

So, by the end of this video you will be able to, reference

five key guidelines to create the kind of clear, effective visuals that will

enhance your presentation and keep your audience engaged in what you're saying.

Number 1, the first guideline to creating a good,

effective visual is to think about the visual's size and color.

Make sure any visual you use is big enough for

your audience to be able to see anywhere they are seated in the room.

Any pictures you use should be easy to make out and

any text you use should be at least 20 point font.

You also need to think bout the color.

Think about the color of the font or the charts or

visualizations of data you include.

The color needs to be easy to see for both.

Let's take a look at an example.

If you look at this visual on the slide, both the text and

the images are too small for the audience to make out clearly.

The picture of the map is much too small to make out in terms of its detail.

And the pie charts and accompanying font is so

tiny the audience would probably not be able to distinguish the detail.

This could be improved by increasing the size of both the pictures,

the charts and the fonts.

The colors used in a visual are relatively easy to make out but

could be improved if the pie charts had more contrasting color

between the purple and light green segments of the different parts.

However, the color of the sub heading,

Adoption of Hybrid Vehicles doesn't stand out clearly against the white background.

A good guideline for color is to look for

strong contrast especially against the background of the slide.

Number 2, keep it simple.

Less is more when it comes to visuals.

Make sure you show only one idea and each of your visuals and

avoid unnecessary potentially distracting details that may confuse your audience.

Let's look at another visual.

You can see how this image confuses and distracts.

The presenter is trying to insert multiple points into one image but

having three different tables and three different vaguely linked bullet

points of information is actually worse than having no image at all.

This could be improved if the presenter chose one of the tables to focus on for

the slide, just one.

Most audience members confronted with the slide would be so

confused by all the different information.

They wouldn't be paying attention to what the presenter was actually saying and

this is the opposite effect you want in a presentation.

Number 3, fewer words are better.

A visual is just that a visual image.

This means you should avoid including too much text.

Your heading should just be keyword or phrases not sentences.

And once you have a heading don't use a sub heading or sub title,

this will often destructing.

A better idea in terms of using text in a visual is to follow the Rule of Seven.

This means you use a maximum of 7 lines of text on any visual, and

within each of these lines there should be no more than 7 words.

If you need to provide more explanation, you should do this verbally.

Remember, this is supposed to be an oral presentation, not a written report.

Let's look at another example.

So do you think the rule of seven has been applied in designing this slide?

No, not really.

There are 15 lines or more of text on this slide.

Forcing the small visual and image to be off to the side rather than the focus.

Also, the heading itself is a short sentence instead of a keyword or phrase.

This could be improved by drastically reducing all of the text.

Cutting the heading so it's just one or two words and

making the image the focus of the visual instead of all this distracting text.

Number 4, Label clearly.

Everything in your visual should have a clear role and be clearly identified so

your audience understands its function.

So if you're inserting a table, a chart, or diagram.

Make sure you identify what your audience should be focusing.

Let's look at another visual.

So here we can see a common error.

The designers of this slide have simply copied and

pasted an Excel chart onto the slide.

As audience members, we would have little idea of what we should be looking at and

what in the world the relevance of all this text and all these numbers should be.

The presenters have attempted to use bright colors to highlight different parts

of the chart but the image and font is too small and

there's too much text and there's no labeling on the image.

What are we suppose to be looking at?

This would be more effective if the presenter simply took the relevant and

important numbers and presented them alone, rather than copying and

pasting a large amount of un-needed information on the same slide.

And number 5, make complex data simple.

Look at this visual.

It's obviously an effort to show some complex setup or image.

But since the creator has not actually made any effort to show that setup

in a way that's easy to understand,

chances are the audience won't know what to look at or even what this is.

Remember to keep your images simple.

If there's some complex data or a complex setup you want to show, take the time to

restructure it in a simple way so your audience can easily understand it.

Well, the purpose of this lecture has been to try and help you create clear,

effective slides and images using the five guidelines I've been focusing on.

The next time you need to create visuals keep in mind that using these guidelines

should help you make positive steps to create clear,

effective visuals which will then help you keep your audience engaged in your talk.

Good luck.

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