Doug Vogel’s 1986 study demonstrated a clear and significant effect on persuasion when a presentation is delivered along with supporting visuals. What is not clear from Vogel’s work is exactly how the improvement in persuasion happens. Persuasion is a complicated process involving attention… comprehension… yielding/agreement… and retention …. culminating in action. Vogel studied 17 modifiers of these components of persuasion trying to understand what was going on, but in the end his results were inconclusive and even contradictory.

Professor Richard Mayer has approached the challenge of understanding the use of visuals from a different perspective. Mayer has focused on the effect of visuals on learning. Just as Vogel developed a well researched theory of persuasion, Mayer has done extensive research on learning and developed a cognitive theory of multimedia learning. All of the research he presents in his excellent book “Multimedia Learning” is designed to test the assumptions of this theory. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the surprising revelations I have had while searching for Presentation Facts is that there is a lot more applicable research out there than I first thought. There is also research that is fundamental to the work Presentation Professionals do everyday. Perhaps the most foundational work can be found in the research and writings of Professor Richard Mayer. Read the rest of this entry »

Vogel’s study on the impact of presentation visuals on persuasion (1998) did not really provide conclusive evidence of the effectiveness of animations. Some improvements in comprehension and perception of the presenter were noted, but these did not translate into a significant improvement in persuasive effect. The quality of the graphics and the way animations were used in the study could have contributed to their lack lustre performance.

This article adds some interesting information from a 1991 study to our emerging understanding of animation effectiveness. Read the rest of this entry »

The argument for and against PowerPoint (mostly against) goes on. Many have picked up on thoughts expressed by Edward Tufte in his essay “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”. Regardless of where you stand on the debate created by this essay, it is important to understand that Tufte’s essay is opinion… not science. There are no studies that show PowerPoint is “making us stupid”, or that we should not trust presenters who rely on it or that projected visuals should be thrown out in favor of handouts. It is also very popular these days to decry the widespread use of the ubiquitous Bullet Slide. Keep in mind that to date, Presentation Facts has found no empirical evidence that the much maligned Bullet Slide is significantly more or less effective than any other type of visual. (It may or may not be better, or worse than other visuals, we just haven’t reviewed studies yet that clearly answer this question).

We have however found clear evidence that what happens before… and after visuals are created can significantly impact the persuasive effect of a presentation. Read the rest of this entry »

You have probably heard it said that when giving a presentation, you are the primary visual. A 1979 study adds some credence to this bit of common wisdom. Read the rest of this entry »

I remember pretty clearly the day that the February 2000 issue of Presentations Magazine arrived in our Kalamazoo, Michigan office. It contained the results from a Presentations/3M study on the effectiveness of multimedia presentations. Prior to this, I had heard rumblings of “data” from the 1980s studies but had never actually read those research reports. For the next few years, I confidently told audiences and clients that “multimedia presentations could increase comprehension 78% over static visuals.” Like many others, I was eager to use any data that seemed to validate the services we were offering to clients.

So what did this study really tell us about the effectiveness of PowerPoint multimedia presentations? Unfortunately, the answer is: Not much at all. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the problems with the 1986 UM/3M study was that it used overhead transparencies and slides for visual support. It is a little hard to know which of the 1986 findings (if any) might be generalized to the way most presentations are given today. It might be reasonable to think that the positive findings in comprehension and retention would still hold true. What about the significant improvement in the audience’s perception of the speaker however? Vogel hypothesized that the improvement in persuasion was predominately mediated through this heightened positive perception of the speaker. Would someone viewing a typical presentation with PowerPoint visuals today perceive the presenter as positively as the 1986 subjects viewed the speaker with overhead transparencies? Read the rest of this entry »

7% - 38% - 55%

How many of you know the significance of these three percentages?
Anyone who has ever attended a seminar or course on presentation skills has undoubtedly heard them. When communicating, we are told, only 7% of our message is communicated through the words we use… 38% is communicated through vocal tone… and a whopping 55% is communicated through facial expression.

I was thinking about this during a trip I took this spring to Prague in the Czech Republic. Czech is a very difficult language to learn (for me anyway). But according to the 7-38-55 theory, I really shouldn’t need to learn Czech at all…. I should be able to understand 93% of a Czech conversation through tone and facial expressions alone. Needless to say, the 7-38-55 concept did not work for me that well. Without understanding the words I was pretty clueless!

So what exactly is going on here? Where do these percentages come from? Read the rest of this entry »

As a teenager living in Sao Paulo, Brazil I owned a machete. It had a 20 inch blade, a shiny black handle and a leather sheath decorated with beads and tassels. Now Sao Paulo was a city the size of NYC at that time… a place where machetes were seldom used for any constructive purpose. In fact, the only time I really needed my machete was during a month long trip with my dad and two older brothers into the interior of the country.

This past week however, I felt a little like I was hacking through the Brazilian underbrush again as I tried to track down the origin of a common presentation related statistic.
If I were to ask you how many PowerPoint presentations are given every day around the world… what would you say?

If you need help answering this question, you can look here, here, here, here, here, here,… or in countless other electronic repositories of valuable information across our great and wonderful Worldwide Web.

The answer of course is 30 million presentations every single day. Most people apparently know this. But is it true? Where does this number come from? How was it calculated? Read the rest of this entry »

In part 1 of this post, I briefly described the background and study design of the UM/3M research conducted by Doug Vogel in 1986. In this post, I will highlight the primary results along with some interesting information I had never heard before about a small side study Vogel did with some “extra” subjects in this study.

If you haven’t reviewed part 1 of this post, please do so because it is the excellence of the design and conduct of this study that lends credibility to the findings. Vogel intended this work to be a baseline for continuing research and in the design of this study has given us a great model of what quality research in the use of presentation visuals looks like. Read the rest of this entry »