This is just a quick cross-posting alert. The online magazine "Indezine" was kind enough to invite me to contribute an article on their targeted field of PowerPoint presentations. I gave them my 'Top 5 Tips For Remote Presentation Design."
One of my tips is a suggestion that is often misinterpreted and sometimes generates controversy. I suggest aiming for an average of one slide change per minute during web presentations.
I always try to couch this in disclaimers that this is a rough cumulative average over the entire duration of your talk. Don't get hung up on making every slide fit exactly 60 seconds of scripting. The idea is there to avoid "too fast" or "too slow" slide changes. If you rapidly click through a succession of slides, it can overwhelm the ability of some web conferencing programs to stay synchronized for all audience members. People can get frustrated if they don't have time to take in your visual content.
On the other hand, you don't want to give remote attendees a chance to get bored with the visuals. Once they start looking elsewhere, you lose their full attention. Even if they keep listening to you, their retention rate goes down if they are playing solitaire or answering emails on their computer. Slide changes act as a way to refocus active attention back to your presentation, so you want to make use of that psychological assist.
Some presenters interpret my rule of thumb to mean: "Read long slides really quickly, so you can get through all that text in a minute." That is definitely not the intent! If you need to convey a lot of information, split it into successive smaller chunks so that you and your audience can focus on one nugget at a time. Each gets its own slide that carries full focus and attention. Then you move on to the next little piece of your recitation. You end up with the same total amount of data on your slides, but each slide becomes easier to take in, allows white space or room for a graphic to set it off, and lets you incorporate more slide changes to retain visual focus.
You can read the rest of my tips on Indezine at https://blog.indezine.com/2018/06/top-5-tips-for-remote-presentation-design.html
