Sunday, October 30, 2011

Vinod Khosla's Five Second Rule - Great Presentation Advice


Thanks to npg for sending this to me on Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems employee #2) on Forbes called - Vinod Khosla's Five Second Rule and it is great advice. 

Below is a snippet:


"For each of them, he applies his five-second rule: he puts a slide on a screen, removes it after five seconds, and then asks the viewer to describe the slide. A dense slide fails the test—and fails to provide the basic function of any visual: to aid the presentation.

By applying his simple rule, Mr. Khosla is addressing two of the most important elements in presentation graphics: Less is More, a plea all too often sounded by helpless audiences to hapless presenters; and more important, the human perception factor. Whenever an image appears on any screen, the eyes of every member of every audience reflexively move to the screen to process the new image. The denser the image, the more processing the audiences need. At that very moment, they stop listening to the presenter. Nevertheless, most presenters continue speaking, further compounding the processing task. As a result, the audience shuts down. Game over."

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