Our previous lesson covered some of the building blocks for your presentation. This lesson will cover the rest of those essential parts and give you some further guidelines. Let's get started. So let's talk about the results or analysis. Now, this is going to really differ for every type of research project that you do. For example, if you did a brand tracking study, you might just want to look at unaided and aided awareness of a particular brand, and then also look at brand attributes of your particular brand. There might also be a particular section that focused on let's say the brand's competitors. But if you were doing let's say market sizing, the results would be completely different. In that case, what you might have is a market size estimation of your audience. And then you might include some additional information about how your product was received, and particular feature information if it was relevant. The key is in each of these sections to make sure that you are really providing the key information that your viewer or reader wants to understand. So for example, in the aforementioned brand example, people really want to know how well the brand is doing, what's the awareness of it. Is it positive or negative? And the market sizing, it might be how big is my particular audience? These are things to really think about, because again, every slide that you put in your presentation should be helping build a story. Now, let's talk about the conclusion or the recommendations. We've spent a lot of time talking about how you typically should have 6 to 12 key recommendations. Think about recommendations in the same way that you might think about a carton of eggs. You don't want to waste the eggs and you don't want them to break. So what you want to do is make sure that every single recommendation is actionable and helps your viewer or reader achieve their business goals. One of the things that's also really important when it comes down to recommendations is prioritizing them. For example, in the aforementioned brand study, it might be that it's most important to recognize what the awareness of the brand is and then some particular brand attributes. Maybe it's favorability, maybe it's something like quality or it could be something like being environmentally correct. What you want to do, again, is figure out based on who your end user or who your key client is, what they want to now. Again, if you are doing recommendations for multiple sets of key constituents, for example, executives, engineering, or marketing folks, the prioritization may be different, or the recommendations might be different. We haven't spent a lot of time talking about a supplement or an appendix. Now, again, when most surveys have 20 plus questions, and focus groups are often an hour to 2 hours long, there may be a lot of information that doesn't necessarily help build your story, but your reader or viewer might want to know about. In that case, you want to put those slides in an appendix and you can let the reader know that they can look at them at their leisure after the presentation. Again, your goal is to provide a cohesive, concise story, not to include every question that was in a survey or in a focus group. All right, let's talk about some guidelines for creating effective slides. When you're ready to put your presentation together, there are some guidelines that could help really improve your presentation style and delivery. So first and foremost keep your text to a minimum. A presentation is not a report. As such your content should be in short phrases and short sentences instead of paragraphs. Use a font that is easy to read. Typically San Serif fonts such as Arial and Helvetica are easier to read than Serif fonts such as Times New Roman. Keep your color scheme simple and use symbolic colors. Humans can easily comprehend two to three colors. Think about a stop light. When color schemes become too complex, it takes more time to comprehend. Make sure presentations have white space. Don't cram slides with too much information. Reader should be able to read all of the content in 30 seconds or less. Simplify the charts. Ensure that you don't include charts that are too confusing or complex. Use the 30 second rule, which states, can you read or comprehend the data in 30 seconds or less? in order to be effective, your presentations have to address many different needs in a relatively short amount of time. This can be challenging for sure, but making sure to section your presentation in the way we discussed will greatly improve your chances of success, and make your presentation much more professional. As you're putting your presentation together, you may realize, wow, I have a lot more information that I could put in this presentation. So where does that information go? That's when your appendix comes in handy. That's basically a section at the end of the presentation where you can put all of the relevant information that doesn't really build on the story. People may want to view it at a later point, so it's important to include it in the presentation, but obviously you don't want it to detract from the main story, so always put it at the very end of the presentation.
