PowerPoint Presentations Don't Kill People - People Do
By Don Norman (referenced by Ken Dyck):
It has become commonplace to rail against the evils of PowerPoint talks....Edward Tufte, the imperious critic of graphic displays has weighed in with a document entitled "The cognitive style of PowerPoint," in which, among other things, he credits poor PowerPoint slides with contributing to the Challenger shuttle disaster....
[L]et me review Tutee's complaint about the presentation of data during the NASA Challenger incident. Here, Tufte points to a complex slide with 19 lines of text, with six different levels of hierarchy, displaying eleven sentences. The complaint, of course, is that the analyses failed to predict the actual damage that had occurred to the wing tiles when they had been struck by foam. Tufte goes on at excessive length to indicate why the slide is so poor and why it obscures information that might have led to a different conclusion. PowerPoint is bad, he concludes.
I differ most strongly with this assessment. Yes, the slide is very bad. Yes, it is almost incomprehensible. But in my opinion, the slide should have had less information on it—Tufte wants more information. He demonstrates this by showing how many words are on a page of a textbook. "So what?" I say. We read textbooks very differently than we listen to talks.
Look, it was a bad slide, but that isn't where the error lay. The error was in the conclusion reached by the experts....The fault is with the findings, not with the slides.
As Tufte points out, there was a statement, in small type, at the bottom of one of the slides, that could conceivably have alerted the reviewes to the fatal flaw in their reasoning. But think about it: why was that point buried in the small print? It was presented like that becase the experts had already considered the point and considered it not to be significant....
That critical slde was overfilled with information, not to hide the points, but because the experts did not believe them to have been significant. Now that the Challenger has crashed, we know the experts were wrong. But at the time, the experts were the best source of information available....I believe the committee members did as good a job as they could, given the time pressures upon them, given the limited information available, and given the limited options they believed they had. The slide did not lead to their conclusion: the slide reflected their conclusion....
Is PowerPoint responsible for the Challenger disaster? Don't be silly. The PowerPoint slides reflected the judgment of the committee. The critical point was in small type because the committee thought it unimportant. The surprise is that they included it at all — which implies to me that they were trying to be as complete and honest as they could. They were not trying to deceive....
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