"Presentation Design for the User Experience," with Dave Uejio

For the past several years, PowerPoint presentations have become a fairly ubiquitous platform for presenting information to an audience. In this week’s session of MLDP, Dave Uejio, Strategy Program Manager at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, discussed designing presentations for the user experience.

Uejio opened up his talk with examples of bad PowerPoint slides and asked the group if we had previously seen slides similar to those shown. The entire room unanimously agreed that they had sat through presentations with poorly designed slides. Uejio challenged us to think about why these slides were ineffective techniques of presenting information.

Many presenters do not know how to use visual tools to frame a narrative. Common problems included text-heavy slides that overwhelm the audience and charts with data that are unclear. Uejio also provided examples of effective slides that had a clear story, used visual data and text to successfully deliver the key messages of a presentation.

After discussing examples of good and bad presentation techniques, Uejio directed us to make a short PowerPoint presentation using the principles of design and effective storytelling. Each group, consisting of 3 or 4 students, was assigned a topic and used data from the Rockefeller Center 6th Annual State of the State Poll to design an effective presentation.

My group’s topic was concerning universal background checks for purchase of firearms in NH. When creating our presentation, we used a black and white image of a gun with highlighted text: “76% of respondents in NH support universal background checks.” This proved to be a powerful visual tool to make our statistics stand out.

I found this session to be helpful because I will definitely be creating several PowerPoint presentations in the future and I can utilize the tips and tools provided by Uejio to make effective and successful presentations.

--Written by Shreya Indukuri ‘16, MLDP S14 Participant