Ask HN: Why are slides used in talks instead of document scrolling? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are slides used in talks instead of document scrolling?

46 pointsamichail95 comments

Any ideas?

It's incredibly important NEVER to reveal information visually before you get to talking about it. With scrolling, you'll be showing bits of the "next topic/points" at the bottom of the screen (unless you're incredibly careful) and people will be paying attention to that and guessing what comes next rather than paying attention to the discussion. (Don't know why people do, they just do. People are curious and easily distracted.)

Therefore, you need a fixed canvas to flip through, for total control. Hence, fixed slides rather than scrolling.

This is also why when slides have multiple main bullet points, it's very common to only reveal them one bullet at a time. This ensures you have the audience's attention as you discuss each one, and their mind isn't distracted by thinking about the next.

So that's the main reason -- to carefully and precisely control the flow of information, to sync talking/discussion with the visual.

Secondarily, slides lend themselves to attractive layout of images etc. for maximum effect of storytelling and emotional effect. Of course, for a highly technical presentation, that may be irrelevant. But a lot of talks do include a storytelling/emotional aspect where the dramatic framing of a single photo is important, which you need a slide with a fixed layout to do.

I’m not saying you are wrong, I’ve done the same thing, although I’ve started to think more deeply about how and when to reveal content.

Edward Tufte on the other hand suggests never “revealing” content since he claims that’s treating the audience not intelligently.

If I'm listening to a speaker, I'm there to learn. If I knew everything already, I wouldn't be wasting my time. So my intelligence is not insulted if the speaker assumes I don't know things.

It's possible to tell people new information with or without misjudging their capacity to follow, and with or without being boring. All those combinations happen out there.

Just like a book or a movie, your audience has to be able to notice that you're taking them somewhere, without being able to piece the whole picture together until the reveal. If you circle around a concept for a while, slowly inch towards it, and press the Next button on your remote like the grand unveiling of a marble statue, the reveal better be worth the buildup. The other extreme exists as well. Make it too cryptic, and people will have no idea what your point is.

No one appreciates having to wait through the slow exposition of something they already figured out. Spend too long revealing something you've already given away, and people will sleep through your snazzy powerpoint reveal transition FX.

You want presentations to be entertaining because people remember information they're interested in! It's not showmanship for the sole sake of the dazzle. Get people's attention, and your slides stick.

I already knew all this. How dare you tell me about it as if it was new?

> No one appreciates having to wait through the slow exposition of something they already figured out.

It’s common for people to rewatch movies they have already seen, and reread books they have already read. Sometimes the joy is in the presentation, not the destination.

Did Tufte say that regarding live presentations? As he's more of an infographic / dashboard SME.

Live presentations are designed to "lead the witness" (neither inherently good nor bad) - or rather, if a presentation really is merely a collection of things without a narrative, it might as well obey Tufte and lay it out all at once.

He sure hates PowerPoint with a passion.

Why can't you reveal items one by one in a scrollable document just like you do in slides?

Once you do, why not just use slides since you're recreating the experience and using them in the same manner?

You can, but at that point it’s much easier to break it up by slide, at least with the tooling we have that’s targeted at giving such presentations.

Would you pad the pages? How would you know what's enough padding depending on screen proprtions/rotation during presentation? How do you align the "scroll step" to match your presentation padding?

If you address all of these, I think you end up with something that looks like a presentation, but the panels have a "slide up" animation/transition to simulate scrolling. So I guess this slide transition could end up being a compromise for people who really want that effect

If you're scrolling a document, the most recently revealed line is always at the bottom, which is often the least visible part of the screen if you have a large audience.

You can, however unless you've got significant padding, the previous information that is scrolled up (but still visible) is still there and possibly distracting.

If you are padding sufficiently to have only the content that you want visible at one time, you've got a slide - and other tooling is better for presenting slides.

Revealing information ahead of time seems counterintuitive when sone presentations have handouts distributed beforehand.

Good presentations generally don't do this.

Distributing handouts/printed slides is a symptom of a culture of bad presentations (bad as in a waste of everyone's time), just like paragraphs of text on a slide that the presenter reads verbatim.

Hard disagree. Always provide me maximum information. If there is a chance I can pre-consume some of the content, I am more likely to better follow what the speaker is presenting and learn more than if everything is fresh.

Audience can choose to not do the pre-reading (most will not), but for those who want it, allows for deeper appreciation of the talk.

It depends on the context. For example, with business meetings slides tend to be jam packed with information. They're already a glorified document with a narrator. The speaker is there to enhance the slides. It works well to hand those out ahead of time.

For a proper presentation, like at a conference, IMO slides should be there to supplement the speaker. Not the other way around. Thus the amount of hard information on the slides themselves should be minimal. Because of this, hand outs don't make as much sense.

And of course a third angle. If one follows my philosophy for conference talks & such, then there's the problem that distributing slides after the fact are useless, because all the important information was conveyed by the speaker. But that's another discussion altogether.

By sheer number, the majority of presentations are of the business-disseminate information type, so that's my default angle.

Unless there is some big reveal that requires secrecy, it costs nothing to pre-share slides, so I wish it were more common.

Agree 100%.

It's just important for everyone to keep in mind when discussing slides, presentations, etc that there's not a one size fits all answer to this stuff. Someone talking about the "perfect slide deck" needs to understand they only mean perfect for the specific context they have in mind.

A presentation isn't a spec review or a technical paper. If your goal is maximum distribution of technical information, you should be looking for another format. Presentations convey the essence of a story.

If it requires a bunch of graphs that people should be actually reading, make it a document, not a slideshow

It still steers and controls the discussion. If people perfectly understood the preread, there would be no need to present it

A slide is not a text transcript. Revealing one bullet at a time assumes the atomic element in a presentation is the bullet. I think it's the slide, which is often an image or a diagram. You earn the audience's attention for the next slide by what you have said for the last. In addition, a TED talk is not a good model for an effective briefing. An effective presentation is interactive and allows for questions to affect the flow. This is especially true for sales presentations, but any presentation where you are trying to move an audience to action.

Because before digital projectors were a thing we had slide projectors. Much easier to create physical slides and flip through those with a slide projector than create a scroll of film and project that. PowerPoint and other presentation programs were the digital version of slides. For awhile you'd still have physical slides made from your PowerPoint slides. My father did that up to around 2000.

It's also just less fiddly to flip through pages or slides than scroll around.

This. When Powperpoint first became popular you'd see people throwing in lots of animated transitions. 99% of the time these just made the talk look like a cheap used car lot commercial on local cable tv. Everyone moved on, and now when people use animation or transitions they tend to be mild and subtle.

when I was a kid I'd use those animations and transitions to make cartoons

Frankly, the only valid use of powerpoint animations these days is to implement an entirely new application [1].

[1]: http://tomwildenhain.com/PowerPointTM/Paper.pdf

I use animation quite a bit in presentations i put together. Usually the 'transform' type to show thw relationship between two consecutive figures like zooming into a more detailed portion of a system block diagram.

This is only half the answer. Microfilm has existed before slide projectors were popular.

I think it's more to do with the fact that humans respond well and are comfortable with a paginated format. "This information fits in this box." Scrolling does not offer that as an inherent part of the format.

And everything I ever looked up on microfilm was paginated, of course, just with multiple pages on the same piece of microfilm / microfiche. Maybe we could imagine reading a book on a scroll of microfilm with the entire book written as one unbroken column.

There were overhead projectors with transparency rolls, and they could provide an experience similar to scrolling on a computer screen. The content was usually hand-written with a marker on the transparency rolls, often during the presentation. This kind of overhead projector was popular in schools, but I'm not sure if anyone ever delivered a business presentation on a roll of transparency...

This is the best picture I could find on google: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/244154-REG/Apollo_VST...

And I think the reason these were popular was that it was a lot more convenient to scroll when you needed more writing space. It was more about working on the fly in front of students than creating scrollable presentations. At least that was my experience as a student at the time.

It was also a way to avoid handling chalk when whiteboards weren't a thing.

Bah! In my day, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we wrote on transparent plastic slides using special pens, the way our fathers did, and their fathers before them! And then we displayed them using machines called overhead projectors, powered by halogen bulbs that always burned out at the wrong moment! Youngsters these days … what do they know?

We know to harvest the Fresnel lens from those overhead projectors to use as a magnifying glass to set pavement on fire!

That’s an appropriate application of technology if I ever saw one.

Also similar to most pdfs and documents nowadays. Even though most documents will never be printed, people still separate typed documents by pages.

I personally love the new pageless layout google docs has. Removes all the distracting margins and headers/footers between pages.

You've made a key mistake. Slides are made of text and images but use the narrative language of TV and movies. Storytelling (and all slide decks are stories) using the tropes of written language results in terrible powepoints, the timing is all off. Whenever you find yourself in a situation where you have a deck that needs to be a doc you've found yourself in a meeting thay could have been an email.

Is there a good way to decide when to do a meeting and when to write an email?

yes, start by writing an email, if you feel it's impossible to solve the issue with the email, set up a meeting

I like that! It also prepares the meeting in case you need one. Thanks for sharing

It's a trust thing - the more trust the less it needs to be a meeting. Unfortunately most companies and client relationships are low trust and need facetime to build towards that high trust environment.

I think it takes experience.

You send out an email and people misinterpret it, and there’s some nuance, and there’s a bunch of back and forth communication, but nothing ever gets resolved—maybe that should have been a meeting.

You set up a meeting to explain something to 50 people in your department—maybe that could have been an email.

Synchronous tools like meetings shine when a topic is ambiguous, contentious, or requires debate. You can have a dialog.

Asynchronous tools like email or even Slack are better for topics with less ambiguity, aren't controversial, or doesn't require a ton of back and forth.

Lastly, meetings are better for building relationships, trust, etc.

I think the simple rule is when you need to persuade when choosing among multiple ambiguous options, you must also rebut counterarguments (even "devil's advocate"), so a meeting is more concise at reaching a decision than an email chain.

So basically any ambiguity about the outcome. When you're not sure what hill to take, when there's competing priorities, when there's conflicting information and you need alignment, when there's risk and you need to spread it appropriately.

The reason you need a meeting is an email by itself will be insufficiently conclusive, and everyone writing emails will be talking past each other.

Amazon disagrees:

We generally had a doc, read it, and then discussed it.

In my experience, those meetings were much more informed and focused than meetings with presentations.

> Whenever you find yourself in a situation where you have a deck that needs to be a doc you've found yourself in a meeting thay could have been an email.

So all of them? I don't disagree that all of my undergrad classes would have been better if they just e-mailed me a doc.

Slides are meant to illustrate concepts, not be a document you read. If I can read your slides like a cut up article you're doing presentations wrong.

Then why are most company websites made with scrolling?

Because visiting a web site is a very different experience from listening to a talk. When you visit a web site, you (the visitor) has control of the presentation. When you listen to a talk, the speaker has control.

Additionally, if the slides have all the relevant content, the speaker is almost certainly doing it wrong. Slides are generally intended to be an outline, not a comprehensive paper.

Websites, on the other hand, have to be much more detailed to be useful.

This doesn't explain why if the user has control they prefer scrolling, whereas if the presenter has control they prefer slides.

This is literally begging the question - of course different users would prefer their content in a distinct format to meet their distinct objectives.

Presenter has control: objrctive is to control the narrative, build to a conclusion, resonate. Slides tell stories and "make a case."

User has control: find what's relevant to them, get out. Documents are organized for search and discovery.

And since when do companies not try to control the narrative?

Companies try to control the narrative just like any one person tries to control the narrative in their lives, i.e. everyone does this. This whole argument makes no sense.

We're not really talking about controlling the narrative. We are talking about controlling the consumption rate (and the ability to set the focus). If I am visiting a web site, some parts are more interesting and some less; I want to spend time on the stuff I care about. If I am giving a presentation, I also want to control how the material is presented. This is nothing about "narratives".

Because websites are not presentations, the two serve entirely different puproses. It's unclear what you're asking to be honest.

No. That's one type of slide. In others, the slides are there to present facts rather than numinous concepts. Think of illustrating something in programming: usually you need to show working code, and the audience need to be able to take and modify that specific code. Just talking about a concept is not enough for that specific case. Btw, there are people who hate "concept" slides just as much as you hate "content" slides. Feynman had some very terse comments on bullet points, for instance.

You are building a plethora of straw man arguments here. No one other than you has said anything about hate or any other such nonsense.

From a physiological standpoint, I don't think document scrolling is of any help when trying to read something. Especially when it's not the reader who does the scrolling.

Scrolling is needed when you have a document that doesn't fit on the screen / inside its window.

Splitting things in chunks is helpful, and can even be helpful if the unit of splitting is dictated by a physical constraint, like page size. It can sometimes be annoying when a flow is broken at an unfavourable position by a page break. But even this kind of uniform splitting provides natural orientation points for the reader to find things previously read or skimmed over. It provides an indexing method for free ("consider the figures on page 14").

It also allows printing on physical media (if wanted).

Agree. So does the Kindle.

I guess the main aim of slides is to focus the attention. So, the act of scrolling may have a negative psychological effect on that.

If you are starting with a document, there are apps that directly transform it into slides, like deckset [1] and marp [2] for markdown. I think I've seen similar options directly integrated into obsidian, Notion and others.

[1] https://www.deckset.com/

[2] https://github.com/marp-team/marp

And also logseq, e.g. visit https://logseq.com/?spa=true#/page/how%20to%20take%20dummy%2... and click the dots in the upper right and "Presentation"

As a lecturers in a uni, I used to deliver all my lectures using slides, (PowerPoint, Beamer or Keynote).

My problem with slides is that my students have a stated preference for knowledge disseminated via simple web pages. So… I switched to simple web pages. They can be a bit clumsy to deliver in a live lecture, but at the end of the day a lecture succeeds or fails by my energy, not the medium.

The advantage of working in this way is that it place me close to web searches, linked material etc. This serves the inevitable extemporaneous diversions I encounter via student questions.

Could you elaborate? — or would you be willing to share an example?

I do the same as the GP; see, e.g., last Monday's class: https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/#Day26

Very nice site... clean and clear.

> Could you elaborate?

There are several things that inform my prefference for 'vanilla' web over slides.

1. Many students are on mobile or a small laptop, and slides do not work well on a small screen.

2. Downloading pdfs can be a bore.

3. Most of our teaching is done on the Learning Management System (LMS) Canvas, and Keeping learning media web-based places teaching material nice and close to this.

4. As I keep all my material in one large open-access Canvas, I can cross link to other lecture material. In this way, assignment descriptions are peppered with appropriate support material.

5. Web pages is a live entity that can be updated at ease.

> or would you be willing to share an example?

Sure... The following is taken from our OER, other stuff is restricted.

- Western art history. Very linear, fairly vanilla:

https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/modules/749876

- Typography crimes. By my talented colleague:

https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/modules/774270

- Colour for artists. I must have done this one 100 times. A tough task to present key knowledge in a streamlined manner.

https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/modules/696256

I have not given up on slides altogether. In fact, only last week I made some slides to address the topic of colour to high school students. In that instance, the linearity of slides served the task effectively.

My students have said they prefer a Web page over slides, for the same reasons. (Example, posted in a grandchild comment: https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/#Day26 )

Interesting, and since it's all about presentation, it would be quite easy to generate both a presentation with slides (say with reveal.js or beamer) and a web page from the same source (emacs, markdown, logseq, obsidian, ...)

I actually use a scrolling document for most of my talks at work. I do this for a few reasons:

I am lazy. I just want write in Markdown. I have a dynamic HTML renderer so I don't even have to render the document myself. https://github.com/superjamie/emdee

Usually the stuff I write is intended to be consumed either as written or as video. I don't want a bunch of slides with incomplete talking points.

It works for me.

Try scrolling with a remote while giving a talk. Somehow I think the current format will prove good enough.

The focus of a good presentation is the presenter, not what’s on the screen. Bad talks make the audience divide their attention between what is being said and what is being shown. What would be shown on a scrolling display? Probably text. Text requires concentration to read, which means asking the audience to divide their attention.

For what it’s worth, if you want something like a scroll effect, I can think of a couple ways to make it happen in Keynote or PowerPoint.

Scrolling would require the presenter to constantly reference a screen He/She/They may not be able to see.

Pacing and control when the information is revealed.

Good captivating presentations are foremost a spoken medium. You're telling a story. You use the screen as an aid for concepts that are easier to show than to describe, and secondarily as an reinforcement/amplification of the points you're making, and then as a background setting the mood of the talk.

But the visuals have to match what you're talking about. Otherwise they're out of context and distracting by foreshadowing what you're going to talk about next. You also can't emphasise things by making a sudden reveal if the presentation is gently scrolling by itself.

BTW the classic PowerPoint style of long lists of bullet points with the presentation outline is IMHO not good. That's more of an aid for the presenter than the audience.

I treat slides like notecards. They keep me on topic and remind me of what I need to talk about.

Present however works best for your material and audience. Discrete slides, scrolling through documents, or a hybrid. But in my experience, slides tend to be better than scrolling unless you're "working through" some problem (even then, slides tend to be just fine).

It's not like people don't scroll through documents and call it a presentation. They've just been some of the most painful presentations I've attended and I have no desire to subject anyone to that myself. I'd honestly rather have PowerPoint eye charts than another one of them. At least the eye charts tried to create a presentation, they just fucked it up.

Because slides are like scrolling with the scroll cadence determined ahead of time. 'Next slide' is easier to think about while speaking than 'scroll..er..this much'.

There are a ton of post hoc justifications for slides here. Ability to control the audience's rate of uptake of info aside, I think that slides are a cultural norm for presenting info in business presentations that predate computers and were the natural mode for the available early av equipment. Sweating Bullets, a biographical account of the early days of power point, includes some interesting description of what things were like pre-computer.

Slides give speakers more control. But I like using a combination approach, so some of my slides link to a zoomable/scrollable canvass.

I disagree that giving people information visually before you speak about it is bad. It may be a creative and engaging way to present. I like to pose visual mysteries sometimes and use my oratory to reveal the secret.

But I agree that the speaker is putting on a show and must be allowed to control it.

Because of movie transitions from scene to scene leading to slide projectors with transitions from scene (slide) to scene leading to powerpoint-like presentations using digital slides iwth transitions from scene to scene?

People are used to scene transitions going back a long time (maybe even thousands of years in the manner of theatre scenes/transitions). Slides make sense to me in that regard at least.

This is all just a huge, un-researched, wild guess, of course.

I remember a few years ago some more dynamic presentation modes making a bit of a splash. I used one of them[1] to good reception in at least one talk, but ultimately it felt more like really slick slide-to-slide transitions than a fundamentally different paradigm.

[1] https://impress.js.org/

I knew an old guy at my previous employer who, when he needed to make a presentation, would do it in Notepad. Text was separated by the exact number of lines that a PgDn would get you, so it was all just one big txt document he could very easily jump through. Clever and hilarious.

my first thought is that it's a focus thing. if I have a scrolling document on screen, it's hard for viewers to know at a glance what piece of information we're currently focused on. slides break up the information into single-focus segments

How do you scroll said document on the screen? Do you do it one line at a time, show a whole page, keep current line at the top, bottom? There's such a myriad of issues and challenges associated with document scrolling etiquette, IMO.

If you think a scrolling document would make for a better visual aid for a presentation, please don’t give any presentations. Just e-mail your document to everyone and don’t waste their time.

Most scrolling implementations are bug prone, and their UX is infamously difficult to get right. Rendering a static asset at a time is an ancient pattern that tends to just work.

Think flipping through slides is mentally a bit easier to read, seeing one frame at a time rather than seeing content that is continually “loading.”

There are those presentations where you can just zoom in or out continuously. It's on Prezi.com. It can be quite engaging.

One idea:

Make a side-scrolling stream of presentation talking points, like Super Mario ... visit one world for each topic :)

Because scrolling reminds people of the infinite scroll and they walk away in the middle of the talk?

we don't like to track things that move outside our control. it takes effort to track something. even if you did it like star wars intro, then you must keep up.

Try it for 5 minutes and it should be fairly obvious.

Use whatever works. Slides work for most people.

greater focus and simplicity.

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