The 5 second rule: enhancing the effectiveness of your slides through visual communication 

Here's a great way to know if your slides are effective. I call it the five second rule. You know, when you drop your favorite candy on the floor and you're thinking to yourself, can I eat it? 

Well, the same thing goes when you are delivering a presentation, if more than 5 seconds pass and your audience hasn’t caught the core of your message, maybe your slides are not effective enough.

The 5 second rule states that the effectiveness of a slide relies on how fast the audience is capable of understanding your message: If you can make your audience understand what you are trying to communicate within 5 seconds, you will guarantee yourself a very effective presentation. 

Here are 5 key principles to enhance the visual communication of your slides:

1. Use appealing images

Our brain can process images 60 thousand times faster than words. Try finding an image that encapsulates your point.

2. Make use of the blank space

In order to focus your audience’s attention on the slide, leave a good amount of empty space in it. This allows clarity by focusing on the point you are trying to make, emphasis on “the point”, only one point and no more. Don’t pack too many images or text in a single slide, it will look messy and confusing. Try to avoid fancy fonts that might be hard to read and stick to a more minimal, simpler way to present information, that way you will make your slides easy on the eyes but also easy to understand. 

3. Graphs and numbers

As math will be only exciting to a very reduced population of enthusiasts, try to make numbers and data as visually engaging as they can be. Use graphs and data to support your results, to make them clearer to your audience. Avoid complicated formulas and hard to understand graphics. In the case of graphs, use thick lines with strong colors and big numbers, but only the numbers you want to show, the conclusion. 

4. Use colors to enhance the visual experience

As color is an important tool to connect emotions with experiences, it will help modeling the communication from an aesthetic point of view. Using color is a way to send information that will be understood faster than text. So, don’t stick only to black and white tones. For instance, if you are doing a presentation about money matters, you will want to use green tones to correlate your subject with your visuals. Things that are dangerous or tabu you might want to use red. 

5. Stick to only a few colors and a few font types in the text

Two colors and two fonts are more than enough in one slide, avoid mixing too many contrasting colors and fonts. Stick to a simple aesthetic choice and use it for the rest of your presentation. 

6. Bullet points will kill your presentations

Bullets go in a gun, not in a presentation, if you must, try to stick to no more than three short items. Too many bullet points tend to make your presentations hard to follow, so you will lose your audience’s interest. Less is more.

If you already mastered the best Zoom meeting practices to engage your audience, your next step is to focus on the quality of your slides, with these 5 second rule tips you will be able to do so.