Redesigning a PowerPoint Guide

Brief Summary of the Project and Its Goals

My target of focus is a real-life issue I had at work: how can I create a PowerPoint presentation that features both landscape (horizontal) and portrait (vertical) slides? Online instructions I found and PowerPoint’s own help files were ill-suited for practical use. Speaking from a user’s perspective, these guides were confusing and lacked clarity: “Why aren’t there images of what I’m supposed to press—I can’t find any of these buttons!” I had to find additional guides to learn the location of program menus and buttons, just so I could complete my original task. Frustrating.

One of the online instructional guides was written for a publication called Quick Start. I have tried to revise it using some ideas gleaned from the Professional Writing and Rhetoric essays. Charles Kostelnick emphasized the importance of balancing the visual and the pure textual in a document, since “a writer strikes a balance between the functional exigencies of information design (the user may give the document only a cursory glance) and an appropriate rhetorical stance—the need to appear trustworthy…successful, and employable” (283). Though Kostelnick refers here to the writing of a resume, this theory also applies to any documents used in business, particularly technical manuals. His entire essay discusses the importance of employing design principles to emphasize or better organize textual information.

Kostelnick’s seminal idea, which I shall apply to the Quick Start instructions, is what type of format is better suited to the text and audience? Since, as a user, the lack of images—of illustrations—in the PowerPoint guide frustrated me, the newly revised form must become more visual and less verbose. PowerPoint is a graphical program, therefore a PowerPoint guide should likewise be visual in nature. Explanatory text or reasoning for using certain techniques should come after the instructional content or at least set aside visually so as to not encumber the instructional text. The document’s main audience is most likely a user like myself who needs easy-to-follow, illustrated instructions to quickly accomplish a specialized task. A guide with screenshots enables the user to glean information faster and more accurately.

My process consisted of outlining the necessary steps needed to complete the task. I deleted irrelevant information—such as the steps for creating a portrait presentation—so that this guide remain true to its purpose and only focused on combining differently-formatted presentations. I also rewrote parts of the text, using the imperative voice more so that a user will understand that these are explicit directions to be followed. Wherever I thought further explanation was necessary, or when I needed to clarify a concept, I used images with callouts (callouts are illustrative texts that point out a specific part of an image). Suggestions and hints were placed at the end of the new guide. To determine what types of images were needed, I conducted a walkthrough of the steps and noted which steps could benefit from visual clarification or verification. I collected images of the screens users would see when they follow the steps correctly. These tactics have proven useful in my workplace, and coworkers usually indicate that the use of illustrated callouts improve a set of obscure, technical instructions instantly.

Works Cited