Does a Presentation’s Medium Affect Its Message?

Despite the prevalence of PowerPoint in professional and educational presentations, surprisingly little is known about how effective such presentations are. All else being equal, are PowerPoint presentations better than purely oral presentations or those that use alternative software tools? To address this question we created a real-world business scenario in which individuals presented to a corporate board. Participants (playing the role of the presenter) were randomly assigned to create PowerPoint, Prezi, or oral presentations, and then actually delivered the presentation live to other participants (playing the role of corporate executives). Across two experiments and on a variety of dimensions, participants evaluated PowerPoint presentations comparably to oral presentations, but evaluated Prezi presentations more favorably than both PowerPoint and oral presentations. There was some evidence that participants who viewed different types of presentations came to different conclusions about the business scenario, but no evidence that they remembered or comprehended the scenario differently. We conclude that the observed effects of presentation format are not merely novelty, bias, experimenter-, or software-specific effects, but instead reveal a communication preference for using the panning-and-zooming animations that characterize Prezi presentations.

尽管PowerPoint在专业和学术演示中普遍应用，但关于此类演示效果的有效性知之甚少。在所有其他条件相同的情况下，PowerPoint演示是否优于纯口头演示或使用替代软件工具的演示？为了回答这一问题，我们构建了一个现实世界的商业场景，其中个人向董事会进行演示。参与者（扮演演示者的角色）被随机分配以创建PowerPoint、Prezi或口头演示，然后实际向其他参与者（扮演企业高管的角色）进行现场演示。在两个实验中，从多个维度对PowerPoint演示与口头演示进行了比较，但参与者对Prezi演示的评价优于PowerPoint和口头演示。有证据表明，观看不同类型演示的参与者对商业场景的结论有所不同，但没有证据表明他们对场景的记忆或理解存在差异。我们得出结论，观察到的演示格式效果并非仅仅是新颖性、偏见、实验者或软件特定效应，反而揭示了对于使用具有Prezi演示特征的多角度缩放动画的沟通偏好。