Literature review: Slide Authoring Tools and Techniques For - - PDF document

Literature review: Slide Authoring Tools and Techniques For Presentations

Kartik Andalam University of Auckland Software Engineering kand617@aucklanduni.ac.nz

ABSTRACT

Presentation software like PowerPoint has existed for over 20

• years. Since then, research related to such software has ex-

panded and grown immensely. Current research yields new techniques to improve the effectiveness of tools to help pre- senters during the early stages of slide authoring, rehearsals, and delivering presentations. In this report, we explore re- search related to authoring of slides and tools that help to cre- ate effective slides. We explore three research areas. (1) We discuss slide author- ing assistants, in particular a tool for analysing slide content and suggesting new content of interest. (2) We investigate various slide generation techniques and present a qualitative

• comparison. (3) We discuss a new presentation style called

canvas presentations and how authoring of slides is affected.

Author Keywords

Slide authoring;PowerPoint

ACM Classification Keywords

H.5.m. Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g. HCI): Miscellaneous

INTRODUCTION

Presentations act as a strong medium for communication, weather it is to inform an audience about an idea or tell a

• story. While great stories can be told with just speech, it is

common for the presenter to have supporting slides. The pri- mary purpose of the slides is to act as visual support for the audience, hence it is crucial for slides to be effective. The pro- cess of authoring slides requires careful planning and exper- imenting to find an optimal method to structure the content. The process is further complicated with restrictions such as time expectations and presentation deviations. This literature review present work related to slide authoring tools and techniques, in particular we analyse slide authoring assistants, slide generation, and discuss the impact of canvas based presentation for authoring. For slide authoring assistants we study a tool called Side Point[5], which offers the ability to analyse the slide content and can suggest related content such as images and phrases. We then briefly discuss its implementation of slide analysis with a different technique for slide reuse presented in [3]. For slide generation we study three tools of varying function-

• ality. The first is a tool called Turning Point[6] which offers

a canvas for narrative driven presentations that in turn gener- ate PowerPoint slides. The second tool called HyperSlides[2] uses a “Planning with points” approach and a simple mark- up language to dynamically generate prototype slides, thus allowing user to easily experiment with structure of content. The third tool is Next Slide Please (NSP) which explores a graph based approach for slide generation focusing on prior- ity and presentation time. For each of the works, we discuss the tool as well as the motivation and user study findings. Then we briefly compare them in a qualitative summary. In canvas and slide authoring, present a comparison of the canvas and slide decks against a set of characteristics defined in [1]. We see the restrictive nature of slides presented by [1]. Later we discuss results of a study done regarding canvas presentations vs slide deck presentations and their correlation with audience recall.

SLIDE AUTHORING ASSISTANTS

Creation of slides requires a substantial amount of time searching the internet for information, images, phrase. This surfaced a need for a knowledge panel embedded in the pre- sentation software like PowerPoint that can assist the user in finding concise relevant content for the information on the current slide. This task is composed of various challenges such as extracting the information on the slides so that key information can be used to as part of effective search queries. As part of the work presented by [5], a user study was con- ducted where participants were given one hour to create a five minute presentation slides. Their findings showed that a large majority of the time was spent outside the presentation soft- ware, searching for content. They also found that participants had two distinct needs they were trying to satisfy from web

• searches. The first is referred to as “active needs”, where the

participant was looking for a particular information. The sec-

• nd is “latent needs”, where the participant has come across

unanticipated content and deems it to be useful while search- ing simultaneously. With the findings from their user study experiment, they de- veloped SidePoint[5]. A presentation tool that is assists the active and latent needs during presentation authoring. Side- Point uses external web services to parse in to keyword sets (noun or nouns phrases) and fetch semantically relevant in-

• formation. A user study of the tool showed promising results

where participants found the tool’s suggestion of information and related concepts to be relevant. However the usability study was done on simple and general topics such as coun- tries and culture. Further studies should be done to examine the effectiveness of such tools for more technical or specific topics. One of the challenges of such tool is accurately extracting information on the slide to a form such that it can result in ef- fective searches queries. In [3] proposes a new method to help better select key information for slide searching. The method involves preprocessing of the slide to form a tree that captures priorities and relationships in the contents of the slide. For ex- ample the title of the slide is considered high priority keyword since it is commonly used to represent the purpose. Also hi- erarchical information can be examined by looking at bullet points and indentations. Furthermore position and spacing and size also influence how the contents is treated. Compar- ing this to SidePoint, it can be seen that some usability issues

• f optimising the search query can be improved by building

better slide analysis tools.

SLIDE GENERATION

Presentations are effective when they tell the audience a story, to create such presentation slides can be a challenging task. Forming good presentation slides can be difficult because it is important for information needs to be logically structured so that audience can follow. Furthermore presenting poses new challenges, for example most presentations made using Pow- erPoint tend to be linear. This might be acceptable for a pre- sentation that goes very smoothly, however it is not uncom- mon that presenter tends to skip slides due to time constraints. By utilising slide generation tools, authors can quickly proto- type and modify slides so that they can focus on getting the logical structure of the content prefect. The following discuss such tools along with their findings and limitations. Turning point is a plug-in for Microsoft PowerPoint that pro- vides a planning environment allowing users to create slides. The process involves following one of six templates that help its users structure the material logically. Turing Point plan- ning canvas is split in two main segments, the narrative stream and the content canvas. The content canvas is a sticky note like area where the user can group related text. The narra- tive stream is what is used to generate the slides, consisting

• f a two streams, show and tell. The show stream allows

space for the user to place visual content and other elements to be presented on the slide. The tell stream contains verbal notes that are used while elaborating the content on the show

• stream. The user study reveals that participants found that

the narrative templates allowed them to keep their presenta- tion on track and clearly define their scope. Some partici- pants claimed that such templates would not have changed the content, but definitely allowed the structure to be made visible faster with a ’fill in the blanks’ nature. However this is dependent on the type of template they chose for the prob-

• lem. Their findings also found that some narrative templates

were less preferred as they are either too long or too com- plex, which surfaces the narrative templates should serve ini- tial guidance without being too prescriptive. Narrative driven presentation planning seems to have effective results, how- ever it is limited by the suitability of the templates for various presentation contexts. HyperSlides is a tool that allows dynamic presentation pro-

• totyping. It utilises a simple mark-up language that can be

used to automatically generate slides with appropriate styling

• techniques. The simple mark-up language allows for ”Plan-

ning with Points”, that is the author can focus and quickly prototype the structure of the presentation without the need to move elements graphically. Furthermore the mark-up allows links to be created between slides to allow the presenter to have navigation control during presentation. This avoids the situation where the presenter skips a number of consecutive slides as they move to the next topic or concept. The find- ings from their user study are largely positive, users found the ”Planning with Points” approach allowed them to better

• rganize their thoughts and subsequently are able to improve

the presentation. From a presentation perspective, the ability to jump out of sequence was a key advantage to using hyper

• slides. Overall it is an effective tool that allows rapid proto-

typing with minimal effort at the expense of reduced layout control and increased navigation overhead. NextSlidePlease (NSP) is a tool that is helps with slide au- thoring and presenting in a novel dynamic approach based

• n constraints. The tool solves issues such as creating com-

pelling slides that capture complex relationships between concepts, assists in reuse of previously created presentations and the novel feature of allowing the user to effectively man- age time with a dynamic presentation. Next Slide represents the slide navigation as a weighted graph with slides as ver-

• tices. The weights are dependent on the slide importance and

the time required to elaborate. Forming a weighted graph al- lows NSP to perform algorithmic computation on the graph. For example, during a presentation the system could offer dif- ferent paths to the presenter based on the time consumed so far. To see the effectiveness of NSP as a slide authoring tool and presenting tool, Two user studies were performed were par- ticipants had to create and give presentations. The first study compared PowerPoint and NSP. The second study compared CounterPoint and NSP. When compared to PowerPoint, re- sults were strongly in favour of NSP. Participants found that it was easier to create links between slides in NSP over Power-

• Point. CounterPoint did not include a time management tool,

which made it harder for participants to effectively navigate through their presentations in time. Counterpoint did not of- fer the ability to change path during presentation. Also NSP’s path suggestion was preferred to Counterpoint’s approach with separate panes. However some participants wished that they had fewer choices while presenting. Issues such as these raise concern about the complexity of the tools during pre-

• senting. The effect of this cognitive overhead in different sit-

uations is still unclear. Also the tool requires the user to be situated next to a screen to show the path, the facility may not be available in all situations thus limiting the use of the tool.

To help understand how these tools compare against each

• ther, table 1 compares the tools described for slide gener-

ation with respect to the following attributes followed by a brief discussion. Layout Control Refers to the ease of controlling layout ele- ments on a slide. Effort Refers to the ease of authoring slides in terms of time taken to set up and modify presentation slides Navigational Control Refers to the ability of the slides to have a dynamic presentation sequence (non-linear slides).

Layout Control

• Req. Effort

Navigational Control TurningPoint Medium Low Low HyperSlide Low Low High NSP High High High Table 1. Qualitative comparison of Slide generation tools

For layout control, NSP has the best layout control as it works with slides from a WYSIWYG perspective. TurningPoint’s does have a GUI to control the contents of the slide, but it is not as free as the conventional PowerPoint slides. Due to HyperSlides mark-up language, the layout control is severely restricted to limits of the mark-up language. For required effort, both TurningPoint and HyperSlide take a relatively short amount of time and effort to produce usable

• slides. However NSP is rated high for effort required due to

the set up phase involving adding slide priorities and expected screen times. In terms of navigational control, both HyperSlide and NSP were high as path creation is as a core aspect of their design. However TurningPoint’s ability to offer navigational control is restricted due to the nature of the “Narrative” nature of the tool.

CANVAS AND SLIDE DECKS AUTHORING

The idea of a slide have been transferred to the digital world from old projectors. Since then PowerPoint slides have been the most commonly used presentation style. The nature of slides have also restricted creative authoring capabilities to bullet points and linear sequence. Canvas presentation is a different authoring style, based on the idea of a infinite can- vas, it shifts the author away from the bounds and restrictions

• f a “slide” for a visually fluid presentation through panning

and zooming the canvas. In the work presented by Bean, J.W in[1], strengths and weakness of presentation styles can be compared by four key

• characteristics. The four characteristics are layout, freedom
• f presentation sequence, context and animation and move-
• ment. In the following we compare these characteristics of

PowerPoint and Prezzi, a popular canvas based presentation tool. Layout PowerPoint has strong display unit boundaries, mak- ing it more difficult to visually encode key relations of the

• content. In some situations the restriction is not as ad-

verse, for example presenting a proposal or technical re- port, which have defined sections and sequence. Prezzi allows the author to effectively and freely make sensible choices in terms of layout utilising position proximity to logically portray relationships and hierarchy that needs to be presented. Movements such as Pan and Zoom can be used to help achieve this. Presentation sequence Power point restricts the presenter to a fixed path, this restriction can be phrased as Linear inflex-

• ibility. This limits the presenter’s ability to dynamically

adapt to the situation during presentation. If needed, Prezzi does offer similar restriction through “paths”, however the author can also allow a free style mode through Prezzi’s smart zooming capability. This new feature allows the au- thor to group visual elements and can freely visit different groups according to the situation. Context Holding the user’s perception of where the current slide fits in the grand scheme of things can be hard. A key characteristic of PowerPoint slides is the title. It allows the author to concisely specify the context of the slide. How- ever structures with deep hierarchy can suffer from slide title flattening [1], meaning the audience can find it hard to understand where the context of the slide is in the hi-

• erarchy. Prezzi zooming feature allow the audience to use

their spatial awareness to help maintain the logical hierar- chical context of the information. The camera can Zoom in to signify a more detailed discussion of the topic. On the

• ther hand panning can be used show to shift the context to

sibling concepts. Animation and movement Although PowerPoint is based

• n the metaphor of projector slides, it uses the ability of

software animations in slides to strategically show ele- ments in a specific order on the slide. This is great for situations where a reveal effect is required. Prezzi’s infinite canvas achieves a similar effect using a different mean. By utilising the pan and zoom, an author can achieve a more immersive experience that can appear as a reveal. The discussion presented by Bean portrays canvas based pre- sentations to have a positive influence on the audience’s pre- sentation experience. In a study done by Lichtschlag [4] con- tributes new findings about the correlation of content recall and user experience with slide decks and a canvas based pre- sentation tool called Fly. The study consisted of two presentations (Convergent Evolu- tion and Fixed-Gear Bicycle ) to two different groups. Each group was shown a recorded presentation (to reduce presen- tation bias) of a PowerPoint and Fly presentation. Later each participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire. The results from the study showed no significant differences regarding re- call of content, however users preferred canvas presentations. Another interesting result that surfaced, was that there can- vas presentation were thought to better as presentations could use spatial awareness to help represent relations. However the study did not find a clear correlation between people who strong spatial awareness and correct answers. When considering the findings of the study, it is important to recognise that canvas based presentations are still new, which

can make the audience more interested due to its style and consequently impact the retention of users.

IMPLICATIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

In terms of slide authoring assistants, there appears to a lot re- search done on slide reuse systems, however tools like Side- Point which are used in the process of creating new slide decks may not have a slide reuse system to rely on. As a consequence, further work is needed to be able to efficiently analyse the information on a slide and be able to retrieve from sources such as a web instead of an indexed slide reuse sys- tem. For slide generation, there appears to be numerous work re- lated to slide decks that can help authors to quickly generate

• slides. However most of these tools are related to slide decks.

An area of that needs future work is slide generation for can- vas based presentations. This opens new challenges regarding layout on infinite canvas and finding suitable transitions based

• n the structure.

With an increase in canvas presentations, there have been var- ious work comparing the effectiveness of canvas presentation tools such as Prezzi and Fly with traditional tools like Pow-

• erPoint. However the current research only looks at the end

result of the presentation. There is scope for work for com- paring the effectiveness with the effort required for authoring slides.

CONCLUSION

In this literature review we discussed work related to slide au- thoring tools and techniques. In particular we looked at slide assistants such as SidePoint which can suggest new content to include, based on information on the current slide. Then we reviewed different approaches to slide deck generation, these tools aimed to allow the author to focus and experiment on the logical structure with a reduced layout control. Lastly we discussed work comparing the capabilities of canvas based presentation tools such as Prezzi and Fly to traditional slide based tools like PowerPoint.

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