Slide packs, slide decks, infodecks, slideocuments, etc. are everywhere and many people around me assume they are an excellent means for keeping and communicating knowledge. Well, I challenge that, I despise slide-based-documents, I hate having to read them and I try to avoid them as much as I can. Here’s a little rant on the reasons why I feel like that.

This is not new or just some crazy idea that only I have. There are a few articles that date at least as far back as 2006 which critique (and criticise) the idea of combining slide based presentations and documents aka slideocuments. They explain how bad and inappropriate they are as they end up being neither good presentations nor good documents. It’s worth reading this short note from Martin Fowler; I like how he makes a distinction between slideocuments and infodecks which helps separate concerns adequately.

Most of the sources I’ve found are clear in communicating that slides written as a support for presentations are terrible as documents and vice-versa. A document and a presentation are very different things with different purposes, and it is a very bad idea to attempt to squash them into a single product.

Slideocuments are indeed a problem that’s still around and doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon but at least the problem has been identified. However, I haven’t found any good challenge on the use of infodecks as documents, as a tool to keep and provide to-read information. In addition to my inclination to ranting, this is relevant because infodecks are prevalent in the workplace and I don’t see many people questioning their value.

For clarity, let’s define an infodeck as a standalone document written on landscape formatted pages (aka slides), which on top of text, often uses graphics and other visual devices (e.g. extreme font types, arrows, boxes, columns, colouring) to communicate information in a not necessarily linear way (within each slide).

Plenty of the above is problematic when the goal is to communicate information in a format that’s easy to digest. Specifically:

• Forcing your documentation to be formatted in pages is a restriction which is only necessary if the document needs to be printed (or maybe projected). I can understand some people prefer to read on paper, but as far as I can see this is less and less common nowadays and I imagine it will only become rarer. Confining the information within the space of a page can be, in some situations, quite limiting and might have undesired design implications. The most usual consequences are slides with almost no margins, no space for footnotes, and generally cramped extremely small font sizes.

• The siloing of sections into slides has the side effect of making it particularly difficult to extend content. Updating a slide or adding information to it, often requires a full re-design of the page. The actual consequence in many cases, is not a re-design but that the seldom empty space in the slide gets filled in with the extra tiny text and the resulting product is even harder to follow.

• Infodecks are by default written in a landscape format. Again, this seems related to the fact that this type of document is paginated and I suspect that it’s a legacy from projected presentations. Although a landscape formatting can have some benefits for specific visuals, for reading it’s clearly suboptimal. It’s agreed that very long lines are harder to read. This is the unfortunate case of many infodecks I’ve come across, but to be fair, there are also many of them that split the text in shorter columns and alternative text configurations, which takes me to the next point: non-linearity.

• A non-linear narrative on a slide of an infodeck may make sense in some situations, for some particular type of content or maybe with some specific audiences. However, as non-linearity adds complexity to the narrative, it relies on the writer’s ability to use design elements that help the reader navigate the information contained on the slide. In all cases this puts extra pressure on the reader that will need to interpret the alternative semiotics used to deliver the message. When compared to classic documents this extra chance to add design and creativity in a document increases the likelihood of ending up with an unintelligible piece that ignores that the main purpose is to communicate information in the most effective way for the reader, that makes the assumption that the audiences will by default understand the structure and interactions of a different design. Diverging from convention is difficult and requires a skill which is not particularly abundant. Therefore, in most cases, the costs are larger than the benefits.

• Last, and maybe less important, there is the fact a document frequently needs to refer to external sources, appendices or footnotes. With classic documents there are well established ways of doing it. However, with infodecks it’s difficult and tends to be badly achieved. There’s no unique place to include a footnote, and cross-referencing to other parts of the infodeck tends to be arduous.

In a nutshell, writing a good classic document is difficult and rarely achieved, writing a good infodeck is way harder and the options to produce something that’s useless grow exponentially.

PS.- There is worse though, documents on spreadsheets make infodecks look good.

PPS.- Amazon’s ban of powerpoint has a couple of killer paragraphs worth quoting here:

The reason writing a 4 page memo is harder than “writing” a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related.

Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the innerconnectedness of ideas.