1. Example “Good Slides”
for a CHI Paper Presentation
Joshua B. Gross, Penn State | jgross@ist.psu.edu

2. Straightforward Overview
• Purpose/value statement
• Principles of a good slide presentation
• Example good slides
• Conclusion - good slides are a good start
to a good presentation
• Acknowledgements

3. Statement of Purpose/Value
• A good presentation starts with a
statement of the value of the work
• Why should people care?
• Why should they hear your talk?
• What contribution have you made?
• This information is probably in your
abstract, but should be distilled for the
slide

4. Presenting Background Work
• Don’t try to present all the background
• Just one or two really crucial elements
• The CHI audience is broad, so briefly
describe
• Examples follow
• Participatory Design
• The theory and practice of involving
users at some or all stages of design
• Semiotics
• A theory of how systems of symbols (like
a language) communicate ideas

5. Citing Prior Work
• It may be beneficial to cite prior work
• It should be important and relevant
• Use this style (Simon, H. A., 1975)
• Often, this is used to give your audience a perspective
• “Participatory design (Nardi, B. A., 1993)”
is not the same as
• “Participatory design (Bodker, S., 2000)”

6. Visual Design
• The pre-packaged Powerpoint slides are ugly.
• A plain background is not ugly.
• If you aren’t a graphic designer, don’t try to be :-)
• Simple, Consistent, and Legible.

7. Good Chart Example
Frequency Follows an Inverse Log Relationship to Word Length
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Word Length
Word Frequency

8. Presenting Data
• Use simple charts/graphs, with (ideally)
one main point per chart/graph
• Don’t try to jam too much data in
your graph
• Labels x and y axis, and units
• Use a title that clearly explains the idea
you are trying to get across

9. Alpha and Beta Teams Perform Better in the Evening,
Delta and Gamma in the Morning
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
0600 0800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000 2200
Time of Day
Mean Tasks Completed Per Minute
Alpha Team Beta Team Gamma Team Delta Team

10. Graphs and Charts, Part 2
• Don’t just accept defaults from Excel
• Colors (including background) may
need to be changed
• Axis dimensions and scale can be
changed
• Make sure text is big enough
• Move legend to where it is most useful
• Make sure colors & background are visible
on a projection display

11. Acronyms
• Acronyms are dangerous
• Example: ERP
• Does it mean Enterprise Resources
Planner
• Large-scale corporate planning
software
• Or does it mean Event-Related Potential
• Reactions measure via
electroencephalograph
• Always spell out acronyms at first use
• E.g. Event-Related Potential (ERP)
• One safe exception - HCI!

12. Slang and Colloquialisms
• Avoid slang and colloquialisms if at all
possible
• CHI is an English-language
conference
• 2 billion people speak English
• Lots of dialect and regionality
• Make your message clear to people who
speak English as a second language
• Or third, or fourth…

13. Future Work
• You may want to talk about future work
• Work you intend to do
• Work you may have already done
• It’s been up to six months since you
submitted your paper
• What direction is the work taking
• What do you see as the major next hurdle
or accomplishment

14. Summary and Acknowledgements
• Summarize your major contributions
• Good slides are the basis of a good
talk
• Assume a broad audience at CHI
• Make sure your content is readable
• Stop on your summary slide - this
is useful for your audience
• Acknowledgements
• Funding
• People
• Include your contact information

15. Answering Questions
• An advanced tip is to have a few slides ready
for questions you anticipate
• You won’t always have one for each
question asked, and you may not use
them, but they can be handy
• This is a useful place to put
additional/supporting data, references, etc.