Chapter 16

• Jurisdiction: United States

Chapter 16

How to Visualize the Story

To design is to plan, to order, to relate, and to control.

—Emil Ruder, Swiss topographer

Overview

The design choices you and your team make to visualize the story of your complex case should resonate with your audience on several levels. First, your design choices for your visuals⁵⁴ must drive into the audience’s memory the critical few points you need them to recall. Those critical few points must be the featured design elements in your visuals. Second, your visuals must appeal to the audience’s Rider and Elephant brains. Remember: both brains are involved in every important decision. Third, your visuals must engage and hold your audience’s attention. Audiences don’t pay attention to boring visuals. If the visuals are too wordy, too technical, or even somewhat difficult to comprehend, they won’t engage or hold the audience’s attention. Design, therefore, is not decoration. Design matters. It matters greatly.

This chapter discusses basic, but important, design principles to apply when creating the visuals to tell the story of your complex case. Understanding and applying these basic principles will improve the quality of your visuals and enhance the visualization of your story. These principles are captured in four words: eliminate, isolate, animate, and orchestrate. Besides discussing these principles, this chapter lists five books that should be part of your personal library. If you follow the design principles and read the books, you will know enough to impressively visualize the story of your complex case.

One more essential: you must retain and partner closely with a competent trial graphics firm. An experienced trial graphics team has participated in numerous trials and courtroom presentations—many more than all the members of your team, combined, have observed. They know what resonates and what doesn’t. Don’t do the visuals yourself or delegate their preparation to an unqualified junior team member—that’s a recipe for disaster. Rely on professional designers, trained and experienced in creating visuals. Also, rely on the principles covered in this chapter when partnering with your retained graphics firm. If you follow the four design principles, your visuals will have the best chance of resonating with your audience.

Eliminate

Let’s begin by understanding the amazing way our eyes and brains view, compile, and retain visual information. Our eyes and brains don’t work the way we think they do—with our eyes recording images like a video camera and the captured images then delivered to the brain where they are permanently recorded. While our eyes deliver images to the brain, our brains then reconstruct what we have seen. What is in our memory banks and the assumptions our brains make both play an important role in determining what the brain perceives, understands, and later recalls. (This explains why multiple eyewitnesses can see the exact same thing and have different recollections of what they saw.)

The brain processes what the eyes see and then issues an opinion about what’s been seen. This eye-capturing-to-brain-reconstructing process consumes a lot of the brain’s processing resources. About half of the brain’s processing resources go to processing vision (what our eyes perceive), which is why, as a storyteller of a complex case, you must do everything you can to minimize the processing demands. The more visual the input is, the more efficiently it is processed, recognized, and remembered. If you want the story of your complex case to stick in the minds of your audience and resonate with them, visualize the story with pictures, simple graphs, and effective animations, and eliminate unnecessary text and clutter from your visuals.

Eliminate text

Let’s begin with the easiest and simplest thing that can be done to improve the quality of the visuals: eliminate unnecessary text. If you take away one point from this chapter and apply it, this is the most important: text on visuals is a bad thing. You must eliminate—no, ruthlessly eliminate—text from your visuals. If you must include text on your visuals, then vet every word with a sharp and uber-critical eye. Every word must have a specific and important job to do. Each word must be critically important to drive home the single takeaway point of the visual. If a word is not critically important, then eliminate it. If you can just say or explain the text to the audience, then the text should be eliminated.

Eliminating text from visuals is often a hard, even impossible, thing for lawyers to do. Why? Lawyers often under-prepare for important presentations and rely on a visual script—the text on a slide—to act like a teleprompter. Many lawyers are also risk-averse and cautious. They fear that if the visuals fail to contain every necessary word they believe must be conveyed, the audience won’t remember all the detail the lawyer deems important; or the lawyer fears forgetting to address the detail because it is not on the visual. (Chapter 15: How to Make the Story Stick explains why this thinking is fallacy and leads to cognitive overload.)

Text on visuals is a bad thing because it increases your audience’s processing demands. And the more processing required by the audience, the less comprehension and retention. In Brain Rules, Dr. Medina explains that using pictures rather than text is a much more efficient way of lessening the brain’s processing demand while increasing retention. If information is presented as text, we remember only about 10 percent when tested three days later. Retention increases to 65 percent if a picture is added. The brain’s ability to remember pictures better than text is called the pictorial-superiority effect. PSE is a well-known phenomenon, yet—invoking Hamlet here—it’s more honored in the breach than in the observance by lawyers.

You’ve no doubt heard the expression, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” It’s true. Researchers and scientist have known for over one hundred years that the more visual the input, the higher the recall. What accounts for this difference in retention? The difference is explained by how our brains perceive text. Our brains see words on a page or on a slide as tiny pictures. Each word we see is processed as a separate picture. “Reading,” writes Medina, “creates a bottleneck. My text chokes you, not because my text is not enough like pictures but because my text is too much like pictures. To our cortex, there’s no such thing as words.”⁵⁵?

When the storyteller presents a visual laden with text, every word on that visual is a picture that the audience’s brain must process. The more words on the visual, the more processing required. Again, if you increase the processing requirement, you decrease comprehension and retention.

Another compelling reason to ruthlessly eliminate text is to avoid the discord created when your audience reads the text (assuming they do) and simultaneously listens (or tries to listen) to the presenter reading that same text to the...