But there’s more to hierarchy than just who in your team is responsible for Pizza Friday. You can take hierarchy more generally to mean importance, and being able to show what pieces of a story are more important than others is a real win.
This goes hand in hand with the design principle of hierarchy too. In design, hierarchy refers to the order in which you view content, so often if a slide looks off-balance it could be that the hierarchy is wrong, and the things drawing your eye don’t follow the right flow for your story, so, for instance, you can’t help but reading the punchline first.
Importance goes hand-in-hand with hierarchy because often the most prominent things in your hierarchy will also be the most important, or you want to lead your user (with good hierarchy) to absorbing the most important thing (the punchline) last.
Take a slide like this:
It’s so busy, you don’t even know where phone numbers egypt to start. And when probed, often the slide author says, ‘well, actually it’s all important’. If that is the case, then it probably needs to be split out over more than just one slide, but I bet in most cases there are some messages that are more important than others.
A good way to think about what’s really important, is to think about what you want the audience to take away, and what realistically they can take away over the course of a 15 or 30-minute presentation. These messages should be juicy benefits distilled into bitesize nuggets, and it’s these that should take pride of place on your slide.
But wait! Before you start creating a slide with the juiciest benefit right at the top, remember how the best stories are told: beginning > middle > end, or in sales speak: problem > solution > benefit. Start by explaining the problem you’re here to solve, then talk about how you solve that problem with your whizzbanging new solution, and finally you land the plane with a short statement that addresses the direct benefit to the audience (tip: remember to hunt down the benefit statements, and don’t fall into the trap of just listing features).