Case Study 1 — One Bulleted Topic Slide, Converted to Assertion–Evidence

A worked redesign. Watch a single slide go from a paragraph-in-disguise to a visual aid. (The scenario is a composite; the slide is fictional but realistic.)

The setup

Dana Whitfield is presenting her churn analysis to the leadership team on Tuesday. The slide that matters most — the one that's supposed to convince Renée Okafor, the VP of Marketing, to fund a one-sprint fix — is her "Key Findings" slide. Here is how she first built it, pasted from her written memo.

❌ Slide 4 (described): "Key Findings." Title (top-left corner, ~18 pt): "Key Findings" Body (six bullets, ~16 pt gray text): - Overall monthly churn rate is 4.2%, up from 3.6% a year ago - Churn is concentrated in the first 30 days of the customer lifecycle - Customers who reach first value within 2 days churn at 3.1% - Customers who take more than 7 days to reach first value churn at 22% - Price-sensitivity analysis shows weak correlation with churn (r = 0.08) - Onboarding completion rate is 61% across all cohorts

Footer: company logo (top-right and bottom-right), slide number.

The diagnosis

Apply the chapter's tests, one at a time.

Title test: "Key Findings" is a topic, not a point. It tells the room the subject and nothing they should conclude. A listener who reads only the title leaves with nothing.

One-point test: the slide makes (at least) three distinct points — churn is front-loaded, slow onboarding multiplies it, price isn't the driver — plus two minor numbers (the overall rate, the completion rate) thrown in as equals. The one finding that should run the meeting (7× churn for slow onboarding) is buried as bullet four, weighted no more heavily than "onboarding completion rate is 61%."

Read-or-listen test: six full-sentence bullets in small text force reading. Dana plans to talk through them, so the room will read the slide in ten seconds, get ahead of her, and stop listening — while her actual argument, which lives in her voice, is lost. This is death by PowerPoint in a single slide.

Back-row test: 16–18 pt gray text fails outright. From row five it's a gray smear; the logos in two corners steal ink from the data.

The slide is a paragraph wearing a list's clothing. The fix is not to make it prettier. It's to decide what one point it should make, and to let the rest move into Dana's spoken words or onto their own slides.

The redesign

Dana asks the only question that matters: what is the one thing the room must leave this slide believing? The answer isn't "we have six findings." It's "slow onboarding — not price — is what's killing us, and it's huge." So that becomes the assertion, and one visual carries it. The minor numbers get spoken; the second real point (price isn't the driver) either folds into the same slide as a contrast or earns its own slide.

✅ Slide 4, redesigned (described). Title (full sentence, ~32 pt, left-aligned across the top): "Customers who onboard slowly churn 7× as often — and it's not about price." Body (one bar chart filling the slide): two bars — "Reached value in 2 days" (3%, short, gray) and "Took more than 7 days" (22%, tall, in the deck's single accent color), y-axis starting at zero so the gap is honest and dramatic, each bar labeled directly with its value in ~28 pt, no legend, no gridlines, no 3-D. A small annotation near the tall bar reads "7× higher." Footer: logo gone from this interior slide; slide number only.

What Dana says (not shown): "Overall churn is up a bit, to 4.2% — but that headline number hides the real story. When we split customers by how fast they reach first value, the picture is stark: fast onboarders leave at 3%, slow ones at 22%. And before anyone asks — it's not price; price barely correlates with churn at all. The lever is the first week."

Why it's better, point by point:

  • The title is now the point. A leader who glances up for two seconds reads "slow onboarders churn 7×, not about price" and has the entire finding. That's the inverted pyramid (Chapter 4) on a slide, and it's a Level-3 interpretive caption (Chapter 9) doing its job — the title states what the chart means.
  • One point, one visual. The slide makes a single claim and proves it with a single chart. The two minor numbers (4.2% overall, 61% completion) moved into Dana's narration, where a listener absorbs them by ear without being asked to read. The "price isn't the driver" point rides along as a spoken clause and as the title's second half — and if Dana wants to hammer it, it becomes its own one-point slide with a flat scatter (r = 0.08) and the title "Price barely moves the needle."
  • It passes the back-row test. 32 pt title, 28 pt labels, high contrast, one accent color, axis at zero, logos gone. The tall orange bar dwarfing the short gray one reads from anywhere in the room.
  • It's honest. Starting the bars at zero turns a real, large effect into a dramatic-but-truthful picture, rather than the truncated axis that would have understated it. (Chapter 9's design ethics, in miniature.)

The takeaway

The redesign added zero new data and changed everything. The move was not decoration; it was deciding what the slide is for. Dana had to choose her one message, promote it from buried bullet to sentence title, hand the proof to one clean chart, and trust her voice with the rest. That choice — forced by the assertion–evidence format — is what turns a slide from a thing the audience reads and forgets into a thing they see and remember. On Tuesday, the version that gets the budget is the one whose title Renée can read from the back of the room.

Try it: take the "price isn't the driver" finding and build its standalone assertion–evidence slide. Sentence title, one visual, no bullets. Then decide: is it worth its own slide, or is it better as a spoken clause on the slide above? Either answer can be right — the discipline is making the call on purpose.

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