Ideal Presentation Duration

This question usually we face around here almost every day. What should be the ideal length of presentation?

There are various factors on which the duration of presentation depends.

1. Time available for presentation ore presenting time
2. Target audience and their understating of subject
3. Complexity of content or subject
4. Information to be furnished

Interestingly over period of time, the attention span of the human has gone down and now even a goldfish has more attention span than us. This drastically impacted the duration of the presentation also.  

Till year 2014, we used to recommend ideal duration of presentation up to 8 minutes. Here is the expert of that recommendation

“on basis of many studies and experience we established that presentation upto 8 minutes are more appropriate than longer presentations. This 8 minutes of presentation duration is optimized between amount spent on making the presentation and user attention paid in terms of time to presentation or engagement of presentation. In other words Return on Investment or value of money. “

With latest studies and experiments, we found that in year 2019, it has dropped further and now ideal duration is upto 3 minutes.

While stating above, it is also worth of mentioning that it is also considered that target audience of these presentations are decision makers of companies or middle level or top level of management people who are seeing these presentations in business hours.

Since these decision makers are already facing time crunch, they only like to see the most relevant information so instead of spending time in building story and then putting information, it is wiser to prepare content to give most relevant information in first few seconds to one minute.

You may also use Flash Based presentation which can quickly navigate in tabs/para so that viewer can see information in buttons click without wasting time. Read more on various type of presentation formats here.

You can also start your presentation with few interesting facts or an interesting opening lines to grab their initial interest.

Always put your audience interest first. Remember to design a presentation according to your customer or market. For example you may have list of credential of your company or product but you  should not show them all which might take few hours to explain rather shorten your points into bullet include only those points which you think your audience want to see or know.

Read more on presentation content writing here.

Basically it’s not length of presentation which will decide business but it’s content of presentation which is customized and made presentable as per target audience requirement and taste.

Following Smart Table may give your idea of right presentation duration for different type of presentations

So next when you plan you presentation always keep above in mind and get the most appropriate presentation in less duration.