Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  In Defense of PowerPoint (27 Apr 2005) Edward Tufte, the imperious critic of graphic displays has weighed in with a document entitled "The cognitive style of PowerPoint," in which, among other things, he credits poor PowerPoint slides with contributing to the Challenger shuttle disaster. I respectfully submit that all of this is nonsense. Pure nonsense, accompanied by poor understanding of speech making and of the difference between the requirements for a speech-giver, the speech-listener (the audience), and for the reader of a printed document. These are three different things. Tufte—and other critics—seem to think they are one and the same thing. Nonsense, I say, once again. Article URL: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/in_defense_of_powerp.html Read 71 more articles from Don Norman sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Status Report on the Code of Conduct     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy