Listening to Managers: A Study about Visualizations in Corporate Presentations

This paper presents a study about the use of visualizations in corporate presentations. We interviewed nine executive managers of a leading technology company about how they create business presentations for different meetings and different audiences. Thereby, we focused on which visualization types they normally use and whether they would accept new forms of visualizations such as information graphics, which are currently very popular. Due to the explorative character of the study, we used the grounded theory approach. Results show that design principles or effective visualizations are not known to the most interviewees. The interviewees rated corporate design, use of master layout, and templates higher than individually designed slides. The most popular visualization types managers use in presentations are bar and pie charts. The term "information graphic" was not known. Our conclusion leads to the following hypothesis: If a company wants to change or improve its communication, it will have to become aware of the power of visual storytelling and start an "iconic turn".