 Every year at hotels all over the world, scientists from every field in science flock to these giant academic conferences. They're like Woodstock for geeks in that field. Scientists go to these conferences to learn about the new research going on in their field and to share the work they're doing with everybody else and to drink and hang out with friends from other universities who they don't get to see very often. So it's like a big social knowledge update for the whole field and at most all of these conferences there's something called a poster session. And poster sessions are where researchers share findings that didn't fit into bigger sessions or bigger presentations. Scientists take some new research findings, some new truth about the world and they try to explain it on this giant poster. These poster sessions are one of the main ways that scientists share knowledge with each other and they have the potential to be this really great experience for both the person presenting the poster and the person walking around looking at all the posters. But in reality, scientists have mixed feelings about poster sessions. A lot of us go into poster sessions feeling like kind of optimistic and then we come out feeling like disappointed and underwhelmed. And here's why. First, here's what it feels like to present a poster. If you're going to be the person presenting the poster, you're first thinking like, oh, this will be great. I'll put all this work that I'm really passionate about on this big, beautiful poster and people will walk by it and be like, oh, cool research. I'll be like, oh, you think so? Let's talk about it. And then we'll have this really engaging conversation where like, I learned things and they learned things and other people will walk by and be like, oh, great research and they'll get to learn what I'm doing. And I'll feel like I'm getting to share what I'm doing with the world and with other scientists. And sometimes like very, very rarely, you will get like half of that experience, but that's the best case. Most of the time you're standing by your poster all eager while people just walk by you and don't even look at your poster as if you don't exist, while you try to like stare them down out of desperation, like, please someone, respond to my work. And then the whole hour of the poster session goes by and no one is even, not even not just engaged with your poster, but no one has looked at your poster. And then you just take your poster down and you look at it and you remember that it cost $100 to print and then you throw it away. And then you think, maybe my research wasn't that interesting anyway, and that was a complete waste of time. Now, here's how it feels to attend a poster session. The experience of attending a poster session and walking around trying to learn from all the posters can be even worse than it is for the presenter. Okay, it's not worse than it is for the presenter. Nothing's worse than presenting a poster session, but it's still pretty bad. Again, you start off with very high hopes. You picture yourself walking through and like breathing in all the latest research in your field, learning stuff you never thought to think about before and really just like getting more enlightened as a scientist and getting all new ideas for the stuff you're doing. But it never, ever works out that way. In reality, most of the time you walk in and there's always presenters standing there by all their posters and they're like locking eyes with you and watching you as you pass because they're also bored and desperate for you to engage with them and like validate their research. And their posters are just like walls of incomprehensible text that you can't interpret very quickly. So what you do is you kind of like avoid the too intense eye contact of the presenters while trying to quickly and surreptitiously scan the titles of the posters trying to get an idea of one or two you might want to check out. And the title of the poster just sort of gives you a general idea of what the study did, like the research question they asked, not even the answer. And it's kind of abstract and a little too technical, but if you can get the general idea, then maybe you engage with the poster and try to get closer and try to figure out what they did and try to learn something. So you found a poster that you're kind of interested in and you walk up closer to get a general idea and scan it and read it and try to learn the core insight from it. But while you're doing that, the desperate presenter who's standing like two feet away from you and staring at you notices you looking at their poster and they're like, any questions? Any questions? Let me know if you have questions. And then you feel like you want to be polite so you talk to the presenter. And maybe you have a pretty good conversation and you learn about what's on the poster and you eventually learn that key punchline of the study after you've asked a bunch of follow-up questions, but you end up staying at the poster longer than you need to, even past the point of learning what you wanted from it, because you're in a conversation, you don't want to be rude or just cut the presenter off. But meanwhile, like this is taking a lot of time. You usually have less than an hour to browse all the posters and that's if you showed up on time, which you didn't. So the minutes are going by while you're having this conversation and doing all these social niceties and trying to figure out a polite way to exit the conversation. And usually after just one of these conversations, you realize that time is limited and you've got to like skim harder and avoid eye contact harder. So you breathe through the rest of the posters, maybe stop it one more, but you're really, really desperately skimming now. So you're forced to adopt this strategy where you spend a lot of time at one or maybe even two posters, maybe even past the point where you've gotten the insight you wanted. And then you've used up most of your time. So you have to skip around and breathe through the rest of the posters and barely even read the titles. And then you leave the poster session feeling a little disappointed and uneasy, but still trying to convince yourself that it was productive. Like, oh, I'm super glad I spent 35 minutes talking about that one poster that I wasn't even super interested in. That was a good use of my time. It was. I'm sure there was nothing on any of the other posters that was remotely relevant to me. So like the point is you may have had one good conversation or two maybe, but you didn't really learn as much as you had hoped to learn from the whole session. And you wonder what insights you might have missed on all those other posters you didn't have time to get to. So this all kind of sucks for you when you walk around trying to learn from the posters. And it also sucks when you're the presenter trying to make an impact with your poster that nobody's looking at. But there's something much more sinister going wrong here. And that's that when you're walking around trying to learn from this poster session and you're only able to interact with one or two posters, you're missing all the insight from the posters you had to breeze by and skim. And these missed insights are all like part of your field. You're supposed to know all of this stuff. A lot of them probably apply to the scientific problems you're wrestling with in some direct or tangential way. And you're missing them. You're only getting like one or two points before time runs out and you got to leave. So not only are poster sessions kind of a lackluster experience for everybody involved, but they're also really inefficient at transferring knowledge to people walking through the poster sessions. And that means it's slowing down the learning. It's slowing down scientific progress, which is actually holding the human race back in a non-insignificant way. That sounds like hyperbole, but I actually mean it. Maybe the research in your field isn't very important. And I'm in psychology, so I get that. But if you're studying something that people are suffering from, like cancer or Alzheimer's or MECFS, like one of those misposters could contain some finding you hadn't thought about that triggers a moment of insight that helps you cure that disease sooner than you wouldn't have if you had missed that poster. And all of these missed insights are happening in mass in every single field of science right now. This isn't just a design frustration. This is a serious problem and a serious opportunity. I think a lot of these problems come down to the way we approach designing academic posters. So let's see if we can fix that. Okay, so here's how the poster design process works. If you can call it a design process. Six months before the conference, you write an essay talking about your research findings that you want to put on your poster. And then you submit that to the conference. And then hopefully it gets approved. And then you're happy because that means your school will pay for your travel. And then you forget about it for like five months until about two weeks before the conference. And while you're already worrying about everything else you have to do for the conference, plane tickets, packing things like that, it suddenly hits you and you're like, oh, oh, oh, shit, shit, shit, shit. I actually have to create the damn poster crap. And then you get like really idealistic. You're like, you know what, I'm going to make this the best poster ever. You open a blank PowerPoint file and you get started. And then like an hour later, you're like, oh crap, nothing's done. And this is going nowhere. I need to get this done to the printer by two tomorrow and I don't have time to do this perfectionist of crap. I just got to like, I need something done now that doesn't make me look stupid. So you desperately email one of your senior grad student friends and they're like, no problem. I got you covered. Here's a poster design I always use. It was handed down to me by Susie. Oh, you never got to meet Susie. She was one of the senior students that graduated before you got here. It was like four years ago. Susie was amazing. Anyway, this is the design I always use. It works for me. Hope it helps. And you're like, great, great, great, great, great, that's perfect. And what you're really thinking is like, I don't have time to be original here. I just got to get this done to the printer. And it's my first year of grad school or whatever. And I'm kind of afraid of looking unprofessional or looking like I don't know what I'm doing. I don't have really time to think this through. So what do you do in times of uncertainty? You mimic. You copy somebody else and that makes you feel safe. So you open up your friend's template and then whatever is on that old hand-me-down poster design, you copy. Like whatever they did, you do. If they had their entire introduction paragraph, copy and paste it into this tiny box in the corner, then that's what you do. You take your entire introduction paragraph and you put it in that little box. If they display like their full table of correlation coefficients that don't all really relate to like what their central points are, then that's what you put in. You put in all your correlation coefficients. That uses up space. And then what you end up with is this monstrosity of a wall of text poster with like copy and pasted bits of your essay squeezed into these templated old boxes with like your school's faded header on top from its 25-year-old branding scheme. And your poster just looks like a wall of mess. And some part of you is like, is this legible? Like nobody can read this. But that part's very quiet. The very much louder part is like, good. It looks great. And it looks great because it looks like I did something. It looks like I spent longer on this than the rushed hour that I actually spent on it. Now, if you have a little extra time on your hands, you may be able to listen to that. Let's make this a little more readable voice. And if you have that kind of time, maybe you like add a nice graph or turn one section of text into bullet points or something like that or add a picture. And I've done this. When I first started my PhD program, I tried to take an extra hour with a poster and improve the usability of it a little bit. So here's one of my first posters. I had like a sew-what box and icons and pictures for everything. But it's still just a wall of text in the same old format. And then there are these like unicorn posters. These are the posters that you see one of at every conference if you're lucky and they're beautiful. They're like infographics and they're designed by either like professional applied firms or grad students who were designers before coming to grad school or they use templates or paid somebody. And these infographic style posters make you feel completely inadequate. You're like, man, my poster should look like that. That's a good poster. But they're still not like there's still just a wall of pretty things you can interpret very quickly. And their cardinal sin is that they expect people to be up close and reading them. The cardinal sin of every poster I've seen, including the posters I've designed myself, is that we assume people are going to like stand there and read our posters in silence for 10 straight minutes, following the order of the sections we laid out. And when we design them, we're sitting up close to them reading them in order. So we designed them for that kind of user experience for a context that's really different from how people actually read posters at poster sessions. Really the accurate way to design your poster based on how they're actually used would be to project your PowerPoint file on a wall at like full size and walk past it over and over again and improve the design for the experience of learning while walking by. But none of us do that. Like, watch, here are beautiful infographic style posters. They're going to move past you at walking speed. Try to read them. Did you catch anything besides the title? Did you even catch the title? To learn anything from the infographic format, you have to walk up and spend a lot of time with it because that's what infographics are designed for. They're designed to sustain your attention while you're right up next to it for 5 to 10 minutes reading it on your own in silence. Infographics aren't the right goal for scientific posters because we just don't spend that much time with most posters. If anything, a billboard is a better design analogy because those are designed to transmit information as you move past them. So what should an academic poster look like? I think an ideal academic poster should accomplish three goals. First, we want to maximize the amount of insight transferred to attendees in the poster session. If you're attending a poster session, we want to make it easy for you to interact with every poster in some way so that you could conceivably learn the insight that every single poster in the session has to offer in less than 50 minutes. Second, we want to keep the good stuff. We still want to leave time for having good conversations and getting deep insight about any single poster if you want to. And third, we have to accomplish these goals in a way that is as lazy or lazier for grad students and scientists to create posters with the new design, under time pressure, and with no free mental bandwidth. Even if this new approach to designing posters cures cancer faster, if it's not easier for scientists to create than what they're currently doing, it'll never happen. So we have to make it easy so that it's both the right way to do it and the fast way to do it. So let's get started. Okay, so let's get into the right frame of mind here. We're going to start things off with one of the most famous quotes in all of design. Here it goes. Perfection is not when you have nothing to add. It's when you have nothing to take away. Good designs start with something very, very minimal, like a core thing, and they work from there. So that's what we're going to do. And for that core thing, we're going to follow the biggest, most reliable rule in all of usability research. You put a lot of effort into what people need to know. And then you include the stuff that's nice to know last punchline first. So here's a blank academic poster. What is the minimum need to know piece of information that should go on here if we could only put one thing on it? Well, that's probably like the main finding of the study, right? So we need a finding. I'm going to use a real finding for my friend Jacob study. Jacob very bravely sent me his poster and let me use it for the video. Thank you, Jacob. And you probably can't tell from this poster, but Jacob study is actually really cool and important. But that coolness and that importance is lost in this traditional academic poster format. So we're going to take this and we're going to redesign it. And we're going to start by grabbing the main finding, the core takeaway of this study and putting it on our blank poster. So let's see, what's the main finding of this study? What's the main finding? So this is the problem I'm talking about. It's taken me way too damn long to find the main takeaway from this study, which is pretty representative of the problem here. And that has nothing to do with this poster. Every poster in science is like this. Okay, so after reading this entire poster, I think the main finding is this bit right here. We found consistent differential validity for some non-cognitive measures for predicting international student GPA, specifically with SJTs, continuous learning, social responsibility and perseverance. So let's put that on the poster. And then we're going to change the background color. You can use your school's color if you want to, but I think it would be extra efficient to use colors that prime people's expectations about what type of poster they're about to see because they'll notice the color first. Like we could use green for empirical studies because they're the most common, blue for theory, red for methods, and yellow, the most attention-getting color for that rare and wonderful intervention study. So this is already better, but it sounds kind of technical to anybody who doesn't specialize in the subfield that this relates to, which is selection or hiring decisions, which is fine for an academic paper where people can go back and look up terms they don't know. But we don't have that kind of time. People are walking by in five seconds. We get a punch in their brain. And research on usability writing shows that plain language is interpreted faster and gets people's attention better. So the most efficient thing we can put on this poster is actually a plain language version of our main finding. So we're going to say, for international students, perseverance and a sense of social responsibility are extra important for predicting first year GPA. Now this kind of makes sense, right? Now you're getting this whole story popping into your mind. But what if we're presenting a poster and somebody comes up and asks us a question we don't know the answer to, like give me your full list of predictors and all the correlations. What about those figures and tables that give us that sense of safety and the ability to answer questions? Well, for that we're going to add something called an ammo bar. Ammo bar is just going to be a column on the right side or whatever side you plan to stand on. And you're going to copy and paste all of your miscellaneous figures and tables and stuff that you need for answering questions into that bar. You're not going to spend any time worrying about the design or layout of the section because it's just for you to use. Treat it as your scratch board. Make it as ugly and as fast as you can. It's just there so you can point to things when somebody walks up and talks to you. Now, what if you're already talking to somebody and you're showing them things in your ammo bar and somebody else walks up and wants to learn more about your study but doesn't want to interrupt you? Well, for them, we're going to add a sidebar on the left. We're going to call this our silent presenter bar. In the silent presenter bar, you're going to do all the stuff you normally do on an academic poster, but you're going to worry about the layout of it a little less. Go ahead and follow the old intro methods results format. Copy and paste bits of your essay or add bullets and graphs if you have time. Just sort of give people an overview of the paper as if they were going to be standing there and reading it silently, but in one to four minutes, not 10 to 15. These sidebars are key to this design because with the ammo bar and the silent presenter bar together, we really have almost as much information on this new design as we had on the traditional design. It's just arranged much more efficiently. But what if somebody wants a lot more information, a lot more than you can even put on your poster and doesn't have time to read it or talk to you? These are the people that sometimes like snap pictures of your poster. Well, for these people, we're going to add a QR code that links to your full paper and a copy of the poster. These QR codes look scary, but they are stupidly easy to create. Just Google create a QR code. You'll do it in a second and every phone can read them. Like if you take out your phone right now and take a picture of this QR code on the screen, it'll automatically know it's taking a picture of a QR code and follow the link. So this last QR code feature lets you snap a picture of any poster and instantly get a copy of the whole poster and the paper. So now with this QR code option, we're actually providing an option to get even more information than traditional designs allow for and doing it in a way that lets attendees choose how much information they want to get instead of being flooded in design. This is called the principle of progressive disclosure. So here's our final design. Now, there are more things we could do with this. Like if you have a really important graph or an image that needs to go in the center, you could move the QR code over. It only needs to be about five inches big to be read. You could also add your own creative flair with images and stuff. But for now, let's look at the design in its simplest form. Let's look at a before and after. So in the next screen, a few real academic posters are going to move past you at a walking pace. See how much information you can absorb. Now try these same posters you just saw translated to the new design. Now, this is going to be a little unbelievable and jarring at first, because when people see this, they don't believe that these clear findings came from the posters they just saw, but they did. This is how detached current scientific poster design is from actually communicating what you need to know. Here we go. You absorbed more, right? You got the gist of probably every poster. If you wanted to know more, you could still walk up and talk or read the silent presenter bar or just scan the QR code and keep walking. So this new design meets our goals. It helps transfer insight more efficiently by leading with the main finding and making it big and obvious. And in plain language, you can still walk up and have good conversations with people. And for our third goal, and I hope you can tell from looking at it, but this approach is way easier for grad students to create. You can create this poster design at much less time than you're spending on your current method. So let's look at the presenter experience. Now everybody who walks by looks at your poster at least, because looking at your poster is less effortful and it's more rewarding to look, which is already an improvement. And now people who walk by can engage with your poster quickly by snapping a QR code, which still makes you feel good if you see somebody do it. And you still get those conversations, perhaps even more of them, because your hook is better. And now look at the attendee experience. You get that feeling of breathing and insight as you walk past, and you have more options as an attendee to choose your level of engagement with posters you're interested in. You don't have to get trapped in a conversation to learn something from a poster. And look at how it could accelerate learning. You can conceivably walk into a poster session with this design and learn something from every single poster instead of just one or two. If every scientist in every field used a design like this instead of the crappy old wall of text template they're using right now, it could accelerate insight and discovery and be more fun for everybody. The reason I spend a year of my life making this cartoon instead of publishing papers like I'm supposed to be doing is because I really think that if everybody uses a design like this, we could accelerate the pace of science. We could cure all diseases slightly sooner, and that's everything to the people suffering from them. I really believe in this design. I know it's jarringly different than what you're used to using, but for what it's worth when actual designers design posters and billboards, their first advice is to keep it simple and be comfortable with negative space, which this design really does. Also, we're going to do a validation study on this new design. So if you're a researcher and you're up for participating in a study to help validate this design, get in touch with me, send me an email or hit me up on Twitter. I'm at Mike Morrison. So please try it for yourself, even if you want to hack it up a little and make it your own, and let me know how it goes. There are links below to download PowerPoint templates for these designs, including example posters. I'm going to use this design at all my conferences going forward, and lots of people here in my PhD program are going to try it out too. So try it and please let me know how it goes for you. Now we'll retweet any poster selfies you send me. Thanks for watching.