 Thanks for being here, everybody. We were trying to figure out how to get you some music, Mike. Yeah, I don't know what song I want, but that's a question that hits your question in my life, you know, Mike. It feels weird to use like a boxer's intro song for design, you know. That's a song. I'll figure that question out, like what if there was a song that summarized user experience design, what would it be? I don't know. It would not be classical, fancy music. It would, okay, no fancy music. Something like do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Like, embrace the silliness of UX design. Yeah, yeah. What does attention sound like? Yeah, like, why did the bumblebee? Yes. Okay, it looks like we are holding steady at the participant numbers. So I'm going to go ahead and get started, everybody. Okay, welcome to the New Mexico Smart Grid Center webinar series and this specific webinar, which is Making Effective Academic Posters, The Better Poster Approach. I am Brittany VanDorff, the Public Relations Specialist for New Mexico EPSCORE, which is the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. In case you don't know, EPSCORE is a nationwide program funded by the National Science Foundation. I'll be your host today, along with Sarah Peche, who is not shown here, but she's doing all the back-end coordination, and she is our Education and Outreach Coordinator. A few housekeeping things really quick before we begin. First, as always, this webinar is being recorded and will be archived on our website at NewMexicoEPSCORE.org. Next, we want to let you know that we will have time at the end for audience questions. At any point, you are welcome to type your questions into the Q&A box and at the bottom of your screen. And Sarah will shoot those to Mike after he's done speaking. Oh, not yet. Okay, here you go. All right, and I also want to let you know about our upcoming webinar next week, which is Entrepreneurship and Innovation Resources in New Mexico. It's also the official launch of our new certificate training and entrepreneurship program in partnership with the University of New Mexico. Rainforest Innovations and Innovation Academy. This is open to everyone. It's free and there's more info on our website. Okay, and finally, almost finally, Mike's presentation has come at a very opportune time for many of the students on the webinar today. Fall is the season for academic conferences and we want to make sure that you all know about the New Mexico Research Symposium that is happening virtually November 9th through the 13th. This is a free event and open all general registration closes November 4th. And a special note, thanks to Mike's Better Poster movement that's taking the academic world by storm. We've introduced, we've introduced a new poster competition category this year called The Best Better Poster. People who register will be able to vote for their post their favorite posters here from our two fabulous keynote speakers and find out who has been selected for this year's New Mexico Outstanding Science Teacher Award. More information is on our website and we truly hope to see you there. All right, okay, for real to the main course. I am slightly obsessed with effective science communication and firmly believe that the ability to communicate once research is as important, if not more so than the research itself. About a year ago, I learned about the Better Poster movement and it blew my mind. Our speaker today, Mike Morrison has been featured by Forbes NPR, the American Psychological Association, and many other big names for introducing his Better Poster approach, which brings UX design principles into academia to make sharing research easier for everyone involved. If you haven't already, go to his YouTube channel after the webinar and watch the videos. They are hilarious and informative. So, without further ado, I am so jazzed to welcome Mr. Mike Morrison, creator of the Better Poster movement. Thank you, Mike. Of course, thank you very much for having me. Thanks everybody for coming. I'm going to switch to my screen now. Hello before anything starts. Here we go. Great to see my screen nod to represent everyone. Okay, cool. Okay. So thank you guys again for coming. So what we're going to go over today is something called user experience design. And that's what you're going to learn hopefully by the end of this user experience design is a lot easier to learn than graphic design. I can teach it to you hopefully the basics of the course this webinar. And the main point is that like instead of trying to make things look pretty, your goals to communicate very efficiently, even if it's ugly. And if you think about it in terms of like every one of you is studying something that is valuable and that can fix some part of the world that you care about. And that piece of insight that you've probably already learned you probably learned lots of but lots of insights so far can help everyone else in your field right because you're all studying the same kind of environment in the same context that kind of thing. So the question is how do we get that insight out of your brain and transmit it to everybody in your field who could benefit from it to speed up their own research and how do we get everybody in your field to transmit all their insight to you so you can benefit from it. What's the most efficient path to that so it's about creating designs that communicate very fast very efficiently. So, as Brady said, I've got video I've got cartoons on YouTube that some of you hope maybe have seen on physical posters we got better poster part one better poster part two, and another cartoon on Twitter poster, which is focuses on how to communicate research on Twitter. If you want to know any more about any specific kind of medium like physical posters or Twitter. So if you want to know those cartoons what we're going to be talking about today is what all of these things have in common, which is these UX principles underlying everything that apply to a lot of stuff beyond posters. So you should really hope, hopefully some of the stuff kind of helps you like level up your game in a lot of ways. So, because I know webinars are hard and you may space out halfway through this I'm going to teach you the most important thing first. So if you pay attention for the first five minutes of this, you can learn really about the science of UX design, then even some UX designers know and then you can space out after that and you will have taken away the most important part so what I want everybody to do is going to be a really risky exercise is I want you to get out your phones and I want you to pull up, like whatever app you use to distract yourself like if you're already bored of me talking and you wanted to like go to Twitter or Instagram or something like that. Like pull up that where you can just scroll and if you don't want to pull up your favorite app for distracting yourself, I'm going to pull up mine. I'm going to pull up my live Twitter feed here. This is going to be risky. I have no idea what's going to show up on this, but as a disclaimer. I'm a psychologist I study a lot or I follow a lot of diverse brains to try to understand them. So give me a second here. Okay, so here's my real Twitter feed. And what I want you to do is ideally you'll get more out of this if you pull up your own like Twitter feed or Instagram or Reddit or New York Times if you're fancy. Just pull up something on your phone that you can kind of scroll through and kind of space out and try to distract yourself. And I'm going to narrate your actions kind of like a guided meditation. So as you're scrolling through here right, you're seeing these posts and you're kind of trying to figure out what to get interested in. And what you're doing right now is you're using the same part of your brain when you scroll through Instagram or Twitter to forge for information the same way you used to forge for food in the wild when you were like a cave person. So you can think of each of these Twitter posts or each of these Instagram scrolls or whatever you're going through as a patch that may contain like knowledge food, right. And you'll notice right away that sometimes you kind of blow past Twitter, you know Twitter posts or tweets or Instagram posts. And sometimes when you're interested you kind of slow down on one right you're like oh what's this right. And there's a couple factors that go into like, when you go fast and scroll past something or when you slow down which is called patch switching or like choosing a patch. And one of those factors, like, that's probably influencing like which ones you're focusing on and again just keep scrolling keep scrolling keep trying to find something. But one of the factors that's probably influencing what you're focusing on is how easy you can process it. So if you find yourself gravitating towards like images or graphics things like that instead of long text. That's called interaction cost things because you're trying to process my voice right now and do this at the same time, you're going to gravitate towards things that are very low in interaction costs that you can process kind of quickly. So if you're just going to its images and short posts, keep on scrolling. Now the other factor here is what's interesting to you, right. So you might find that like, even in a scroll full of images, some things are more interesting to you and others, you know, just like, okay, scientists faces I like those. Coles not interested right. And what's cool is that you can change this right so if I tell you to look for something happy, right, you're going to focus on thing you're going to skip the heavy stuff skip the graphs and you're going to be like okay picture of leaves and you know things like that things that are easy and happy and funny you know little girl hopefully she's smiling doesn't have covered. And then you know things like that right that make you like have a positive mood. And if I tell you to change your focus and say now now find something political right which shouldn't be hard now. Now you're going to skip the happy faces right and you're going to gravitate towards things you know if somebody has a tie on. You know politics but you'll gravitate towards things that give you those cues here we go as a political post right. And you'll skip the rest. So what you kind of focus on changes based on your goal. And that kind of with that you're getting as far as whether each post matches your goal or doesn't is called information sent. So you're kind of doing a calculation you want something that's relevant to your goal that's strong information sent and easy to interact with low interaction cost. So that's something that's sort of more interesting than it is effort and that's what you'll slow down on. And then if it's too much effort not interesting enough you'll blow past your patch switch right. Alright, phones down. I'm sure I have lost some of you. Goodbye to those of you who are now on Reddit for the rest of this webinar. Hope you enjoyed that demo. What you just learned is called the rest of you who are left. What you just learned is called information foraging theory so this is kind of the bedrock of every website you use every app you use is built on information foraging theory, and we'll recap the concepts here. So we had interaction costs remember that's like how much effort something is to use. So if you think of like fast food is very low interaction cost, and then like following a recipe going to the grocery store buying all the groceries. That's really high effort that's a really high interaction cost right. And then they can have really profound consequences to. So like watching a two minute video on police reform. That's really low interaction costs that's easy right but like reading a 97 page essay about the science of police reform. That's really high interaction cost. And so we can have these profound consequences for what we pay attention to. And at some point if you want people to actually pay attention to something. You have to sort of stop trying to force them to read the 97 page thing, and just make a two minute version right and then all of a sudden you'll get the uptake and a lot of times if you linked the longer one, the two minutes will hook them right so it can really affect what people pay attention to in society. So there was information sent. So information center member it's like how interesting something is, and this can be objective to. So if you think of like titles right like you see articles online. You've got three different kind of types of titles. We've got one here like investigating the effectiveness of differential mask usage strategy sounds like a normal scientific title. That's going to be a little bit stronger information sent, like the clickbait title you guys know like, like clickbait or like a buzzfeed title, like worried your cloth mask isn't filtering coronavirus, this hat could make it more effective. That's giving you something now I know it's about a cloth mask right it's about coronavirus. That's giving me something but it's making me click to learn more to get that full information sent right. And then imagine what the strongest information send would be. That would be something like this. Put a nylon stocking over your cloth mask to make it more effective at filtering out coronavirus. All three of these headlines linked to the same article it's three ways to say the same thing. But the strongest information send you can provide is just get directly to the point. And you can do this with images to like check out these three images. So the first one crowded people you're like what is this is it is about masks about a crowd. Okay, this is definitely about masks. And the third one. Nylon stocking over a mask really really specific really straight to the point really strong information sent. So the more you get to the point the stronger the information sent usually. You can think about this here's a couple real scientific article titles. And as you guys are doing as you're searching and doing reviews that kind of thing, you've probably come across titles like this. So you have like that pretty good title right like, how does yeast affect cancer cells that's a real scientific article title, you're like, Oh okay that's that's a pretty good title I know the research question right. There's another thing in like it has that click baby feel that medium information set words like you could really kind of say this as like you wouldn't believe how yeast affects cancer cells like it's the same kind of feel right. If we wanted a stronger information sent title. Those are those titles you come across like this one. That's great increases with city size boom right to the point right that you and when you come across those articles usually when you're when you're searching around you get these strong information sent titles and you're like oh thank you whoever wrote this like that's this exactly what I'm looking for right. So really, we want to dial that information set up as much as we can. And you can think about it whenever you're designing something think about it in terms of like, you have to make it interesting enough to overcome the interaction cost to make it worth the effort. And if you've noticed there's like two ways to do that, you can either make it really easy and it doesn't matter how interesting it is, or you can make it really interesting and then it can be harder, you just need one to overcome the other right. So you can make it easy information sense really strong and this is like, or the information sense week and you make it easy you can look at it. So things like Instagram posts, like move like short YouTube videos that kind of thing. Those are so easy. You'll click on one that's like, oh a cat doing something I've seen it a cat do before neat because like it's so easy it doesn't matter you'll click it right the information since it doesn't matter. And then an example of like when it's really high interaction cost but the information sense is stronger enough to overcome it is like if you've ever walked past the poster science conference or like found something where it's like a long form article, but the subject is like really just speaking to your soul. Then you just go for it, even though it's really high effort. That's strong information sent overcoming that low interaction cost. So, summary, think about it as a trade off you either got to make it really easy, and it doesn't matter how interesting it is or really interesting and it doesn't matter how hard it is. So the other variable is patch switching you learn about remember when we're scrolling through the Twitter feed and like you scroll past some things. That's called patch switching. And you can kind of think of patch switching in terms of patterns of patch switching. So I'm sure you've all watched a lot of Netflix during this time. And you know that mood to get on Netflix where you're like, kind of not feeling anything. You're just sort of like, I don't feel like watching anything. Nothing interests me nothing has an information sent right. So you're going through these like critically acclaimed film row right and like what do you do what do your eyes do when you go through it and you're just not feeling anything you do this right you're like, you kind of skim past most one you you check in with like one thumbnail like maybe trombone and then you're like no I use keep going right and I call this like the boredom bump it's like where psychology studies have shown that if you lock people in an empty room. They'll spontaneously engage like we're wired to just sort of test our environment. I think that's what you're seeing in this pattern where like none of this interests you but you're going to check in once just in case right. Now that the counter this like the healthy patch switching is like if you're really interested in the category like if you're browsing Netflix, and you're like, man I just want something that's like maybe a reality show and I can just get away and just escape. And you've seen that before on Netflix where just like it knows you right you're like this is what I want what do you do what do your eyes do right you you pay attention to everything you're like the big power, you know, big flower fight big valley Russ valley restores you like really evaluate each one. So I call this like the kid in the candy store curve patch switching pattern where like you're like ooh that's interesting that's interesting. And this is like a healthy patch switching pattern. So I think of applying this to a virtual poster. We'll see how this, see how our current virtual poster sessions stand up to this. So, here is a real virtual scientific poster session and we're going to apply what you just learned. So first, what are the patches. Well, each of these posters is a patch, right. And where's the information sent coming from probably these titles right or these little file names, but these aren't really file names, these are some guys name right or some girls name I guess it's just like the author name. And so that doesn't give you anything about what the studies about if you're trying to decide on which poster to browse. You have nothing to go on you can't read the thumbnails you can't like the author name doesn't give you any information about what the studies about. There's no choice paralysis with no, nothing to go on again. So this is pretty close to zero information sent this is providing you nothing to go on right. And then let's look at the interaction costs now we've got zero information sent. What's the interaction costs of a virtual poster session right now is it lower high. Basically super high. So already you have this choice paralysis this like what the hell poster do I click on right. This interaction costs that that paralysis that mental energy you're dedicating to like deciding which put which of these foreign the cryptic, like no information sent posters to click on that counts as cost. When you do click on one, just probably out of curiosity, you're like okay, click, wait for the PDF to load. And then you have this wall of text poster that shows up right and you what you've got to do you got to process all of this you got to filter out everything that's going on which is cost that you got to like zoom in, try to like learn something pan around, then zoom out, and then like kind of feel a little bit overloaded and fatigued, and then click the back button, another cost. And then if you interact with another poster, you've got to go through all of this again right so this is a huge interaction costs you're really making this painful to interact with any given poster over and over again right. You have a very almost no information sent and a very high interaction cost. So what you're probably going to do is you're going to check out one poster, like the border bump style just like be a good citizen of your field, and you're probably going to bail on the whole session and get back to work or browsing YouTube or whatever you were doing before you did this right. It's probably going to, you're probably going to not see a lot of posters because it's just to punish you do it. Maybe click out one or two and then bail. But the worst part is, is that in user experience design research. Anytime you're browsing a set of patches or interfaces, where you have a really high interaction cost really hard to interact with a take a lot of effort. And they don't give off a lot of information sent, and you're under time pressure like I'm going to browse posters for five minutes before I get back to work. And there's always variables add up to a negative attitude towards that thing. And you know this because like when you're browsing a bunch of websites and you can't find what you're looking for, and you're under time pressure, you're just like screw this website right like that's, that's that negative attitude and what that's what we see in surveys of poster session attendees where everybody just feels kind of like meh about posters and it's kind of determined by these factors. One of the things here is if we fix this, we could actually create poster sessions that you don't just feel meh about that you like look forward to and you love them and you enjoy them, just by fixing these things. And we can create an experience kind of like a museum museums have like super healthy patch switching patterns where you just sort of pause in front of each exhibit and kind of see a little bit of time and if you're really interested you stay one longer and if you're So we want to create poster sessions that encourage patch switching the usual advice you get for posters is like, you want to trap people into your poster for two hours and get all the networking you can out of them and squeeze their brain for every all the little learning, but you don't really want to do that you want them to learn from your poster and see your colleagues posters to back to that thing about like all of your colleagues in your field have insight that's relevant for that attendee to you want poster session attendees to be able to keep moving and see and learn learn from a lot of posters and me like a lot of people. So we want to design posters to facilitate like circulating through poster sessions instead of trapping people. This is the traditional scientific poster design. It. It's, I don't think I can say enough negative things about it in terms of applying theory to it. The most negative thing I can say about this that think the most damning thing and we'll go into the evidence in a little bit. The damning thing to me about this traditional scientific poster design is that it hasn't changed in 30 years. You probably use this template like this for posters, I use a template like this for posters for generations of grad students before us use this template right and you know that because sometimes some of you have like hand me down templates. Everything in science should stagnate like this, because if you're thinking about how science works we're discovering new things every year we're learning new things every year about how to communicate effectively, how to design how to design effectively. Why didn't it change why didn't posters change in 30 years. If we were applying science to them they would get a little bit better every year as we learn more about communication design. So many discoveries in the last 30 years, mainly because the internet happened since this poster was designed so this poster predates the internet by a large degree. So that's where we're at right now in terms of traditional posters this thing is. It's there's something else driving its stagnation and that thing is probably conformity and fear nobody really knows what to do. Everybody assumes there's a good reason for it so they just keep using it. So this barely in terms of the evidence. There's a lot of evidence against this being effective at all in person. It's probably worse online. And that's because there's two main research findings you need to know about how people consume information on the internet. So the two main research findings by how do you read online is first, they don't people don't read online. They like skim and they scan scan and bounce around kind of selfishly right. So if you think about this again, some people get frustrated here like well people are so lazy, but really if you think of laziness is efficiency. It's, you can love them for it because laziness really is wanting the most benefit for the least effort. That's efficient that's that's an evolved kind of strength right you're trying to look for only the information you want and filter out everything else. That's how people read online. And if you want to design successfully online, you have to sort of bite the bullet and make things very brief and skimmable, because if you make it not brief and skimmable they'll get nothing. The other fact about how people read online is that when people do stop to read something on the internet. They read 20% slower. So another reason why content has to be very brief you can't overload people because they're skimming around and they're reading slower online. So let's apply this to improving posters. Let's recap our interaction costs here. We'll take a break in a minute here but so we're going to recap our interaction costs, but I went through the hurdles. So you have to choose when you go to a virtual poster session you have to choose you have to choose a poster to interact with you to click on one like zoom in, zoom in, like multiple times until you're just tired. So how can we eliminate these hurdles to design a better virtual poster. I think it's probably the best to start with the zooming, like if you address one problem on your poster, make it so they don't have to zoom because that zooming is a small action but it's repeated so it adds up it like multiplies. And that zooming in on these virtual posters having like zoom and zoom and zoom comes from cramming too much like trying to cram your entire paper on to like a one page virtual poster. Usually I think a lot of people feel like, well, I've always heard that it's good to keep your resume on one page right you're thinking kind of like that like keeping things on one page is a virtue. When really like it's only a virtue if you kept it on one page by cutting things. If the way you fit everything on one page is by making the fonts tiny and cramming everything. That's not more readable. It's just more readable to have multiple pages with bigger fonts at that point. So first tip, break your virtual poster on the multiple pages. You're on the internet now you can most conferences just want a PDF file in any format. So just give them a multi page PDF file, which lets you put different sections on different pages and helps you keep that content bigger so people don't have to zoom. Now some of you are thinking, well, if I just put my wall of text poster on the multiple pages it's going to feel like paper right like nobody wants to scroll through this like paper as a poster. Exactly. That's the problem you know like nobody wants to like read it as a crammed one page thing either. So really online you've got to reduce your content burden. This is like for you to like you shouldn't have to feel this burden of having to summarize your entire like five part study on this one page. You should shrink your burden a little bit to picking like the your favorite part of your study. You can make this decision pick like one or two aspects of your study that you think are the most important or that you really like the most and teach that one thing really deeply versus trying to teach five things very shallow. So I think it's probably best to aim for about a minute of total content like if you were to read your poster out loud it should take you a minute right. You can get kind of anxious about this, but you already have something that's this condensed and that's your abstract paragraph. So your abstract paragraph is already kind of pre condensed right so instead of thinking about your paper or your poster as paper minus starts thinking about it as abstract plus you can start with your abstract paragraph or like one summary of one study that you did and then expand on it so you're not cramming anymore you're actually expanding something already pre condensed just point just put like one point per page that way people can pace themselves and then you can illustrate that point with figures and graphs and illustrations. So people are just scrolling through they're getting one point at a time they're getting these big generously sized key figures where they can explore the data with like good like punch lines about it right without getting lost in all these walls of text right they can sort of paste themselves. And then you're going to have to cut stuff you might have to cut 75% of your stuff out right, but we're on the internet now you can just link to the rest. So have a slide at the end that just links people to your paper links into more details in some way that can kind of give you sort of a spillover so you can just sort of like you can communicate really briefly and really efficiently and then link them to more details if they're interested in. So let's see what this looks like. I'm doing example here. Let's see. So here we have a poster for neuroscience. This is an example of that like one minute conversation, every design you make is like having a conversation with somebody and if you, it should read like that too. So here, I'm going to do this poster in one minute. This was donated by Rick Kraus. So thank you to him abstractly. So this poster you're going to immediately you're like, okay, mouse tone cheese, and then he's got some kind of chemical coming out of his brain. So your eyes go there first and then you're like, I see the Colleen release in the BLA shifts earlier as animals learn about actions and cues lead to reward. You're like, Oh, well I just learned something with no effort what else you got. And it keeps teaching a novice animal releases a CH when they see the reward novice reward a CH goes up. The animal releases a CH when they hear the cue expert tone beep a CH goes up. Methods we recorded a CH in the BLA with fluorescent a CH sensor five photo photometry sorry not my field. Okay, you see a little mouse with his presumably needle in his brain. Then the key figure in mice with more training a CH spikes on the tone or the poke and then we can have a second graph here to point out that in mice with less training. In mice and spike to the reward. And then a summary BLA CH signaling carries important information about salient events and cure reward learning. So this is already really scrollable, right. And then the thank you the links to the rest. If you imagine what this looks like on a mobile phone. You could shrink this way down. So you could do like zoom it way out right like a phone, you could still read it. If you have a traditional poster on your phone. It just it won't work. You have to zoom around and pinch around and zoom on your phone. So this is already much more mobile friendly and it reads very efficiently. And when you get to the end of this you kind of feel like, well that was a cool learning bite what else you got, but that's good that cliffhanger feeling leaves you some mental energy to keep seeing other posters right so you want to keep people circulating. So as an example of a quick virtual poster. Now what we've done here is like when we export this right. If you export that to a PDF file, you're going to have a thumbnail where the first page is the cover image. So already look at how different this is. You have so much more information said to go on the rest of these just look like wall of text posters right you're not you can't tell what they're about. But this one that cover slide teaches you something about a ch release in the VLA regular I already learned from this poster. And really you could take it even further so you want to use everything your conference gives you use it to teach if they give you a thumbnail image, use that thumbnail image to teach people something if they give you a file name, use the file name to teach so we can like a three word psychon challenge here we could be like a ch earlier experts that PDF right like that's that's the least better than you know Owen that PDF right at least people learn something from it just always be teaching and what that does is it establishes a good rate of return so if you can teach somebody if somebody learns something from your poster in the first five seconds of paying attention to it, it establishes your poster is like a good source of learning and then people will continue. So what we've done here already is we've eliminated the zooming. And we've probably shrunk that choice paralysis a little bit where now they have a little bit more information to go on, which has gotten people closer to just being able to click and learn. There's another big hurdle here but we're going to go over that after the game break. So, I think is where Sarah comes in but I have a design game for all of you. So we're going to play, break things up and then we'll talk about the biggest hurdle of all that we haven't even discussed yet to getting people to use virtual posters. So Sarah is going to share a link with you. I just stuck it in chat everyone. Awesome. I see you guys popping up. Okay, no wait till everybody gets in here. We got 27 in here out of 78. Nice. That trick for how much of you're still paying attention to the engaged front of the class guys and girls. Let's see. Okay. When that number hits 42. I'm going to start talking. Oh, sorry. Here we go. So, you guys are rock stars. A large percentage of you're here and this is great. Okay, cool. Well, this is a very silly game that I started playing with myself to teach myself visual hierarchy more and then people ended up really, really liking it for understanding that. I think you usually hear the design is about making things look pretty, but there is a science to it and it's much more scientific than that, or it's much more functional than just making stuff look pretty. So what you need to do is what you're going to do and don't do anything yet, but just look at my screen or look at the first the first slide is you'll see these numbers like 1234. And what you're going to try to do is you're going to try to make people look at the screen in that order, you want them to look at here first on number one that number two spot that number three spot the number four spot. So here's an example. So here's a more tease your eyes go straight to his face right and then hi more tease bigger the yellow bubble. And that was his one. And it's two so you can see you're covering the numbers and then follow this arrow was his number three. And well done was his number four so he made your eyes go in exactly the right order right so that's what you're going to do you're going to pick any slide and duplicate it so just click on a slide right click and then duplicate slide to create your own. So I'm going to give you probably five or six minutes in a minute here to just cover up those numbers in a way that makes people look in that order. Some of these are easier than others, and some of them are really hard. I will tell you right away that if you find one where it's like four corners, that is brutal I still struggle with that one because they're equidistant it's hard to make people look in the right way. I'll wait till everybody makes their own little playground slide. And then after you've done this, what we're going to do is we're going to go through a few of them randomly and shout out what we see first and see who gets it right. My favorite part of this game is one of you is going to be some like hardcore artist, and your slides can be gorgeous you're going to direct the eyes all perfectly and then we're going to discover that you should be teaching this webinar. But there's no, like, if you get the eyes to move in the right order you've won, you don't have to make it pretty. That's the point of UX design. All right, looks like a lot of you have duplicate slides. So I'm going to start a timer for five minutes and you can use anything use text use images, grab stuff from Google images, Google images or draw stuff whatever you have to do change the background color it is your slide. So I'm going to start the timer for five minutes and just cover the numbers with stuff to make people look there first. All right, set the timer for five minutes, you have five minutes, go. And I will be giving you advice as you are doing this. Hopefully doesn't mess you up. But generally, to start out with the eye goes to where the most contrast is first. So you can think of contrast anything that gives contrast a very bright color on a dark background or the reverse. Some of you are using faces that's very good you have a special area your brain the fusiform face area I think for processing faces, we tend to faces very quickly. After contrast, or with contrast, your eye goes to where the most contrast is, and it also goes to what you can process the most easily. So you go to what's easy to process down towards what's hard to process. So a lot of things can make things easier to process, you can make them bigger, you can make them bolder, you can make it harder to process by having more words than less words. There can also be confounds one time someone played this game and they accidentally pasted in a photograph of one of the other participants. So when she went she saw herself first and like that was completely impossible to predict but usually, these are pretty universal You can make most people's eyes go in the right order. You have three minutes and 40 seconds left you got plenty of time. Have fun. You can also use arrows kind of work. I wouldn't over rely on them what an arrow does is if you think of the diagonal line involved in an arrow. It, it moves your eye towards that direction. So a line that is moving the same way can also can sometimes accomplish the same thing. But arrows are good because you got the weight at the end of the year or two. I see a lot of posters were like look here look here. It's better to do it if you can your arrows are so good please use arrows but if you can use it, try to try at least a couple of things with with not using arrows. So I'm going to set you a maximum of one arrow zero arrows if you're like, yeah maximum one arrow don't rely on them. I'm going to put pressure on whoever's on the strawberry slide. You guys got plenty of time over half the time still left man you guys are doing some good stuff. What you're learning right now if I haven't said this already it's called visual hierarchy. So you're learning to help the user understand what's important and take them through a conversation. If you think of your poster as a conversation. You have something you say first something you say second right like I learned this. This is our methods this is how we learned it. There's a few exceptions. That's how you'd say it out loud to a person. The goal is to say it through design where they read it in that order. And that's what you're learning how to do right now you're learning how to direct people's eyes the things you want them to see first and second and third two minutes left. The multi page thing I've been showing you is actually a way to sort of get around this where you let people paste themselves by putting one point per slide and then they can choose when they want more information. You can kind of tax it. But if you only had one page you would really need this and when we go back to physical posters this exercise is really going to help. I hope I still got over a minute left. You can kind of think of these as eventually when you go to design your next poster you'll think of these as sections of your posters you can imagine these as points that you want people to look to first and second. There's an application here that if you have 10,000 points on your poster imagine trying to walk people through 10,000 things in order. Like it's fatiguing. And that's how people read people have to read one at a time. That's called the limited capacity model. I use pictures shapes is great. See some of you using faded colors that's a good way to do it. If you generally like most these backgrounds are white so brighter colors are going to have less contrast. If you think of gray or like some closer color behind another color it'll reduce its contrast. And if you think of things that are like in design that are like faded into the background. Both text light text that kind of thing that's what's happening is you're giving it more or less contrast. A lot of these graphic design rules you hear about like alignment contrast and color and this kind of things. They have roots in cognitive psychology and making people helping people process things very efficiently. Okay, that's your five minutes but I'm going to give you until this person on the strawberry slide with the strawberry cake covers number four. You know who you are, you determine the end game for the rest of everyone. Oh, it's going to happen. Anonymous dolphin. Don't delete it cover it. I hope you guys are covering your numbers not deleting them. Thank you strawberry person. All right. That's about time so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go through some of these. All right, let's do one. Hopefully I can unmute some of you ready to be figured out we can unmute people. We can. We just need to know what their names are. Okay, cool. We'll try this once the artworks. So I'm going to pick everybody. I want to pick, I think probably back to my screen if you're not already on my screen. I'm going to pick one of these at random. And then we're going to see how it worked. I'm going to pick a few and then I'm going to ask whoever I picked do the next one. So here we go you're ready. Here's the first one. I see a dog first. And that was all you didn't wait was that number. One nicely done. I'm going to change this background, but hey you there is second. I'm going to guess that was your number two. I bet you've got a number three back here. I'm going to change the background to white to see how it goes. Oh, I missed number three. I was number three. You want one, two, four. I think you probably didn't finish. All right. Think another one at random here. Go vote right away. Lightning bolts. Nice. Okay. Number one, well done because the lighting both serve as directional arrows. Your, your eye goes down the diagonals. Number three is to expose. Number two, I like this really like on point, relevant example, like you're really using design for good right now. Number three, follow the arrow. Oh, there we go. You almost got that and you did it with real content, which is extra impressive. This is the kind of thing you can do with good design right like if you can imagine someone having this question in their head like go vote. Well, I don't know where to vote find your polling place. Well, where's my polling place. Oh, here's the link if you followed that order really well right and that's what that's what you do when you design stuff like this. Okay, who's with this. Let me try to raise their hand. Yeah, so maybe we can, if you put your name on your slide, then Sarah can go in the back end and unmute you Jennifer Fowler. Happy. Fine Jennifer Fowler who should be smiling with her mouth open. Hello. Okay, I got the numbers messed up my bad. Okay, you did a great job that was awesome. Okay, so Jennifer it is now your turn to pick the next one. So I'm going to you, I'm going to pick one and then you're just going to yell out what you see first alright ready. Here we go. Okay. Go. So the first thing I saw was actually Einstein. No, the number is gone. I think, let's see if they keep in mind your order. Let's see. Where is the text color. It is one nicely done. Okay, what's next. Rainbow. For four day. Okay, the third one I saw was the stem and then the fourth was the arrow. So I kind of got it backwards. It's cool. Jennifer what our journey journey you make to this one I think probably you're going for is the clockwise thing, which can really work right. Yeah, don't blame yourself your eyes go where I should have followed the arrow looking at the right colors. No, it's okay but that's good right we've learned that those bright colors are super attractive right yeah that this is so like ruthless right like for for journey sake like. Like, you, you think you've got it even after like years of practice and somebody was like nope like the arrow, you know, your rainbow had this kind of curvature and it was pointing me this way and you're like well now I learned right. So these are journey you had a hard one because you did a lot of bright colors. And that's hard to contrast, but it was a hard mode. Thank you Jennifer. Let's see if journey can do it next. Well done on the voting thing again journey. I think I'm unmuted. Okay, hey journey. Do the next one. Yeah, actually 28 side 28 caught my eye with a huge hello. Okay, alright, that's going to be number one. What's next. Then I went to the beautiful sign to well done whoever this is. And then my I went to the stop. Interestingly. That's the hard one that color so contrasting because you have a lot of grays in here and so that just comes right out and stop signs are like coded in our brains to be meaningful. That was, that was good though, and then almost got it three out of four. And now I think so what I don't know I think we're probably one full on time but I want to try one thing, because I want everybody else to get feedback on their thing. So, thank you journey also. If you guys, what you can do now is pick the slide above yours. And if you look on the last slide so slide 47. I don't know what happened to slide 47 it was organized when I started but you see you have these numbers you copy and paste like 123 and four. What I want you to do is just pick the slide above yours and copy paste these 123 four numbers on top of what you look at. So people get feedback. That makes sense. Yes. Cool. Okay, I have never done this before. I hope this is helpful for you guys getting feedback. This game evolves. Stupid silly number game evolves. In 10 years, it will have more animal pictures. But I hope this is fundamentally what you're doing is an essential part of design skill. So, as silly as it may feel you're learning a lot hopefully give you guys a minute to do that. And then check out your design see how close you got. Look at the photos. That was hard mode if you use more than one. Nice. Look at the complimentary colors. That's great. Also sorry, I've been locked in quarantine with my partner in my foster dog for a long time so sometimes I talk in a voice like I'm talking to my foster dog to like, you know, people, because we've been trapped in here together so long. So that's how I talked to the dog. Look at the complementary colors. You know, company color is interesting fact is usually your rods and cones in your eye. Like if you fatigue one of them the other one will still be active so blue and yellow or opposite side so if you fatigue the blue, the yellow show or the yellow, you can use the blue and the yellow, like in contrast like blue and yellow cones that's why it's such a high I catching and so stimulating and stimulates both. I butcher that explanation but generally company colors are rooted in how your retina processes images, the highest contrast. Nice cat photo. Do a couple of these capital one flash to over here for all you pick the corners one you almost got it. Okay. 10 seconds on this. I hope your hub is helpful for you like this is really the way to think about helping people process things one at a time is your goal here is really to sort of order that conversation of your design. Okay, cool. And 10 more seconds. Now we're good. Okay, cool. I'll leave these up for a while if you want to check out your thing. If you haven't already, like, check out your own thing. So, everybody start winding down start paying back attention to my beautiful game break slide. So we got one more hurdle to knock down doing go questions. Okay, so I'm gonna start with our last hurdle. Remember we fixed the zooming at this point with our scrollable virtual poster. We fixed the shoot we we've lowered that choice paralysis, right, but there's still one big hurdle left in virtual posters, and that's deciding to go look at posters, right, like you have this busy scientist who is sitting in quarantine home. She's like searching Google scholar for like literature she's taken a break on Twitter Instagram YouTube right, and you have to convince this person to stop doing their work stop like enjoying themselves on the like YouTube and Twitter, and go look at posters which are traditionally miserable on her conferences website. I suspect a lot of scientists will never do this, and the ones that will just check in wants to be good citizen of their field. So really the biggest hurdle in virtual posters is deciding to go look at posters. How can we reduce that right how do we get this person to do that. What's easy actually, you just put posters where they're already looking. So they don't have to decide it just comes to them you bring the posters to them. You just put a version of our virtual poster on Google scholar on YouTube on Instagram on Twitter. And as some of you are like really averse to social media. If you are like really if you are on any social media that you like, use that one. But even if you're a verse to it, at least do Google scholar, because if you get your poster and Google scholar, then like two years from now, when somebody like you is researching that thing that you're also passionate about, then they can find your work and be helped by it and be like thanks or you know like collaborate or something right so at least put it on Google scholar, but really think of each of these platforms you don't have to do them all. But think of each one you do is like an impact booster that gets your poster in front of more and more eyeballs. I'll show you how easy this is so it seems kind of daunting to be like oh I got like export my poster always platforms, but it's stupid easy to do this like you can just with like a few minutes of extra effort on what you already have you can get it on all these platforms. So you've already created at this point a PDF version for your conference right. We'll just go to fix share to get it on Google scholar, and you literally just click, and you drag and drop into this box up here on fix share it's like four clicks, and then you hit save changes and it publishes, and you get a little DIY URL and gets in Google scholar. So you can take the PDF you already have your conference drag it on the fix share poof it's in Google scholar and like under five minutes. Your platforms are easy to like Twitter and Instagram, and YouTube are easier than you might think to if you work with what you already have. So for Twitter, we want a animated gift right so we can have sort of our pages scrolling through automatically like this if you've seen Twitter poster before this is the whole idea right. And I want to show you how easy this is to create. So we have our poster right here right. To create an animated give for Twitter file. Export create animated gift. Let me create the gift. And it goes to our folder. Then we have that right. Then we have our animated gift right. That was like less than a minute. But now we want Instagram right well Instagram it wants a slideshow so you can kind of flip through which is actually more intuitive for the user then Twitter because you can choose when you're ready for the next slide. So we want to create a slideshow for Instagram. And that's also easy. All Instagram wants is our slides as images right they just want a separate image for each slide. This is where these like square dimension I created in the example poster this is why it's square because Twitter and Instagram really love square shapes they both accept square you don't have to do anything else to it. So for Instagram, we just go file. Export. And then change file type. PNG. I'll have all of this in a video in a month or so less than a month hopefully save as. And then we save that right. What we end up with is this we have a Twitter version in a gift. And we have our Instagram version where we have each slides and image, and we just drag this on Instagram and we drag this gift version on Twitter. And now we boost our impact by probably tens of thousands of people right like that we can we can get our science out to more people. And we can start crowding out some of that like junk pseudoscience people read with real science, because now we got scientists summarizing their own work which is the best case. Finally, we have the YouTube version. So I'll show that side. So YouTube version type it more involved but like not a lot so for to create a YouTube version your poster the cool thing here is you can expand a little bit whereas this poster might be a minute. So your YouTube version, take it to two or three minutes right add a little extra detail, you if there was a slide you hated cutting at that back right explained a little more, or don't doesn't matter. But all you have to do for YouTube is first of all you probably change this to widescreen but you'd go slide show record slide show. And then this opens this recorder window that may break zoom. Hopefully won't. I think you probably done record slideshow before, but you can see that because it opened a different screen but basically you to record slide show and that's going to save you a video file that you can drag on YouTube and dragging on YouTube if you've never uploaded to YouTube before. I want you to see how easy this is. So you go to YouTube, but we might want to save a little bit of time for questions Mike. Cool. I'm done then this button to upload to YouTube and you're done it's literally this create button. And that's the whole thing. So that's the basic idea. You can link these to each other as impact boosters. That's it. I've got questions. Sorry about that. I want to spend a little extra time on the game. Hope that was enjoyable. But that's the basic idea. Just create impact boosters. Make a scrolling for you. Nice. Thank you for having me. Sorry, when you have questions now I'm sorry guys I ran the game ran a little long but I hope that was one. So thank you for thanking Mike and if you have questions go ahead and put them into the Q&A. I will, Sarah will field them. I did want to let everybody know this is this is for some it may seem like a pretty radical approach to posters but it's up and coming and I strongly suggest that you just Google better poster template and you'll see ones that you can actually use right now. So that's it for that are a little bit more traditional but also that are useful for virtual like posters. And everything. Thanks to Mike is open source. So you can just copy and paste it down and then fill it in. So, yep. It is very different from the way you're used to designing posters. And I think there's a temptation to think that the way we've been designing posters is there must be some reason for it it must be right but it's not it's that there's there's evidence against it working it's very ineffective and if you do nothing else you should just not do that and try something else these designs I can defend every pixel I can cite your research for every decision I made in these. So you're really following theory and evidence more when you try to take a risk with these new designs that you are with conforming with the old design but I know it's scary, but that's where it learns experiment. Mike we have a question from anonymous attendee. How can we reduce the friction of changing how posters are created within our own circles. This is something I don't think my advisor would go for a great question. I'm going to send them the second better poster video. And it sites research. So I do a good job in that I think of citing studies and very mature theories for every decision. And talking a little bit about the evidence that's against the traditional way of doing posters. Keep in mind also that you're, you can use conformity pressure to so you can say that like major scientific conferences have adopted these kind of principles, including ACR APA. It's important to understand that your advisor feels conformity pressure to just like a grad student. They're worried about what their colleagues will think about them if they break with tradition right, but that idea of adhering to tradition is so anti scientific right. I would say that there's more evidence behind the new ones and that's true. Thank you. Amanda asked if this recording will be shared she has a few people who also might be interested in this video. And the answer is yes, this recording will be posted on the New Mexico F score website later this week. So, to know that. Iwana Marzia Moshi. Hello, it says it seems that the poster will be more slide presentation as you said maybe you can elaborate on that a little bit. Exactly, it's a silent presentation. But if you think of if you're very busy on the internet right. That time you spend orienting to a one page poster like where is everything that's waste right so to break the feel of scrolling through a slide deck. I like to square thing but also if you keep it to one point per page it feels more like a conversation and scrolling is easier than zooming scrolling is an easier effort. So that is a risk that you're like feeling like a slide deck but if you keep it to one point per page and really think of it like us like a silent slide deck is a silent presentation. So everything you've learned for doing good presentations would would help you with this and if you're already good at presentations, you'll make probably very good posters in this style. Carol Allen asked that I like your approach but sense resistance, how do you know when it's okay to use this it may duplicate the initial question, and then also Andrew kind of Andrew coming follows up with that Mike I adopted your format early on but I've been met with some indifference or even resistance. There's also the risk of sticking out in a bad way. The gatekeepers are mostly the old guard that are hesitant to change. How do you get the old on board. Yeah. So I think what we're finding in our poster studies is that some lake. It's myth that it's only that generation like the old guard that that is like really resistant to it right there are a lot of old guard that are really supportive of it. And there's differences right and even we did one study with the CDC where they found that later career researchers like it more. The big thing here is that most of the resistance, I'd say almost all of it comes from my first design. So my first design was basically this one without a graph. It was a complete minimalist it was a reset right it was like put your main finding in the middle stuff on the sides right. People like it was like 7030 like 7430 I hate you right, which was it was kind of meant to find that that middle that that bottom right. These new designs like this the generation to layouts that are in the part two video, much less resistance people are much, much more accepting of them, especially I tried this one this is called the presenter layout. This is the least controversial design of the better poster family. Part of that is because people like to see graphs and figures, even if they don't read them it's reassuring that there's that detail there but also if you make the graphs big people can explore them. So I would really try this one don't pitch this one if you're going to get resistance because that's the most controversial go with this one. I think you'll get a lot less resistance so far people have been much, much less resistant to this one and more accepting, but again virtual just make sure they don't to zoom. I think two is going to be your friend here. We have it looks like tumor questions. What's the maximum number of slides that would be ideal for this approach. Is there a sweet spot. About a minute did like like literally read them out loud. And if you go over a minute cut because you want people to have that energy left over to see other posters and if they're really interested in yours like you can see in the example poster. They'll have links to more to the video version of the paper. But yeah, I think about a minute and I know that's controversial but like it's that's, that's the kind of level where you could see lots of posters and enjoy it right and if you're interested you can pursue more. That's how the internet works. Let's go with this last question by Steven, can this method be adopted for physical poster presentations. The physical poster template is definitely for sure I mean that's where you have these. I think what you learn individual hierarchy will help you. The problem with physical as you have to fit it on the same page. So I think the exact same principles apply. All the principles you learn still apply. The difference is, you're going to have a little harder task with what we did with the game, you're going to have to make people like if you look at this one is designed so they look at the left first because people read enough pattern and they can process these kind of an order right. So you said same principles very low interaction costs easy to interact with, you're keeping that cognitive load low, and you're keeping the information said hi by doing punch lines. So instead of thinking in titles like we normally do in science, think in terms of teaching so you can see each of these graphs have a like a summary of the graph. This is completely supported with evidence to by the way, but the idea is that you're, you're, if the people are trying to read the graph while you're talking to them. It's so much cognitive interference that you want to just spell out like here's what it shows here's what you're looking at right. So things like that that can help them think that helps. Awesome. Oh, this is so wonderful. Okay, I'm going to take back over and close this out. But I want to get us on the right thing. So if here's an example that we have. That's a little more traditional but for New Mexico, EPSCOR posters, but you don't have to use it, but it is a little less scary and it still follows some of the same concepts. But I want to use this time to thank Mike. Whoops. Oh, well, to thank Mike and thank you all for joining us today. You can find him on Twitter and YouTube at Mike Morrison and keep an eye out for his releases as he mentioned he's working on one that's going to air soon. I will add this is the beginning of something we're at the beginning of changing all this so there's still a lot to do and if you have suggestions please send them away. And then I stopped the screen sharing but I wanted to also really quick thank my co-pilot Sarah Pache and all of the National Science Foundation communication folks and folks other folks who help me get the word out about this webinar. With that I want to want to thank Mike again for his time and thank everybody for being here. Thank you guys for coming very much. Have a wonderful afternoon. Yay guys. Bye.