 Okay here's a quick recap on the scientific poster revolution. Scientists try to communicate tens of thousands of new findings to each other every year through posters. And all of these posters have used basically the same approach to design for decades. You put your vague jargony title on top followed by your 45 author names and then you try to cram your entire paper on the rest of the poster. We call this the wall of text. If we can create a new design that transmits knowledge even a little bit more efficiently then we can speed up knowledge dissemination and learning across all of science. And it's a really low bar to make a difference here. We're not basing this design on any evidence or mature design principles or anything. We just use it because everybody else uses it. The research we do have on posters has found that direct quote here the wall of text is undermined by a limited ability to effectively disseminate information. And that posters have quote outgrown their traditional format. Link to that research and more in the description of this video on YouTube. Every time you hear this sound or this sound that means I've linked research in the description and I'm going to be doing that a lot. But the biggest red flag here is that this hasn't changed in 30 years. Nothing in science should be stagnant like that. For perspective this design hasn't changed since before the modern internet. And we've learned a lot in the last 30 years since the internet about the science of how people consume information. If we were really applying science to posters they would get better every single year. So last year I took a shot at creating a new default layout for scientific posters. It looks more like a billboard and it works like this. You can't help but learn the main finding as you walk by or you can stop and skim a sidebar for a minute or you can talk to the presenter for a few more minutes and he has his own sidebar to present from. Or you can just scan a QR code get a copy of the whole paper and move on to other posters. And you can buff up your hero area with key figures and graphs. We call this the better poster version one. The better poster cartoon and templates went viral across the entire scientific community. It was featured in major news outlets like NPR and the Boston Globe. The free better poster template file has been downloaded over 250,000 times. And a lot of wonderful scientific conferences have encouraged their attendees to try it. And the feedback from scientists who've tried it has been overwhelmingly positive. People say things like best poster session of my life. I got more conversations. I got better conversations. At this point you'll see at least a couple better posters in any poster session across all of science. And that's incredible but we can push it so much further. We want a whole session full of creative efficient posters that teach you more as you walk through them or click through them online. And we want to unstick posters and use science and evidence to constantly improve them. Better poster version one was just a bridge between what we were doing and something much much better. And that much better thing is you. I'm going to teach you the research backed design rules behind layouts like better poster so you can apply them your own way and we can all create a new generation of posters together. And these same principles will help you improve virtual posters, presentations, reports, anything you design for people to use. So get ready to level up your science communication skills because you're about to learn the magic of user experience design. Lesson one. User experience design is not graphic design. Like here's a quick poster graphic design lesson. Make sure you line up everything with something else. Give the thing you want people to notice first the highest contrast and use a block test to make sure everything has the same amount of spacing and padding around it. These rules will help you create a more attractive poster but it's still possible to use all of them and create a poster that communicates nothing because it doesn't respect the user's context enough and that's where user experience design comes in. When you're doing UX you're trying to figure out where people are getting frustrated so you can smooth out those frustration points and get them to their goal faster and more efficiently like those ketchup bottles with the cap on the bottom or how you can order a product from amazon in a single click or when you search for something in google scholar and it finds the little pdf link for you and saves you 10 clicks and you're like oh thank you that's good UX. The central truth of UX is that if something is hard to use people just don't use it that much. In science every extra click it takes to access a journal article or every poster if it's so badly designed that the good science on it gets lost. That's a little bit of delayed progress on things that could affect you and people you love one day and smoothing out these friction points so you can get to a journal article faster or understand a poster faster can accelerate scientific progress. Lesson 2. Be realistic about people and love them for their limitations. Look at this image these are called desire paths. Some people see this and get frustrated they're like oh people are so crappy we should put up signs and keep them off the grass. A UX designer looks at this and just goes oh good now we know where to pave the next path you can't fight how people behave you have to figure out how to go with how they are behaving. This is really hard for scientists to do because by the time you become a scientist you felt judged and graded by so many professors and advisors and reviewers that you end up picturing your user as this hyper intelligent judge who's gonna like divine your entire poster's contents instantly and then yell at you for all the things you left out. A lot of grad students have told me they don't even want people to see their posters they just want to give an overall impression of effort which kind of explains how we design them. This isn't a realistic picture of a human being in all their limitations this is this is dummy. Dummy represents the inner lazy distracted person in all of us. Dummy has evolved to be really lazy about how he processes information as a matter of efficiency like all of us he just wants the maximum possible reward for the least possible effort. Dummy's goal for this poster session is to learn something new anything he's completely open. In fact when people start a poster session they're probably in a temporary state of openness to experience which means they're actually less judgmental they're in a mood to see funny stuff and creative stuff and stuff outside their normal area. Lesson three information foraging theory you forage for information using the same mental processes you used to use to forge for food in the wild when you were a cave person think of posters like bushes or patches that may contain food knowledge food you're gonna approach the bushes that smell like they contain good knowledge food unless they're too thorny looking and then you're gonna skip that bush that's called patch switching and it's gonna be really important later but if a poster bush smells insightful and isn't too thorny looking then you'll forage for knowledge barriers until you run out or it's too much effort to keep going and then you'll move to a fresh patch now dummy has some limitations first of all he only has 26 minutes to browse 150 posters before yesterday meet up with his friends for more day drinking which dummy calls networking he's under time stress and that shrinks his attention span and working memory capacity which weren't like super high to begin with people can only process so many things at a time like seven things plus or minus two and dummy's not like sitting at home focusing on your poster in silence he's already thinking about other stuff like the last 50 posters he walked past and that one he kind of wanted to stop at and probably should have stopped at and that thing he's gonna say to that person he's gonna network with later and of course juggling how much time is left in ux terms he's already at a pretty high cognitive load which only leaves a tiny part of his brain left over for processing your poster and makes it extra important to design your poster to minimize cognitive load citation which basically just means help people think there are lots of things you can do to reduce cognitive load through your poster design but the easiest way is probably just to give dummy fewer things to process every time you add something to your poster dummy has to process it and that adds cognitive load and every time you remove something from your poster that's one less thing that dummy has to process that reduces his cognitive load and leaves more of his resources left over to deeply process what is on your poster but if you add more to your poster than dummy can process it once it overloads him so to relieve the load dummy's brain very helpfully just chunks the entire thing into noise most traditional scientific posters are way over that threshold I know there's a lot of important information you want people to read on your poster but putting it on your poster is not the same thing as people actually reading it a lot of that content you put all this time putting on your poster just gets chunked into noise when people first look at it except maybe like a couple familiar words in your title and a picture or a figure or something that stands out from the noise and people will try to glean what's on your whole poster just based on these little bits they can process quickly it's almost like they're giving off a smell and they are that's called information sent right now the main thing giving off information sent on scientific posters is the title and when you write your title what you're usually doing is trying to create like an intentionally medium information sent like clickbait you're like i gotta write a title that's just witty and mysterious enough so they'll stop doesn't give away too much because then they won't have to stop and then no one will talk to me and trapping people into talking to me is my only real goal this medium information sent is too weak in a crowded poster session under time pressure if people's goal is to learn something then just hinting that your poster could teach them something isn't enough because they can't just learn it they have to stop walking walk up to you engage you in conversation and probably miss other posters because that conversation is going to take forever and the sum total of all these things someone has to do to actually learn something from your poster is called the interaction cost citation and because every one of these identical wall of text posters has such a high interaction cost it's like all the bushes are thorny so the attendees just keep rapidly patch switching every two to five seconds if you watch people walk in poster sessions you'll see them blow by way too many posters way too fast when somebody does stop and approach your poster you can hear that high interaction cost in their voice you're like all right let's do this so uh tell me about your poster and what that means is so tell me about your poster because i have no idea what it says except those two keywords i recognize in your title and kind of light if the first thing someone says when they walk up to you is to tell them all about your poster it means your poster told them nothing which is scary because so tell me about your poster is the most common thing said at poster sessions right now but it gets worse because having to filter out these walls of noise over and over again and paying all these high interaction costs fatigues people's attention people can only browse so many posters in a session right now without just getting tired but being an overloading wall of noise with a high interaction cost and a weak information scent that's fatiguing to use still isn't the worst thing about the wall of text the worst thing is that in ux research when you combine a high interaction cost with a weak information scent and put it under time pressure you get a negative attitude towards that thing citation so ux research can predict how we're using poster sessions can explain what's wrong with them and even predicts how we feel about them now let's use it to fix them we want to create posters with a low interaction cost low cognitive load a strong information scent and some unexpected fun stuff to keep people entertained and energized and maybe one day make posters downright addicting i'm going to give you three options easy mode challenge mode and next level let's start with easy the easiest dead simple way to improve your poster's performance using information foraging theory is to just do your normal wall of text thing but replace your title with some kind of statement that gets directly to the point even if you just copy and paste your main finding from the last sentence of your abstract that totally works doing this is going to boost your information sent because the only purpose of a title is to provide information sent if people are browsing through and their goal is to learn something then teaching them something is the strongest information sent you can put off information sent is about concordance with goals and this small change also does something profound it transforms your poster into one that teaches something to everyone who walks by it not just like the three people who stop challenge mode remember our desire paths we can't fight how people behave we just have to go with it so people are going to walk by our poster and only give it five seconds of attention let's see how much we can teach them in five seconds i'm going to do the better poster thing and try to summarize my main finding in just a short sentence and you can speed up interpretation by translating it into casual conversational language if you don't translate it dummies gonna have to translate it in his head anyway and that's going to increase cognitive load so your goal here is just to say it the way people are going to think it anyway and we all think in casual language casual language also creates a sense of social presence which is better for learning it's like the poster is talking to me so this is about as many words as people can process walking by but we still have room in dummies brain for a fast image you can use a related graphic or a quick illustration of a process or best case a real image from your study as long as it can be interpreted really fast i think most real data and figures are too slow to be interpreted walking by but i've seen notional figures work really well teaching people the same fact in both text form and image form helps people elaborate on your finding in their mind so it roots more deeply now we're pretty much at the cognitive load limit for this layer dummies attention is maxed out right wrong there's a free space where we can store a little more data in people's emotions triggering emotion is scientific and the stronger emotion you trigger the better for learning this means it's time for us to stop defaulting to our school's branding colors use color and fonts and images and anything you can to trigger an emotion that reinforces what you're trying to teach people any science can be made emotional are you studying something harmful something helpful something clarifying or just reuse one of the colors from your image just take your best shot and now it's time for the most fun user experience rule of all you want to surprise and delight try to make your poster unexpectedly rewarding in some way like do something that makes you giggle or makes you think wouldn't it be funny if i just did this here's an early better poster about searching for bacteria and sea sponges and he added a little sponge bob on there and sponge bob is searching it's completely relevant to what he's doing and it helps you remember it here's another one on pathogens and the author just turned her bullet points into little pathogens okay surprising delight fairy would you mind adding some surprising delight to our example posters sure thing my copy to do that we could make a little meta joke on this one get it i'm helping people imagine that helping people imagine helps them learn i did my best see the bar is low for you now we're gonna add more than this but these simple one sentence posters already transmit a higher quantity of information on the walk by then the wall of text the wall of text tries to communicate a thousand things at the same time and gets nothing in these posters only try to transmit one piece of insight but they land that one piece of insight into people's minds in five seconds with imagery and emotion for elaboration and learning a poster that successfully communicates one thing is more effective than a poster that fails to communicate a thousand things now people are learning a lot from the posters they're just walking by and we're putting off a much stronger information scent so paradoxically people might be actually more likely to stop and when someone does stop all that work we did in the five second layer has given them a richer stimuli to respond to it's triggering more of their long-term memories and schemas we've given them a richer retrieval cue so they don't say so tell me about your poster they already know stuff about your poster so they start with a deeper question or comment about what you already taught them in the five second layer this isn't just a prediction people who use better poster often report getting better conversations not just more and i've experienced this myself with my own better posters now when people stop at your poster it gets tricky because your social presence is consuming so much of their resources that they're probably just going to look at you and not the poster unless you point to something in which case they'll kind of glance at it and dumbly half process it as you're talking so this is your second constraint see how much you can get people to dumbly half process while you're talking you can try the better poster version one thing and have a sidebar located far away from you for people to skim and if you make that far sidebar approachable enough people will actually stop and skim it before talking to you and then ask even better questions but a lot of better poster presenters tell me they don't end up using the cheat sheet bar and they want more room to show off key figures so maybe try something like this we'll call this the hero figure layout or you can just treat the rest of your poster like a presentation aid put up a few key figures make them big and then write little punch lines on top to quickly explain what the graph shows help people think we'll call this layout the presenter all right challenge posters over let's take this to the next level right now when people walk down a row of posters they kind of blow past most posters in the row in three seconds maybe stop at one and then blow past the rest so their patch switching pattern looks like this better poster tries to go with this so you still learn from the posters you're blowing by but we shouldn't be blowing by posters that fast that's a symptom think of how you move at a museum you kind of shoelace and pause in front of each exhibit for 30 seconds or so we could get a lot more learning into people's brains if we could get 30 seconds of attention on every poster it's gonna sound counterintuitive but i think one way we could do this is by designing posters to encourage patch switching like museums and art shows do a museum doesn't want you to spend 45 minutes staring at one statue and then leave and miss all the other exhibits posters they want you to keep moving that's why they just have one little paragraph next to each painting or exhibit they limit the knowledge berries so you run out and you switch patches this could mean designing posters with less than 30 seconds of total content that you can read at a distance just pausing in front of it really fast data visualizations would be perfect for this like this one this was so memorable it got put on pants and cars and concerts and magazines and i'll better help the author's career and more importantly gave him a sense of impact and fulfillment that we really struggled to get in science and i don't think any of that would have ever happened if we debuted this in a traditional poster format it would have just been lost in the noise which makes me wonder how many cool things like this have been lost in 30 years of the wall of text you can also tell a whole story in 30 seconds like this one the meat of this poster is right here just a punch line that your eye goes straight to real pictures of their results that help you remember them and communicate the methods which is eye tracking and then just one paragraph explaining why what they're doing is really important this is already one of the most efficient research posters i've ever seen but we can push it even further first this paragraph is really tightly written but it be kind of awkward to try to read it while the presenters are standing there looking at you and way easier just to ask so we can pull out the main key points about their methods and then focus in on the most impactful sentence from their paragraph and then make it bigger so it's readable from a distance now this is all i would do but surprising delight fairy told me she would do something like this which would actually help you remember the finding even more and yes this layout would require scissors but you're allowed to do that do we really need to put more than this on the poster if jen and alex are standing right there able to answer any question you could have i think in a lot of cases the answer is no we don't oh we forgot something what about all the author names and credits and stuff that you have to put on your poster i'll bet you didn't miss them let's do what movie posters do and put them on the bottom where people can still find them but they're not hijacking people's attention before they've learned anything and we'll include the qr code again that links to a copy of the full paper or your contact details if you want so thank you for the poster donations jennifer sims and alex hanes from sociology kelsie merlot from work psychology and ilia kashnisky for showing me ed hawkins awesome warming stripes and now i'm going to summarize everything you learned in this video into two golden rules of scientific poster design number one don't put things on your poster that people will ignore number two people will ignore most things now it's on me to prove that these new designs teach better and i'm hoping to have some updates for you later this year on our formal studies but so far all the available evidence points this way there's evidence that the wall of text is ineffective and a lot of empirically driven theory suggesting that new layouts like these should communicate more insight to more scientists and better develop your science communication skills and get you more and better conversations so now you have a choice scientist you can download powerpoint templates for every poster you've seen in this video on the open science framework there's a link in the description or you can apply these principles to create all new layouts just experiment and the crazier the experiment the better and as always please tag me on twitter and show me what you come up with so i can retweet your awesome poster i'm at mike morrison now go out there and create a better poster for all us dummies but above all don't forget to surprise and delight