UPDATE: If you want to teach people about poster design, you can download all the slides for this talk on my Open Science Framework repo here: osf.io/taq2f Use these slides freely. You don't need to credit me. But would love to hear about your learnings and struggles! And let me know if anything else would be helpful! Idea inspired by @brian83011 🙏
I was just looking for a video about making pretty scientific posters. I didn't think I would find a whole research! The thing about computational articles with myst also sounds really cool. I'm excited to get my first paper ready to try the poster layout and the notebook.
P.S. - Computations articles with Myst has been before/after for me personally. After I created one, they got easy and now it's the only kind of article I want to make!
@@MikeMorrisonPhD Yeah that is where I came from haha. I love that it has references, so that I have something to reply to anyone that objects to my poster not being a wall of text.
I'm glad to have found this channel. I was looking for information on how to improve my university classes and material with better design. I was not expecting to find a research field of scientific communication design. I truly believe that we can not only be better at transmitting information to the scientific community, but also bring a wide range of people to science. And I will use all this information you are giving us to enhance the teaching activity, to generate a better educational experience. Thanks.
Feels like we are so on the same page on this evidence led design, we have been trying to use heatmaps for over a year now and even getting traditional poster designers to take a look at it has been a struggle. I like your thought about how to make people care about improving the accepted norm by making them care more about the outcomes. I definitely find from everyone involved in creating posters currently that there is still a lot of work to convince people that having a large number of people understand some of your research is better for everyone than having a tiny number of people spend the time and effort to read an overly complex poster to understand all of your research (maybe). Love the evidence you are now generating, keep going!
Thanks Brian!! Yeah once I saw the eye tracking results I thought my job was done. I was like "Clearly, anybody who looks at these two heatmaps will get it." lol I should have known better. I still haven't found a reliable way to convince people that "putting it on your poster doesn't mean it goes into people's brains" and the whole thing about elements on a design competing with each other. My best win so far is showing people Terms of Service with a "I have read these terms" button and being like "Imagine a lawyer being afraid to remove a sentence from this because he thinks people need to read everything, when obviously nobody reads any of it. You're the lawyer." And then I show tosdr.org/. That kind of helps? What's your go-to strategy that helps convince people? Any successes?
Great stuff @MikeMorrisonPhD. At least once a week I hear the call, "But that's how we've always done it", I appreciate your battle against this thinking.
Thanks Iain. At least once a day I think about the concept of informational conformity from my undergrad psych: "Everyone else is doing X, we've always done X, so X must be the best thing to do." While I'm sitting here looking at eye tracking data showing traditional poster content completely ignored. Creating improved designs has been by far the easiest part compared to adoption. But, having time and knowing people like you are in the fight too keeps me hopeful for the future!
I really enjoyed the evidence-based approach to information foraging. Some food for thought on how to track the behavior of people on the cheap. Using cheap cameras, it would be pretty simple to record the movement of people (assuming they are mounted on the ceiling, or with a wide enough field of view). Then, computer vision can be applied to the recordings to measure not only the time spent on specific rows, but on specific posters. Depending on the size of the poster session, this could be achieved with smartphones, and then uploading the recordings to be processed. Resolution doesn't need to be too high for this!
Would LOVE to do it this way, but we'd probably have to limit ourselves to industry poster sessions (like with science-heavy companies who often have internal poster sessions). Companies and government agencies won't hesitate to video crowds for learning. But scientific conferences are squeamish AF about collecting identified data. Even still, I wonder if we could inspire them with a proof of concept? Probably way more software already built for video data, right?
@@MikeMorrisonPhD I resonate with the concerns over personally identifiable information (PII) and privacy. I can think about a number of ways to mitigate the privacy concerns, such as low quality video taken from the ceiling, rather than at eye level, so face recognition would be challenging at such angles. Alternatively, the software can pre-process the footage to blur each person before storing it, or simply storing the position of the "center of mass" of each person at a given time. If cameras are an absolute no-no, There are other types of sensors that cover large (10 by 10 meters or so) areas with enough accuracy for this application, and no possibility of PII, Kinect, or infrared beacons come to mind, and those can be controlled with arduinos!
Exellent video mike, im currently preparing for a poster presentation in the field of cardiology. watched all your videos and came up with a modified version of poster, excited to share with you. Keep inspiring us, Mike.
Yeah! Have fun with it! One final tip in case it helps: your eye goes to where the most contrast is first. That applies to the poster row too. If you want people to pay more attention to your poster than the other posters in the row, you just have to make it look very different from the other posters. Since everybody else in the room is still mostly conforming right now, you have an easy start on winning that game. It'll get harder later when other people realize this haha.
Been a big fan for some years Mike. I came across your early videos just before the pandemic (your dabbing rainbow unicorn will forever have a home in my brain), and didn’t have a chance to present since then. Just got back from the American Society of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics (ASCPT). They recommend your #betterPoster, and it was my first time presenting that format (I guesstimate that maybe 70% used it). It was harder to create than I expected (it’s a new way of thinking about what a poster needs to do), but so worth it! But the urge to “show how much work I did!” is so strong! For anyone thinking about it, but unsure, I would say you don’t have to go all in, try to incorporate some ideas, see how it goes. You won’t regret it!
I spent HOURS on that dabbing unicorn! Worth every minute lol. And thank you!! That's really wonderful to hear. I'll have to reach out to ASCPT at some point. 70% adoption is off the scale! And even a few in the room will start to give others ideas. I think you kind of nailed my struggle: I'm not arguing for a 5% improvement in the existing poster design/goals. I'm arguing that posters need to do something different than they've always done. I think I'll steal that line from you if you don't mind!
UPDATE: If you want to teach people about poster design, you can download all the slides for this talk on my Open Science Framework repo here:
osf.io/taq2f
Use these slides freely. You don't need to credit me. But would love to hear about your learnings and struggles! And let me know if anything else would be helpful!
Idea inspired by @brian83011 🙏
Thanks!
Sure thing!
I was just looking for a video about making pretty scientific posters. I didn't think I would find a whole research! The thing about computational articles with myst also sounds really cool. I'm excited to get my first paper ready to try the poster layout and the notebook.
Haha I have that kind of video too! But good on you for clicking the extra nerdy on haha:
th-cam.com/video/SYk29tnxASs/w-d-xo.htmlsi=sn34lxATgVd-7D1j
P.S. - Computations articles with Myst has been before/after for me personally. After I created one, they got easy and now it's the only kind of article I want to make!
@@MikeMorrisonPhD Yeah that is where I came from haha. I love that it has references, so that I have something to reply to anyone that objects to my poster not being a wall of text.
I'm glad to have found this channel. I was looking for information on how to improve my university classes and material with better design. I was not expecting to find a research field of scientific communication design. I truly believe that we can not only be better at transmitting information to the scientific community, but also bring a wide range of people to science. And I will use all this information you are giving us to enhance the teaching activity, to generate a better educational experience. Thanks.
Glad to meet you too, Rodrigo! Come hang out on the r/scienceUX reddit sometime and share what you're working on!
Feels like we are so on the same page on this evidence led design, we have been trying to use heatmaps for over a year now and even getting traditional poster designers to take a look at it has been a struggle. I like your thought about how to make people care about improving the accepted norm by making them care more about the outcomes.
I definitely find from everyone involved in creating posters currently that there is still a lot of work to convince people that having a large number of people understand some of your research is better for everyone than having a tiny number of people spend the time and effort to read an overly complex poster to understand all of your research (maybe).
Love the evidence you are now generating, keep going!
Thanks Brian!! Yeah once I saw the eye tracking results I thought my job was done. I was like "Clearly, anybody who looks at these two heatmaps will get it." lol I should have known better. I still haven't found a reliable way to convince people that "putting it on your poster doesn't mean it goes into people's brains" and the whole thing about elements on a design competing with each other.
My best win so far is showing people Terms of Service with a "I have read these terms" button and being like "Imagine a lawyer being afraid to remove a sentence from this because he thinks people need to read everything, when obviously nobody reads any of it. You're the lawyer." And then I show tosdr.org/. That kind of helps?
What's your go-to strategy that helps convince people? Any successes?
PS - added a link to download the slides above, inspired by your comment!
Great stuff @MikeMorrisonPhD.
At least once a week I hear the call, "But that's how we've always done it", I appreciate your battle against this thinking.
Thanks Iain. At least once a day I think about the concept of informational conformity from my undergrad psych: "Everyone else is doing X, we've always done X, so X must be the best thing to do." While I'm sitting here looking at eye tracking data showing traditional poster content completely ignored. Creating improved designs has been by far the easiest part compared to adoption. But, having time and knowing people like you are in the fight too keeps me hopeful for the future!
I really enjoyed the evidence-based approach to information foraging. Some food for thought on how to track the behavior of people on the cheap. Using cheap cameras, it would be pretty simple to record the movement of people (assuming they are mounted on the ceiling, or with a wide enough field of view). Then, computer vision can be applied to the recordings to measure not only the time spent on specific rows, but on specific posters. Depending on the size of the poster session, this could be achieved with smartphones, and then uploading the recordings to be processed. Resolution doesn't need to be too high for this!
Would LOVE to do it this way, but we'd probably have to limit ourselves to industry poster sessions (like with science-heavy companies who often have internal poster sessions). Companies and government agencies won't hesitate to video crowds for learning. But scientific conferences are squeamish AF about collecting identified data. Even still, I wonder if we could inspire them with a proof of concept? Probably way more software already built for video data, right?
@@MikeMorrisonPhD I resonate with the concerns over personally identifiable information (PII) and privacy. I can think about a number of ways to mitigate the privacy concerns, such as low quality video taken from the ceiling, rather than at eye level, so face recognition would be challenging at such angles. Alternatively, the software can pre-process the footage to blur each person before storing it, or simply storing the position of the "center of mass" of each person at a given time. If cameras are an absolute no-no, There are other types of sensors that cover large (10 by 10 meters or so) areas with enough accuracy for this application, and no possibility of PII, Kinect, or infrared beacons come to mind, and those can be controlled with arduinos!
Exellent video mike, im currently preparing for a poster presentation in the field of cardiology. watched all your videos and came up with a modified version of poster, excited to share with you. Keep inspiring us, Mike.
Yeah! Have fun with it! One final tip in case it helps: your eye goes to where the most contrast is first. That applies to the poster row too. If you want people to pay more attention to your poster than the other posters in the row, you just have to make it look very different from the other posters.
Since everybody else in the room is still mostly conforming right now, you have an easy start on winning that game. It'll get harder later when other people realize this haha.
Been a big fan for some years Mike. I came across your early videos just before the pandemic (your dabbing rainbow unicorn will forever have a home in my brain), and didn’t have a chance to present since then. Just got back from the American Society of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics (ASCPT). They recommend your #betterPoster, and it was my first time presenting that format (I guesstimate that maybe 70% used it). It was harder to create than I expected (it’s a new way of thinking about what a poster needs to do), but so worth it! But the urge to “show how much work I did!” is so strong! For anyone thinking about it, but unsure, I would say you don’t have to go all in, try to incorporate some ideas, see how it goes. You won’t regret it!
I spent HOURS on that dabbing unicorn! Worth every minute lol. And thank you!! That's really wonderful to hear. I'll have to reach out to ASCPT at some point. 70% adoption is off the scale! And even a few in the room will start to give others ideas. I think you kind of nailed my struggle: I'm not arguing for a 5% improvement in the existing poster design/goals. I'm arguing that posters need to do something different than they've always done. I think I'll steal that line from you if you don't mind!