This post is not a criticism of the posters in the picture below.
To get the full effect of the size and placement of these posters, I think we need a human for scale.
I cannot believe in this day and age that anyone expects to have someone get down on their knees to read the bottom of a poster or to scan those little QR codes in the corner.
Organizers, please do not allow this to be the format your require for your posters.
From the social media site that used to be good then turned very bad.
I have been writing about the possible uses of QR codes for more than a decade now. But I have had one lingering question.
Does anyone actually use them?
This matters for conference poster design, because every bit of space
on a poster matters. If nobody is scanning QR codes on posters, they
should just be left off.
I looked through Google Scholar many times trying to find any research on how often QR codes get scanned. And I keep getting nothing. Obviously, companies that use QR codes can track how many people visit a website or download something that a QR code leads to, but those seem to be purely internal data that never get shared.
My completely subjective impression was that QR codes were not used by viewers. I rarely saw anyone with their phone out, scanning QR codes, when I walked through poster sessions.
If I had to guess how many poster session viewers scanned QR codes, I would have guessed it would be a percentage in single digits. Maybe 10% at best.
I was wrong.
Last week, I was at the ISMPP conference last week presenting a poster that tried to answer this question. Click to enlarge!
The top line result was shocking to me. About half of conference goers surveyed scanned QR codes! That was far more than I expected!
Now, this may be an unusual audience. Medical communication professionals may be more technically savvy than attendees at other conferences. Similar studies at other conference would be welcome!
Although engagement was higher than I expected, the reasons why people did not scan the codes were interesting. Many just didn’t notice them. So if you people to scan your QR code, maybe don’t make it the size of a postage stamp and stick in at the bottom of your poster.
Another reason that people didn’t scan QR codes may not be fixable, the dreaded “Not interested” response.
But when I presented this poster, I noticed that a poster nearby had a QR code with the description:
Scan to discover more.
As a viewer, I was wondering, “More what?”
What is the value add that I get from scanning this QR code? If you told me what is on the other end of that QR code, maybe I will be interested enough to fish out my phone and scan it.
And the moral of the story is: QR codes are not wasted space on a poster if you feature them in smart ways.
A note about the design of this poster. I did not design this poster; it was done by professionals who work with my colleagues at IPG Health. We tried to exemplify two of our own recommendations by making the QR code big and telling people exactly what they get from scanning.
Messina EL, Faulkes Z, Evans V, Wells JL, Morrison M, Parrish C, Hannan N. 2025. Half of Cochrane and ISMPP conference attendees scan poster QR codes: Can we harmonize discordant feedback to further enhance engagement? Poster presented at 21st Annual Meeting of International Society of Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP), Washington, DC, USA, 12 May 2025. https://cdn.fs.pathlms.com/bSpeakR8RpO1BjN63xkx?cache=false&dl=true (PDF); https://mhmc.reveal-sp.com/poster/view/?id=UQj901Y1U (video walkthrough)
This conference was different than most others I had been to. I normally go to scientific conferences. This meeting is certainly adjacent to academics, but people at this meeting are not mainly professors and graduate students in universities. They are communication professionals in businesses.
The contributed poster session was relatively small: 72 posters in total. But this did mean that the organizers were able to do a few things with posters that I had not seen at larger conferences.
Here are a few things I noticed.
Many medical writing companies employ graphic designers. (I even met a graphic designer at a roundtable!) So it was not surprising that conference posters on display looked like that had been done by someone with more experience than a science grad student.
The choice of colours was more coherent. There were more graphic elements, particularly icons.
Despite what seemed to be the hand of graphic designers, many posters still needed editors. I still saw many posters that contained mostly columns of small text. (Don’t bother clicking to enlarge on the example below; it is blurry on purpose).
The example above show the big blocks of small text that are the enemy of conference poster design.
Speaking of bad habits shared by academics and medical writers...
Medical communications professionals are rightly interested in making sure that people of many different kinds of educations and backgrounds are able to understand medical research. There were many posters about PLSs and PLPSs.
That’s “plain language summaries” and “plain language publication summaries.”
A suggestion I have for anyone writing a plain language summary? Don’t call it a PLS or PLPS. Try not to use any new acronyms at all.
I liked that some posters got spotlighted. This conference had no contributed oral presentations, as far as I could see; only posters. The program committee reviewed the abstracts and picked a few that they thought were worth more attention.
The authors of two posters were given the chance to present their works after a keynote, in a big ballroom.
The authors of two more posters were featured in a “Guided poster tour.” When there were several parallel tracks of programming on the first afternoon, one option was to go to the room where the main poster session was held. The poster presenters had a microphone and small portable speaker, and were able to talk to whoever came in to hear them.
It was much like a regular poster presentation, except that there were no other presenters in the room competing for attention, and so the room was much quieter. The speakers were able to address a larger audience, and just had to do it once for everyone who came by. There was no expectation that they would go over the material for a few people individually.
Another clever way to promote people checking out posters was a “scavenger hunt” in the conference app. Clicking the link led to a survey with questions about posters. Some questions gave you a specific poster to check out, with a question about the content. Other questions gave you some data or information presented on a poster, and asked you to identify the poster number.
I did not like that posters were in at least three different locations. In a room with only posters, the vendor’s room, and scattered throughout the hallway.
I spent much time in the main poster session room where I was presenting, and almost overlooked some of the posters in the hallways.
Not related to posters, but a nice bit of design...
The front of the attendee badge is standard stuff. The back, however...
The back of the badge features a small program guide! I hadn’t seen this done before. Great way to use space that normally goes to waste.
The conference organizers did some quite innovative things with their contributed posters. Although this has the advantage of being a smaller meeting with a relatively small number of posters, I think several of these ideas could be used at meetings that are substantially bigger.
Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day!
This poll from this weekˆs ISMPP annual meeting shows how far we have to go in the field of conference posters:
My quick tip for better accessibility:
Fewer words, bigger.
How many people around you wear glasses or contacts? The world can be blurry for them! Bigger is easier to see!
Do not use generic section headings like “Introduction,” “Methods,” “Results,” and “Discussion.” Instead, use longer descriptive headings that give the main points of each section.
For example, instead of writing:
Reaching out to resources
They suggest a longer but more informative heading:
Women report reaching out to more resources than men
The team call these, “Complete assertion headings.” There are two examples in the paper I have reproduced here; click either to enlarge! Table II in the full paper also lists multiple examples.
The team tested this format against the billboard poster pioneered by Mike Morrison and the “Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion’ (IMRAD or, as Wolfe and company call it, IMRD) formats.
They did two tests. Both of them used posters about the same content formatted in three different ways. Viewers of posters were scored on their comprehension of the poster and their preferences.
The first was with undergraduates. The authors wrote that students are not exactly the target audience for posters, who tend to be a bit further along in their studies. So they conducted a second study, using “engineering professionals,” which was a mix of graduate students and faculty.
The logic of the second study was generally the same, except that instead of testing for comprehension directly, they asked how participants how easy it was to understand. This is an important difference, because people’s preferences about content they are trying to learn do not always align with their actual learning (Delauriers et al. 2019).
In both studies, the “Complete assertion headings” generally comes out on top, the billboard format in the middle, and the “journal article on the wall” fares poorest.
Both studies had relatively small samples, between 20 and 25 subjects. I would love to see studies on poster usability that are ten times bigger.
What strikes me is that this format – using headings to guide a reader quickly through a poster – shares much in common with the billboard format and with what I’ve called “the Columbo rule.”
All three of them emphasize making simple and clear declarative statements. They just differ in where those statements are placed.
I think many scientists shy away from making those strong declarative statements. Flat out saying “This is the finding” might feel push and blunt because it runs counter to academic culture. Scientists are taught to be conservative in their interpretation of data. To allow others to inspect data so that they can reach their own conclusions. Not to hype their research.
These are generally positive things for researchers to do! These are good practices for full presentations of research projects in journals. But in the context of a busy conference, trying to say as little as possible about the data and the interpretation of them makes for much less effective communication.
While I didn’t use the term, I basically used the “Complete assertion heading” format in one of my own posters.
First, I ditched the standard “IMRAD” headings. My idea was to try to make the poster quickly readable by making every heading a key question or finding. That way, you only had to read a few sentences to get the gist of the poster.
Ahead of my time!
Deslauriers L, McCarty LS, Miller K, Callaghan K, Kestin G. 2019. Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: 201821936. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821936116
Wolfe J, Reineke J, Lott J. 2025. Comparative study of scientific research poster design favors complete assertion headings and no abstracts over other formats. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication: In press. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPC.2025.3529094
Detective stories: “Whodunnit?” versus “How’s he gonna prove it?”
A poster with no conference, or: What I made in that #SciFund poster class
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