The edge effect

At a conference last week, I had two posters next to each other. The next day, I scribbled this in my notes:

I think the difference in traffic was not due to any inherent difference in the poster, either scientifically or graphically, but was because of the room layout.

All the posters in the session were mounted on single poster boards. Every single mounting board had one had one edge along a wall (or, in the center, a curtained room divider). This meant that poster viewers couldn’t walk along a row of posters. They had to walk in towards the wall, surrounded by posters on either side, over and over again.

Remember that people read from left to right, so the starting point of a poster is on the left edge.

The poster marked “more traffic” above has its left edge away from the wall. As soon as people walked into that cul-de-sac, they first thing they will tend to read will be the “more traffic” poster.

The poster on the right (marked “less traffic”) has its left edge next to the wall. To get to the start of this poster, people have to make their way all to the end of the cul-de-sac. The path might be blocked with people reading the other poster, or people reading the end of the poster they want to start reading.

One poster had an unfair advantage in attracting attention over the other.

And the moral of the story is: Conference organizers, think about the patterns of foot traffic in the poster session! They influence what posters get viewed the most.

Critique: Motor units

Today’s poster comes from Mike Pascoe, and is used with his permission. Click to enlarge:

There is a lot to love about this poster.

1. Uncluttered. The text is pared down and the graphs are given ample margins to let white space. It is not an intimidating poster. It invites in people, saying, “Hey, I am going to tell you my story and be done in two minutes. It won’t take you half an hour to decipher me.”
2. Aligned. The columns are clean (though not perfect).
3. There is no confusion about where I should read next, even when the poster switches to the reading order going sideways (Results section 4 to 5) instead of down (the rest of the poster).
4. The artwork of the arms in Results section 1 acts as a nice entry point for passers-by.
5. It has a QR code, which is at the vanguard of today’s conference poster technology (which I say purely and only because I wrote a blog post about them). Just so you don’t have to scan the image above, it links here. This is a full package of everything someone at a poster session might want to follow-up on.

This poster succeeds brilliantly on those points alone. Do not be fooled that the list I am about to give of potential improvements is longer than the list above makes this a bad poster. It does not. The points above weigh heavily. The points below are trivial.

If I were to pick on a few points where maybe things could be improved...

1. The combination of Times New Roman and Arial is readable, but lacks character. A little something more daring, perhaps for the headings, would make this a little less “plain white bread.”
2. Arial is used throughout the results, for both sub-headings and graph labels. Those are more text-level than heading level, and putting those in Time New Roman might have been a better match. The poster is perfectly consistent, which is good, but I am not sure if it meets expectations about hierarchy.
3. The colours of results sections 2 and 3 could be made more consistent.
4. Similarly, the graphs in results sections 4 and 5 use symbols filled with colour, and the graphs in results section 6 don’t.
5. Containing only text, that all important left hand column is just a trifle gray.
6. I remain unconvinced that poster numbers (in the upper right under the QR code) are helpful to viewers.
7. The first section of Results, um, isn’t results. “Experimental setup” should be in methods.
8. The two “Experimental setup” pictures are further to the left than the corresponding pictures below them.
9. The Results section heading could be made even more descriptive. For instance, instead of, “Sustained contraction characteristics,” it could be worth the extra bit of space to say, “Sustained contraction characteristics differ in young and old.”
10. And now we’re down to truly nitpicky stuff... But I am not alone in disliking a comma before an ampersand symbol (in the list of author’s names).

This is a great looking poster, and I bet it went down well.

Breaking the hourglass for headings that holler

Making a poster like a journal article is one of the easiest traps for a poster maker to fall into.

Much of the good advice about posters from Mike the Mad Biologist will be familiar to readers. But this one is something I haven’t written about:

Informative headings are your friends. I see too many posters with sections labelled “Abstract”, “Methods”, “Results”, and “Conclusions.” You have a summary! And some methods! Results and conclusions too! Bully for you. Use the section headings to inform the reader, while simultaneously describing the figure or table (see #2). Something like, “xyz genes are found only in clinical isolates” tells me what I should be looking for in the figure.

This is a classic case of doing something for no reason other than habit.

Academics write journal articles. It’s what we do. And journal articles have a very rigid structure that takes practice to master. So much so that it becomes second nature.

The classic journal structure has an acronym: IMRAD. The letters stand for the section headings that Mike refers to: Introduction, Methods, Results, And Discussion. This format leads to people saying that academic papers have an hourglass shape: They start off very broad in terms of problems and concepts (Introduction), increasingly become more specific and detailed (Methods and Results), then widen back out again to big picture stuff (Discussion).

You can even see this tapering from general to specific in the Introduction. The first sentence is usually about some very big issue, like terrorism or invasive species or the nature of sexism. Then it pares down to to a more specific question, then pares down again and again until you get to this particular paper.

This means that the specific research question is usually buried in the last paragraph of the Introduction. this could be two to five paragraphs down in the text. This is what my journalist friends call, “burying the lead.”

But you don’t need to follow that structure on a poster! At least, not to the degree of actually spelling out each heading.

Someone looking through conference posters wants to know the question you are trying to answer immediately. Putting those key points in big text as a heading helps the curious quickly figure out if this is something they want to read. The IMRAD format is so well known to academics that you can dispense with them entirely. I did that on one of the favourite posters that I’ve done, and it worked well, in my opinion.

Instead of, “Introduction blah blah blah research question?”, shorten it to, “Research question.” Leave all the rationale and justification and background and blah blah blah off the poster and say it  to people who visit your poster.


Related posts

Poster Venn
Should your first presentation be a poster?
References on posters

Trap photo by kevindean on Flickr; hourglass photo by bogenfreund on Flickr; both used under a Creative Commons license.

Posters as whiteboards

The Poster Session blog (commercial site) notes that you can write on some laminated posters with dry erase markers.

This opens up interesting  possibilities. You can leave space on your poster where you can write in discussions. You could leave diagrams unfinished, then draw on the poster to show relationships as you’re giving the poster.

Poster versus talk, May 2011 edition

Eva Amsen at the Expression Patterns blog asked if people preferred giving talks or posters. The winner, by about a three to one margin, was a talk. This is about the ratio that I saw the last time this came up.

I have not seen a discussion of which format people prefer as an audience member, though. I think a poll may be in order... check the right hand side of the blog.

Updated, 26 November 2014: Fixed link rot. Hat tip to Morton Ann Gernsbacher.

Related posts

Poster or talk?
Should your first presentation be a poster?
Poster versus talk, May 2010 edition

Poster conversations matter

In a longer post about the qualifications for a doctorate, DrugMonkey dropped in this little bit about the importance of posters:

I confess, when trainees are still pre-doc or recently annointed, I don’t get a general impression of them by toting up their (research papers). Yes, it contributes some but really, how could I possibly keep track? The things that contribute in a big way are my direct interactions and experiences at meetings. Poster conversations, their presentation of data from the platform, etc. This is what convinces me that the training program is a stellar one....the trainees appear to be good scientists with a head on their shoulders.

My emphasis.

Critique: Shrimp parasites

Forgive me for showing one of my own posters again. I thought this was a good follow-up to last week’s post on logos, because one of the things I wanted to do with this poster was to subvert the way most people do titles.

I wanted to turn that prime top left corner into an entry point or highway sign by putting the most immediately recognizable image that was relevant to the research. Strictly speaking, the poster is more about the parasites inside the shrimp than the shrimp itself, but people know what a shrimp is.

Because the background of the picture was solid black, that gave me the idea to make the title space a distinct black banner.

I’d wanted to try an orange and blue colour scheme ever since I’d written a blog post about orange and blue on movie posters. But I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t come by it honestly: the staining technique I used for the first picture in the introduction gave me orange and blue! Two of the other pictures were orange-ish colours, so it made for a surprisingly consistent colour scheme.

I carried the colours through in the section headers, the data points in the graphs, and the title. Those may be too subtle in the last two, though.

Reference

Carreon N, Faulkes Z, Fredensborg BL. Polypocephalus sp. infects the nervous system and increases activity of commercially harvested white shrimp (Litopenaeus setiferus). Journal of Parasitology: In press. DOI: 10.1645/GE-2749.1 (If DOI link is not working, abstract and preprint available here.)