Researcher Q&A: A Conversation About the Better Poster Project

Mike Morrison, PhD, is an organizational psychologist and the lead UX researcher at Curvenote. While in graduate school in 2019, he posted a YouTube cartoon about creating better research posters and shared the template on the Open Science Framework (OSF). The video has over a million views and #betterposter went viral. In this Q&A, Morrison answers questions about his project and its impact on the scientific community. 

Q. What inspired you to make scientific posters your mission? 

A. I came from a tech industry background, and I thought coming into science would feel like traveling into the future, where scientists would have all these super advanced tools. But it felt like everything was stuck 30 years ago. 

Then I got a health scare, went through my PhD program, and decided to try to do something about the bad design of sciences' interfaces. I realized that there are so many people in the chronic illness community stuck waiting on science. Those of us working in science owe those people efficiency. In my case, I started with the poster. 

Scientific posters are very cluttered and overwhelming, and contain way more content than people actually read. . So, I suggested that we cut down the content dramatically, add a lot of white space to aid attention, and speak in headlines. These are not revolutionary ideas in design, and most designers think I'm not going far enough. But to scientists, this was apparently a revelation.

When I posted the Better Scientific Poster project on the OSF, I thought I would be bugging people for years to use it, but instead, it went viral across science in 24 hours. I kind of hit a home run on my first swing — pure beginners' luck.

Q. What was the response like?

A. It was unbelievable. I had to have friends logged into my email box replying to the press emails when it first hit. I still haven't fully caught up years later.

With the first design, 70% of people loved it, 20% hated it, and 10% hated me. I improved the design based on feedback and now it feels like around 90% of people like the latest designs.  I get much less hate mail now!

In terms of just numbers, more than 250,000 studies have been communicated through Better Poster designs. Most major fields of science have used it in some capacity. A lot of major conferences recommend it. I tried to make a difference and ended up making an impact on every single field of science seemingly overnight. As hard as it is to change science, you'll never convince me that it's not possible now. That early success really motivated me to keep trying to improve the system. 

Q. Why did you use the OSF to host the Better Poster Project?

A. I needed a home for the new poster templates that was very reliable. If you create something that a lot of scientists find valuable, they're going to want to share it with each other and link each other to it, and you need a legitimate, reliable home for it. OSF was that for me, and in five years, I have not gotten a single email about problems with OSF. OSF is part of the scientific community and has a good reputation. They have that reputation of being one of the fold.

One of the goals of good design is that if you strap eye trackers to people's heads, they'll look at the parts of the design in the same order. With a bad design, their attention scatters all over the place.

Q. Do you have a favorite example of a Better Poster?

A.  There are too many. Researchers are very creative with it. But just sentimentally, my favorite is the first-ever #betterposter by Eugene Ofosu, who was the first researcher to try the layout — and won a poster award with it! The first-ever #betterposter won an award! I'll always love Eugene for his bravery. I'm also proud of a recent 'Z-layout' #betterposter I made because it performed so well in a recent eye tracking studies. [Eye tracking is a technology that measures where a person looks when reading a document.]

One of the goals of good design in science is that if you strap eye trackers to people's heads, they'll look at a good design in the same order as a bad design. With bad design, they'll look all over the place. 

This new layout guided peoples' eyes more efficiently than any other poster tested (including previous #betterposters). It still feels dense, and has big data visualizations, so it still feels 'sciency', but if you read it out aloud, it would take you less than one minute. You could learn three main takeaways, the methods, and the results in under one minute — while standing three feet away.

With the traditional poster, you can see the clutter in the eye tracking data — people don't know where to look. Then you have a tight focused attention pattern with the better poster. That's pretty damning to me every time I see the data.

Q. You’ve tackled scientific posters. What’s next?

A. Scientific articles. One person can design a new poster, but it takes a team and a lot of resources to fix scientific articles. Even if you have the right technology, the history of science is filled with really cool article technology that fails because nobody adopts it, but I think we have a shot. 

I work at Curvenote, and we have a new scientific article technology that can democratize the best technology in scientific articles. The very best scientific articles you've read in terms of reading experience will have cool features, like hovering over terms, pop-ups with definitions, and interactive graphs. We can now make that available to all journals of every size — even your preprints. 

If you wanted to start your own scientific journal, you could have a reading and publishing experience as good or better than an Elsevier journal would. We work with large journals, small journals, and funders to build these new article publishing systems. 

I’ve also launched my own scientific journal for publishing studies about improving the design of sciences' interfaces: ScienceUX. It's been hard to find a home for those kind of publications, so I started my own!

Q. What would you say to someone interested in using OSF for a project?

A. I love OSF. If I had linked to my own website or GitHub, I don't think people would have trusted that link as much. I don't think it would be shared it as much, and I don't think they would have downloaded it as much. 

It's also made it easy for me to keep the designs updated. When I want to release a new layout, OSF makes it easy to do that and doesn't break the link. I now have research resources on my OSF project for teachers too. It made all of that easy in this legitimate place that's part of the community. I can't think of a better home if you build a resource for scientists. 

Do you need a reliable platform to host your next project? Explore OSF.