Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words = Looks Like a Promotion = Ignored

That’s what Jakob Nielsen says in his alertbox about fancy formating.

The task was simple enough: To find the US population in the census.gov page.

Although the page does most of the things well, it failed miserably giving this information in the home page, mainly because of the fancy formating and for being written in big red numbers.
This resembled for me the Bingo Jackpots counter these things written in big numbers that count slowly showing a gradual increase.

Now we know people don’t really look give them to much attention. It’s normal, they resemble a marketing technique, an advert so they gather in other places even if the number they are searching is right there half a meter from their right eye.

Lesson understood: If you want that your users find your information use a clear language and don’t make it big like an add. As you can see putting the numbers in big red didn’t help that much, here we propose an updated design:

• Original:

Population Clocks
U.S. 302,789,390

• Updated

Current US Population
U.S. 302,789,390