If you were specifically looking for the population of the United States, you'd notice the big red numbers in the upper right corner of the US Census Bureau homepage right? Not so fast. A recent eye-tracking study suggests you've been trained to ignore things like that.

If It Looks Like An Ad They Ignore It

Editor's Note: Studies are great and all, but sometimes real-world examples are more powerful. Have you recently redesigned your site and seen drastic results? Let us know how you did that in the comments section.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen, who's been studying how people interact with webpages since there were webpages to interact with, follows up on previous explorations to show once again that people not only ignore content that looks like advertising, but need things plainly spelled out for them.

The task was simple enough: find the country's current population. Nielsen even gave them the website to use. But 86 percent of users failed to find the answer even though it was displayed in large red letters in plain sight.

"Users tend to ignore heavily formatted areas because they look like advertisements. Thus, about 1/3 of users never even saw the Population Clock. However, most people did fixate on this area because it's not as overly formatted as most promotional features. So, most users saw the Population Clock; they just didn't use it, even though it contained the exact information they were looking for."

Okay, so a third doesn't exactly make up 86 percent. Why did the others fail when, in my grandmother's language, if it was a snake it woulda bit them? There are many reasons, but a large chunk of it, says Nielsen, lies in the language.

Most users scanned the big red number U.S. 302, 781, 150, as of today, but only made it to 302 before skipping off to the search box labeled "Population Finder" or some other area. (Or in one case, a man after my own heart, frustrated with poor site search, said "forget it, I'm going to Google.")

The big red number was labeled "Population Clocks," which isn't exactly an intuitive label. It sounds more related to time than it does to number of people. It's a classic case of leveraging core competencies rather than using your strengths. As users didn't automatically grasp what a population clock was, they skipped it.

The suggestion here then is that a simpler label of "Current US Population" would have worked much better, giving the user what the user expects, which is the end goal.

Andy Beal, editor and Internet marketing consultant for MarketingPilgrim.com has another take on it, which might make sense to you. Users may have taught themselves not just the look and feel of advertising, but also the location of advertising.

"The study demonstrates that it's not just paid ads users are filtering from web sites, but areas that might contain ads. Web users are conditioned to focus on the main area of a web site, when looking for meaningful information.

"They've been taught that the areas to the left or right are typically reserved for navigation or advertisements. As Neilsen suggests, it's important to make sure important information is located in the area of the web page users expect to find it."