It took me a while to work out what (11/16) meant. I've seen some bizarre way to write dates, but this is just random. I know it's space limited, but why not "16th Nov"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country
relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1179/
edit: actually, according to my first link, Belize, Canadian newspapers, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Philippines (when speaking English, although not Filipino), and Palau all also use the month- day- year date system. TIL!
And by proudly, I mean we don't even realize the rest of the world handles this marginally better. Even official forms have no consistency....
As it is, I didn't interpret 11/16 as being a date. I thought they needed five out of 16 interviews.
Where are you from? How do they represent the month day?
My brain pattern matched it as two numbers that have some relationship with each other, but It didn't even occur to me that it was a date until I visited the page. If it was written 16/11 I might have gotten it(the bigger number on the left makes it unlikely that it's a ratio of some sort which is how I read it intuitively). But what if it was 5/11 or 11/5, still no idea what it means without context. If it said "on 11/16" I would get that it's a date, but it would still take me slightly more energy to figure out which is the month as I don't associate the right number with the day, but the opposite.
Keep in mind, if I look at it for more than 2 seconds I will figure it out, but if I need to spend more than a fraction of a second parsing a date, you have a UI problem.
US is the only country using MD, isn't it?
So most people, perhaps not.
The thing is the website is in English, so it does not target 7 billion people. It only matters what percentage of target audience can process the message, and it's targeting professionals, so not even entire 300 mil population of US. Basically I think about 300 mil and 7bil numbers are wrong in determining if it was OK to use US-format.
I am not saying you are wrong, I agree that spelling out November would make it clear, but just that the numbers quoted are not representative of who will see the site.
What were the results of the previous "where are you from?" ASKHNs? Not doubting US is the top audience of the site.