[ben1040]

4 or 5 years ago I made a registration workflow for a event I was working with as part of a freelance gig. We had a giant bolded text link, something like 24 points, that said "Click Here to Register," right on the front page above the fold.

I got several emails from users who asked me "How do I register? I looked all over the front page and found nothing."

In hindsight, I wonder if maybe I needed to make it look like a button, or if these particular people were beyond saving and wouldn't have bothered to read the text on the button anyway.

[patio11]

The industry has trained people for a decade that primary calls to action look like buttons. People scan for this as a learned behavior, because scanning accomplishes their goals faster (true for most HNers), they don't enjoy reading, they can't read well, or they've learned by painful experience that words on a computer screen are likely scary gibberish like "screen resolution" and "defragment" and you should just click the blue thing in the bottom left corner followed by the blue E so you can get to your Googles.

[icegreentea]

On top of this, users have also been trained to ignore anything that looks like a banner or ad. Sometimes giant text just looks like something meant to be ignored.

[LearnYouALisp]

You should see this website:

http://airforcefcu.com/

[ben1040]

I didn't even need to expend any mental effort to ignore the large advertisement-shaped blocks there.

AdBlock Plus did it for me, and delivered me a blank page.

[LearnYouALisp]

Apparently with no scripting, the middle of the page does not load.

[TeMPOraL]

It happened to me once when reading a FAQ for rootnode support IRC channel. There was a most important "point 0" in FAQ, that was emphasized by moving it above the page header. It was supposed to be the very first thing visitor will read, but my mind didn't even register this text being there (even after being told that there is a "point 0" and revisiting the page). Needless to say, I got into some trouble because of that, but I managed to convince FAQ maintainers that banner blindness[1] is a real thing, and they fixed the FAQ.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness