In an application when you are showing a date to someone (and you don't know their preferred format), what date format should you use? USA or Rest-of-the-world?
For reference if anyone is not sure what these formats are, today's date would be:
USA = 10/07/2011 or October 7, 2011
Rest-of-the-world = 07/10/2011 or 7 October 2011
Assuming an equal probability that a user is from the USA or outside the USA, which format should I use?
Note, this question was largely triggered by the comments in another UX question.
Answer
I've recently had to make a similar choice. And, yea, as a programmer, ISO 8601 is the best, but most humans do find it unintuitive, unfortunately.
I find that the problem isn't so bad for either side as long as you don't use pure numerical date formats. So this 12/10/2011 is certainly ambiguous, but Oct 12 2011 is not, and neither is 12 Oct 2011. So just stick to EEE months, if you can. There's no better.. there's just least surprising to the user.
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