Frequently Asked Questions (F.A.Q.s, FAQs or Q&As), when done well, deliver a lot of value not only to your website visitor but also to your organization. The FAQ is a mature information format that orginated in 1982 and has evolved along with the Internet, first in email and then in newsgroups. On the web, FAQs continue to improve, with the addition of hypertext links, visual design, databases, and analytics. Encountering familiar tools and structures helps website visitors walk up and use them without having to spend much thought on figuring out how.

If you spend too much time and money on website email or customer-service calls, or if people have questions before they can buy what you’re selling, you might benefit a lot financially by addressing the bulk of those questions in a systematic way on the web.

Countering Objections to FAQs

Good Websites Don’t Need FAQs; We Already Have Search

Search is a frequently tried FAQ alternative, but search is rarely enough. The big problem with a search-only approach is that your vocabulary and your users' vocabulary probably talk past each other. (The "verbal disagreement phenomenon.") Regrettably, most people are also not skilled at forming effective search queries. Plus, site search rarely works as well as major search engines.

Because you need to know what users’ FAQs are in order to tune your search results, you might as well show the current FAQs in order to provide the best service. Some websites use quicklinks, a kind of first-aid navigation shortcut list, as a way to work around poor search results or outdated navigation structures. An FAQ may be more practical, however, because it offers more context than a list of links as well as room to talk about the topics. Your FAQ content can also be usefully indexed by search engines.

FAQs Will Expose Our Bugs and Usability Issues

Well, good luck with that, because they likely are being discussed (perhaps without the benefit of your input) in social media and third-party Q&A forums. Addressing concerns in a timely manner by monitoring and posting on many other websites takes a lot of time — and it looks like fire fighting when you do it, and like callous disregard when you don’t. If you don’t create a great place for people to contact you, people will post questions, complaints, bugs, workarounds, and self-help documentation somewhere else.

FAQs can show that the organization is listening and addressing people’s concerns. Providing customer support in public is inevitable, but electing to do customer service in public can demonstrate that your organization is transparent, caring, and honest — if you do it with those values in mind. Everyone has customer-service challenges. What you do about them is what counts.

FAQs Have Made-Up Questions

We have long warned against that bad practice. (It was #7 on the list of top-10 web-design mistakes in 2002). If you’re listening to your users, you know what their questions are. It’s that simple. Sometimes you have to rewrite questions to make them general enough to apply to most people who need that answer.

Reading FAQs Is Cumbersome

FAQs often can be read from end to end, but good, large FAQs are chunked by topic and designed to be visually scanned. The goal should be for people to be able to rule out most of the topics quickly, and then just read the parts that have something to do with the question at hand. Good information design in an FAQ can help people both locate what they need and discover other information they may want.

We Can Invent Something Better than FAQs

Well maybe, but many people already know to look for an FAQ when they need a fast answer.

Web designers often become bored with conventional elements of web design and content, because they look at websites more often and from different points of view than everyone else does. Best practices for user interface (UI) and interaction design include the evolving and growing collection of widgets and conventions that people can figure out how to use quickly and easily.

This work-alike quality, which allows people to use familiar things without having to learn how first, is often disregarded; but familiarity is what makes interfaces seem intuitive and it can improve learnability.

(As Don Norman has often argued, there is really no such thing as an “intuitive” user interface: a person raised by wolves and given a first computer at age 18 wouldn’t be able to do a thing, even on the most usable website. But people who have already used hundreds of websites will find your site easy and seemingly “intuitive” if your design follows principles they have soaked up from other sites.)

When something works well, use that. The world is full of more-interesting, more-important, unsolved design problems to tackle. FAQs are a good tool, and they can finally be dressed up for modern web-design presentation.

Strategic Value of FAQs

Set the Tone of the Organization

Any conversations or Q&A with people should be polite, personable, and reflective of the organization’s culture or brand. Because these conversations are also public, they serve as indicators to prospective customers of how easy it is to resolve problems and to find a helpful person to talk to.

  • Does the company deal fairly, honestly, and responsively with customer concerns?
  • Is the organization being candid about problems and feature requests?
  • How fresh is the latest information?

Unfavorable answers to any of these concerns mean that the visitor will likely find some other place to do business.

Provide Decision Support for Prospects, Customers, and Recommenders

When people read FAQs they often look for more than just an answer. They may be judging your products, services, and company prior to purchasing. Good FAQs provide answers to these tacit questions:

  • Could I get an answer to my questions easily, or is there an endless loop of unhelpful documentation and no contact information?
  • How credible is the provided information?
  • Are the answers written in clear, grammatical language?
  • Do the answers seem factual and frank or more like marketing hype?
  • Does the FAQ openly acknowledge the problems or limitations that everyone knows about?
  • Is the relevant big problem that’s in the news today also being addressed by the organization?
  • Can I dismiss all my concerns before spending money?
  • How mature is the product or service? What doesn’t it do yet?
  • Are others able to use it the way I want to?

Every good salesperson at your company knows how to address presales questions and can probably dictate the FAQs you need to publish.

Improve Your Website's SEO and Increase Site Visits

Put an FAQ link in the footer and pay attention to SEO. Question format matters because people often type questions into web-search engines these days. People don’t search for your solution, they search for their problem. If you’re careful to use the vocabulary of your users, these very targeted web-search queries will better match your questions, so people can go straight to your best answer from the search-engine results page. Site-search usability is important too.

Reduce the Burden on Customer Support Staff

No one wants to have (or to be in) an army of support people who answer the same questions day in and day out. It’s expensive and boring. Your customers also don’t want to call you to get information that you already know they want and need. Their time is money too.

Forums are great, but FAQs work 24/7. If you can afford both, use them to help each other. Every question and answer has the potential to help someone else, and customer support people can use FAQs too. You may want to develop both an inside and an outside set of FAQs.

Route Visitors to Other Key Content

Linking to comprehensive or authoritative outside resources can often save everyone time and money, and it makes your organization seem more helpful and credible. Careful offsite linking also prevents having to create and maintain information that may be more comprehensive elsewhere but less-frequently needed by your visitors.

Serve as an Early Response System for Urgent Problems

Data is your friend: The people who are on top of your organizations’ mentions in news and social media, the people monitoring incoming questions to company forums, blogs, and customer support, and the people watching the analytics data are very likely to be among the first to know when things go seriously wrong. Give them a solid process to follow.

Contribute to Your Continuous Improvement Cycle

If you have a bunch of questions that people ask all the time, that may be a sign you need an FAQ. Incoming questions can also point to UX problems you should address elsewhere, so the goal should be to use FAQs as clues and to hand off the identified problems and solutions to the part of the organization best able to address them.

Questions and problems are the stuff UX gotchas are made of. Well-informed UX people can spot important issues, understand root causes, and recommend strategic fixes, when they are allowed to gain a systemic point of view.

In a well-organized information ecosystem, Q&A pairs generated by users and company staff should pass through UX analysis — and when appropriate, the FAQ. Over time, chunked information in FAQs (and from other information flows) can be harvested for expansion in other formats, such as articles and documentation.

The goal should always be to improve the products and services, of course; but in many cases these other media exist to manage the gaps between the products’ and services’ current state, and their usability, customer training, and market expectations. The flow of information in and out of the FAQ shows visitors that sales, marketing, CS, and UX are on top of active customer issues.

FAQ Usability

Design is not just about aesthetics, but there’s no reason for text to be ugly. The elegance of a tool that just works creates its own kind of delight. The traditional question list followed by the individual questions and answers is still the best underlying design for short and medium-length (less than 10-page) FAQs.

For longer FAQs, or those with involved answers, screenshots, or alternatives, a separate list of questions that lead to answer pages (or topic pages) works best. Regardless of length, the contrast in fonts used for FAQs should make it easy for readers to scan questions quickly in order to find needed information.

FAQs can do a lot of good when they contain the right content. Questions should echo the real concerns people contact you about, and in most cases, the questions should reflect the vocabulary and phrasing of your visitors.

Inevitably, if you don’t create a great place for people to interact with you when they need help, they will post questions, complaints, and self-help somewhere else — in public. Instead, bring people who have questions to your website and treat them right. The best way to evaluate a company’s customer service is to watch what happens when something goes wrong — so embrace the public view.

It’s More than Q&A: FAQs Should Be Part of a Knowledge Management Process

The main goal of capturing and answering questions should be to help improve the next cycle of products, services, and information, as well as the overall user experience. Creating a feedback engine for your customer data can make this improvement process faster and more efficient. A UX researcher should analyze and interpret incoming data and help route information strategically inside the organization to the places where it can do the most good.

Related

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Report:

Our 69-page report, Strategic Design for Frequently Asked Questions discusses how well-crafted questions and answers can assist customer service, feed into documentation, and help content strategy. It examines FAQs from 23 big and small organizations and contains 94 guidelines for making good FAQs, illustrated with 41 screenshots, including tips on designing FAQs for better accessibility and better SEO, and how to make accordions more usable.