As part of our FAQ report Strategic Design for Frequently Asked Questions we reviewed the FAQs at 23 big and small organizations to help derive design guidelines for how best to present this important content. The Mayday organization, devoted to election-campaign reform in the United States, provided an interesting before-and-after example for our FAQ analysis and guidelines. We didn’t have anything to do with the marked improvement in the “after” example, but it helps illustrate some of the important design attributes of good FAQ usability.
Good Aspects
✓ The FAQ uses video to explain and to break up the page visually. Well-chosen variations in the visual aspects of a page attract attention, anchor the eye, and support scannability.
✓ The FAQ is constantly updated with new questions as the situation and organization evolves.
✓ Jump links are used to navigate from the question list to the answers below. The jump links let users quickly scan the list of questions and find the one relevant to them instead of scrolling through a lot of content in search for the right question. (Alternatively, closed accordions, although not always implemented well on the desktop (but generally used to good effect on mobile), would also have been an appropriate design choice for this content.)
Needs Work
✗ It’s very difficult to detect the links in the question section without scrubbing the screen with the mouse (a thing you can’t do at all with a touchscreen), because they are dark blue, not underlined, and thus they don't contrast with the black text enough. Although little kids can enjoy mine-sweeping a web page, grownups get annoyed when they can’t scan the page and see what’s where.
✗ The typography and fonts used in the FAQ's answer section don't emphasize questions or links enough. Although questions are surrounded by white space, it's still difficult to scan the page visually and isolate the questions from the answers. A bold font for questions would help.
✗ No navigation or back-to-top links are provided at the bottom of the page. (That would be a good place for another Donate button too.) To move away from the page, users need to scroll up all the way to the top. That amount of scrolling can be daunting, especially on smaller screens.
Improvements Made
In the newer version, below:
✓ The link color has more contrast with the background and text colors and helps links stand out.
✓ Chunking has been greatly improved with the use of headings for the questions. It’s now easy to scan through the questions visually and make sense of the page quickly.
✓ The content is changing as the situation of the organization and the questions it receives are changing. This is the kind of dynamic content that can do the most good when it’s part of an information-discovery and service-improvement process.
Related
FAQs Still Deliver Great Value
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Strategic Design For Frequently Asked Questions
We reviewed the Frequently Asked Question sections of 23 big and small organizations to illustrate how best to make this important content type more usable. Our 69-page FAQ report contains 94 guidelines for making good FAQs, illustrated with 41 screenshots. This report is not just about more-usable web page design, however. It offers advice on how to position both FAQs and UX researchers strategically in order to manage data and information flows, content strategy, and product and customer-service improvement.
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