What frustrates you about FAQ lists (Frequently Asked Questions), and how would you improve them?
Today’s question comes from a LinkedIn user who wants to know about site FAQ page issues and solutions. Many people on the thread (read it here) complained about FAQ pages and some even recommended against them, but I disagree. FAQ’s exist for a reason: they’re a quick and easy way to get answers and access useful information. Unfortunately many FAQ pages suffer from bad design, which leads people to distrust them.
The business lesson here: you should strongly consider having an FAQ page on your site. If you do, make it easy to find for visitors, and use best practices for the FAQ page so your visitors can find what they’re looking for without having to work too hard.
The Question
What frustrates you about FAQ lists (Frequently Asked Questions), and how would you improve them?
My Answer
Here are the top three issues that I see on site FAQ pages. Before I begin though, I’d like to disagree with the folks on this thread who say a site shouldn’t have an FAQ, for this reason: JoelonSoftware defines good user experience as “When what the user expects to happen, happens.” Just like a sitemap, people who are looking for info about your site or business may look for an FAQ, and you’re providing good user experience by giving it to them.
When you play off the conventions that already exist on the web, your site is going to be a lot more user friendly. That said, the FAQ needs to be set up correctly, as you indicate by your question. Here are the main issues that I frequently see.
1. No list of questions at the top, with anchor links to jump you to the answers.
This is a no-brainer and most sites have a question list, but many still don’t. On sites with an FAQ laundry list that would print over six pages if you printed it, this becomes a total waste of the user’s time and effort to scroll down and read through irrelevant questions to find the relevant one.
2. Poorly organized or unorganized FAQ content.
Even when people provide the question list at the top of the page, those are often not broken out by sub-section, and when they do they’re still presented in a vertical list format. The solution here is create question “link groups” at the top of the page (About the Site, About our Products, Policies and Procedures, etc.) with headers and links below them. These groups could be organized across the top of the page to take advantage of horizontal space like a sitemap. This allows visitors to scan quickly for the content they want and jump right to the answer.
3. Misuse of technology to save space.
I’ve seen tons of sites where clicking on the question “opens up” the answer but you don’t know that until you’ve clicked the question. This show/hide technology saves space but makes the visitor have to click on every question to read the answer, thereby preventing scanning. It’s better to have content groupings and “return to top” links so you can display all the content but make it easier to navigate through it.
