FAQs: do better solutions exist?

Note. If you want answers to particular questions, search this website or use the a-z index.

Documentation sometimes contains a section titled, 'Frequently asked questions' or 'FAQs'. The TechScribe website used to have a page of FAQs, but better options exist, and therefore, we removed the FAQs.

The problem with FAQs

Caroline Jarrett explains how to write good FAQs (www.usabilitynews.com/news/article3724.asp). Follow her advice, and your FAQs will be better. However, no matter how clear each FAQ is, as a group, FAQs have basic problems.

Typically, FAQs are only a group of facts that were dumped into a document because the writer did not structure the document effectively.

Typically, a page of FAQs contains many lines of "How do I…?," "What is…?," and so on. That text gets in the way of the important content, which appears at the end of each sentence.

Possibly, your customers spend a long time searching a list of FAQs to find answers to their questions, because a question can be asked in many ways. For example, if you sell your products through resellers, possible FAQs are:

How do I buy your product?
Where can I find a supplier?
Who sells your products?

Alternatives to FAQs

A well-designed document answers a reader's questions, and the structure of the document lets the reader find the answers easily.

With some documents, an optimum structure for all types of readers is not possible. If FAQs are necessary, a hybrid method is possibly suitable. For example, when we had a page of FAQs on the TechScribe website, instead of the typical FAQ style, we used text similar to that shown in the second column in the following table.

FAQs and hybrid equivalents
Frequently asked question	Alternative hybrid FAQ
Who owns copyright?	Copyright—who owns it?
How much does documentation cost?	Cost—how much does documentation cost?
How long does it take to produce documentation?	Duration—how long does it take to produce documentation?
Do you work on a fixed price?	Price—do you work on a fixed price?

In the second column, the key word or phrase is at the start of each sentence, which immediately tells the reader whether it is worth reading the remainder of the sentence. The key words are sorted alphabetically.

However, this hybrid method is similar to an a-z index. The information content in an index is higher than in an equivalent set of FAQs, because an index contains only important concepts and phrases, without unnecessary text.

A disadvantage of an index is that the reader must navigate from the index entry to another topic that answers the question. With an FAQ, the question and the answer are in the same location. However, despite this limitation of an index, we decided to remove the page of FAQs from the TechScribe website.