FAQs: do better solutions exist?
Note: if you are searching for answers to specific questions, see the a-z index.
Documentation often contains a section titled, 'Frequently asked questions' or 'FAQs'. The TechScribe web site used to have a page of FAQs, but we removed it; this article explains why we think better options exist.
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 class, they suffer from fundamental problems.
FAQs are often just a rag-bag collection of factoids that have been dumped into a document because the creator of the document did not make the effort to structure the document effectively.
FAQs generally consist of 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.
Your customers may spend a long time searching a list of FAQs to find answers to their questions, because a question can be expressed in many ways. For example, say that you sell your products through resellers. Possible FAQs are:
- How do I purchase your product?
- Where can I find a supplier?
- Who sells your products?
Alternatives to FAQs
A well-designed document should answer a reader's questions, and the structure of the document should enable the reader to find the answers easily.
With some documents, it may not be possible to have an optimum structure for all types of readers. If you really do need FAQs, a hybrid approach might work. For example, when we had a FAQ page on the TechScribe web site, instead of the normal FAQ style, we used text similar to that shown in the second column.
| 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 arranged alphabetically.
However, this hybrid approach is similar to an a-z index. The information content in an index is higher than with an equivalent set of FAQs, because it contains only important concepts and phrases, rather than including 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 a FAQ, the question and the answer are in the same place. However, despite this limitation of an index, we broke with convention, and no longer have an FAQ page on the TechScribe web site.
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