Why would you put FAQs on a website?

To be able to tell people that FAQ content is available on your site.

Who do FAQs help?

Only the person who needs to claim that the content is on the site.

Why don’t FAQs help visitors to your site?

Because visitors to your site don’t care whether their question has been asked by anyone else or not. All they want to do is accomplish a task.

But my FAQs are representative of what all visitors are asking, so don’t they bring value?

Think of it another way. Your site is providing a user manual for your services. By providing FAQs you’re offering them that user manual without a contents page. Is that helpful?

But isn’t it helpful to provide what most people want first?

Of course, but if I don’t want the most obvious answers, I’ll give up and go to another provider: either through a competitor website or I’ll pick up the telephone and harass your call centre. That probably defeats the purpose of your website.

Why is browsing FAQs a flawed argument?

Let’s say you’re describing your arrangements for dealing with business partners. If I want to become a partner, I should follow links to Partners > Becoming our partner. Why would I trawl through a long list of questions in order to find the right one. I want a simple and obvious path to the information I need.

Why can’t visitors just search the FAQs?

They’ll probably do this if you offer no other way to the information. But the success of their searches will depend on how well and how consistently you classify the questions and on having a really good search engine that will pull out relevant information.

Isn’t it easy to manage FAQs?

It might be easy to add an FAQ, but it’s extremely difficult to manage them. You’ll need to check that similar content doesn’t already exist, just framed with a different question. You’ll need to check that you’re removing questions that are obsolete, or simply not being asked any more. And you’ll need to ensure that questions are presented in the right order according to your site visitors’ behaviour.

So is there anything good about FAQs?

Not in their standard format of unsorted lists of questions and short answers.

So what should I do?

Review what people are contacting you about over other channels. This information should probably be on your website. Does it exist already? If it exists, is it being adequately promoted? Undertake some usability studies challenging people to find the information. What do you learn about your site navigation from this? If the content is prominent, is it well-written? Are people finding the content and misunderstanding it?

Isn’t this post just stating the obvious?

Yes, but it’s amazing how many people think their website needs FAQs but they never ask themselves why.