In our Ask the UXperts session earlier this week I asked Donna about FAQ pages and this is what she said
[B]I think FAQs are almost always ‘we didn’t know what to do with this, so stuck it all in a page’. In most cases FAQs should be removed and replaced with real content.[/B]
As a prolific user of FAQ pages on other people’s sites, I was really interested by this. What are your thoughts? How do you use FAQ pages, both when you design and when you consume?
I do actually agree with this - FAQ pages are lazy.
As a designer, just this week something I was working on introduced me to someone’s landfill of an FAQ page. The content was useless and in many cases was really just duplicated information from at least 3 other pages! I was left wondering what was the point of this? When I asked why it was put there in the first place, I was told it was because people ‘expect’ it to exist. I don’t think that’s true. If actual effort is put in and the content is useful in the first place why would people feel the need to go looking for answers?
As a consumer, I do use FAQ pages from time to time but only when I can’t find it anywhere else. This usually only happens when I’m shopping and the site doesn’t make it clear if they post to PO Boxes or not in their delivery info page.