Re: FAQs - Good or bad?

[Lisa Wright <lisawright -at- mail -dot- utexas -dot- edu>]

Steven,
I am in FAQ hell at the moment and am digging out a 5000 page site one 
project at a time. In my department, where I am relatively new, the 
default synonym for "documentation" and "help" at some point became 
"FAQ," and thus the plague was unleashed. "Oh, put that in the FAQ." "We 
need a FAQ before we deploy this." There are even pages listing all of 
the FAQs that one could possibly want. I suspect that this happened over 
time for a variety of reasons. Some of this is a labeling problem (as 
was suggested when I posted about this early this year). Procedure 
titles were phrased as questions, for example. But a significant part of 
the problem is in its approach to writing and organizing information.

My personal mission is to eradicate the FAQ from the web site, from our 
vocabulary. The problem with them, if they are used as the sole means of 
documentation, is that FAQs are not purposeful information. They lump 
all information in at the same level of importance. They do not 
distinguish between different types of information: reference, 
procedural, conceptual. Even when categorized, they force the user to 
correctly guess the correct category where the information might be. I 
found an interesting contradiction in one set of FAQs that I rewrote. 
The questions were written in such a way that they fragmented related 
information into different topics, and it was really more helpful to 
have all the information in one place. At the same time, there was 
excessive repetition of some information when "questions" about the same 
subject were phrased slightly differently.

I am having success in my efforts. I haven't had anyone come back so far 
and request the return of the FAQ. I am hearing a lot of 
support--especially in the user support group--when I voice my personal 
mission. One developer expressed trepedations ("we like FAQs, we're very 
comfortable with them"), but once I show them what I've done (and note 
that I'm writing for a large audience of non-techies, not the 
developers), they have not expressed any concerns.

That said, there is, I think a certain place for an FAQ. I realize that 
much documentation in the developer and open source world is in FAQ form 
and it's a format developers are comfortable with. I like them for 
troubleshooting (though I tend to call that "Troubleshooting"). They are 
okay for addressing small, general issues, I think, like payment or 
upgrade pages. I simply don't think it is the end-all, be-all of 
technical documentation. Others may see more use for them.

So to answer your question, yes, I suspect that "FAQ" has become a 
general term for documentation (it's certainly happened here, as I said 
above). I would look at the content your internal customers are asking 
for and then see how you can structure it to be meaningful information 
in the context where they want to use it. That format could end up being 
an FAQ, but I won't bet on it.

My 2c,
Lisa
(So busy with the FAQs that I haven't had much time to post lately.)

Steven Brown wrote: