FAQs nobody ever asked: getting FAQs and their UX right.

Key points:

• 83% of customers use a company’s website as their first information point. 51% prefer to self-serve (e.g., FAQ pages). 56% of customers leave immediately at the first sign of frustration.
• Whether making your policies clear or answering real questions below the periphery, FAQs are down the funnel and often the difference between a customer proceeding to purchase, being forced to pick up the phone, or abandoning altogether.
• Good practice FAQs might seem logical, though good practice can drift.
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Conclusion: FAQs are an ongoing effort, not a once-off. They can be continually optimised, and there will be tangible upside to doing so.

This morning, I asked my wife if a restaurant we were planning to go to on the weekend was BYO.

She said she didn’t know and to check their website,

As is almost exclusively typical of restaurant websites, it didn’t say. Of course.

Though their first FAQ?

“Do you accept online reservation [SIC]?”

A question I had never thought to ask a restaurant, and an answer I could probably determine pretty quickly by being on their website.

So, rather than the website helping me complete my job (e.g. understand if the restaurant was BYO), anxiety and friction were introduced, and I was forced to call the restaurant.

And of course, there wasn't a link in the FAQs to make a reservation. Just a reference to it somewhere else on their website.

The website failed its job.

(And the restaurant was not BYO. Double disappointment.)
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Jobs to be done and the role of FAQs

‘Jobs to be done’ is a term in product that refers to user goals or the jobs users want to get done.

The more jobs users can do through a product and the faster these jobs can be completed, the better a product performs.

FAQs provide users with answers to common questions and should mitigate users' concerns and objections to your product or service.

Users have the reasonable expectation that FAQs should cut through the sales and puffery of your sales pages and genuinely deliver helpful and forthright answers to genuine and possibly nuanced questions.

This is your opportunity to seal the deal, show that you respect your users, and answer their questions.

Not every customer wants to pick up the phone; depending on your business, you might not want them to.
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The UX case against FAQs

Some in the UX industry argue that FAQs are a crutch for inadequate content elsewhere on a website, with further criticisms being:

• Structuring a heading as a question invariably results in a long heading, which is unavoidable and requires a more significant cognitive load for users.
  
  Long headings are also complex to read on mobile devices.

• FAQs are slower to process because they necessarily start with terms like:
  • What
  • Who
  • How
  • When
  • Where
• This means headlines are repetitive because we can’t optimise the readability of the headings/questions with keywords and other tricks in information design.
• We’ve concluded that users come to websites to complete tasks or jobs. Clumping content together is counterintuitive to this, even if the content is related. A straightforward, task-based journey would be a more intuitive way to educate users rather than having them guess and hope their questions are answered in your blog, resources, toolkit, or FAQs.
• Managing FAQs can be complex in larger websites, which different people likely own. However, this is not a reason not to have FAQs, though you need a robust process to ensure they are always current.
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The two non-UX reasons FAQs fail

I buy these UX arguments, though I think that good FAQs on many websites have a greater upside than no FAQs.

The key is optimal UX, and I’ll come to good UX treatment later in this article.

Instead, let’s go back to my restaurant experience and unpack the two reasons FAQs fail:
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1. The FAQs aren’t real

FAQs are essential to sales and conversion but aren’t the time to sell.

Users expect factual, valuable answers.

Using FAQs as a further opportunity to promote the merits of your product or service is counterintuitive. You are losing trust and wasting your users' time.

And users will see straight through it.

FAQs are a literal extension of customer service, and the stats are as astounding as they are unsurprising:

💡51% of customers expect a business to be available 24/7. (Helpscout)
💡75% of online customers expect help within 5 minutes. (Helpscout)
💡66% of respondents said valuing their time by providing a good online customer experience was the first thing a company should do. (Helpscout)

If your customer support team skirted questions and were perpetually selling, your customers would hang up.

FAQs that attempt the same are just as bad.

💡55% of customers avoid returning to websites with poor user experiences. (Toptal)
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2. The FAQs don’t answer nuanced though genuine questions

FAQs don’t have to be so thoroughly comprehensive that your users drown in the minutiae. However, answers showing that you’re listening and speaking to all areas of your product and service show ALL customers how extensive your support and thought are.

As part of an audit I undertook with a leasing client, we listened to dozens and dozens of calls from potential customers.

I won’t go into the nature of the leasing product, though several callers asked if taking out a lease would “affect their child support arrangements”.

More callers asked if taking out a lease would impact their “credit score”.

“What happens to repayments and my lease if I go on maternity leave?”

The FAQs on my client’s website did not address these pertinent, meaningful and personal questions.

And these are just three examples.

Someone paying or receiving child support is not an edge case.

Getting to this level of answers shows such a customer that you recognise them and their situation and have answers for them.

There is no need for them to pick up the phone.
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The role of customer support and FAQs

Listening in on the calls of customer service is always insightful.

Pretty quickly, you hit repetition in the questions people are asking. And then you get the gold.

Developing an interface between customer support and your FAQs—especially for seasonal questions—will inform and enrich your FAQs.

Customer support and ticketing tools such as Zendesk include Knowledge Management tools through which customer support can manage the knowledge base directly.

You don’t have to go this far, though the intent should be the same.
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Engaging customers in your FAQs

There is a concept known as ‘never switching channels’.

It instructs that keeping users on one channel is better than switching them to other channels against their wishes, which is inadvisable.

If a customer is on your FAQs, they probably didn’t want to have to call you.

Allowing customers to ask questions from the FAQs page is the obvious solution.

It would be even better if you could get them an answer quickly.

Build your FAQs process so that if a question is pertinent, the answer is promptly added to them.
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Integrating FAQs across your website

Integrating FAQ sections across your website makes sense.

Page-specific FAQs address questions directly related to the content of the page.

Better customer service and better SEO.
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FAQs and search

FAQs are dynamite for search.

Using rich snippets, you can present your FAQs to Google in a way that allows it to transpose them and include them in search results quickly.

In turn, your page stands out in Google as an authority.

Here is an example from an article I recently wrote on what is search debt:

Additional FAQ UX tips

Here are a few additional thoughts on good FAQ UX:
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FAQ information architecture

Back to user jobs to be done, the job here for users is to get their answers as quickly as possible.

Your underlying information architecture will drive this.

Users should never notice good information architecture, though they’ll appreciate it: structured data that lets users know where their answer will likely be.

This will possibly include logical groupings of answers as your FAQs grow in size:

• Shipping
• Billing
• Returns
• etc.

Include good search capability as your tree of content grows.
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FAQ layout and information design

There is another blog in this, though removing the cognitive load is vital.

A giant list of questions is overwhelming.

Challenge your digital agency and find an efficient layout.
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FAQ Language

The point of a FAQ is to answer the question clearly and quickly.

For additional information, click here to find other FAQs or a knowledge base.
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Monitor your FAQs

Google Analytics will give you insights into the performance of your FAQs.

What FAQs are users engaged with, and what are users searching for?

If you can attribute FAQs by linking them to pages or a CTA, it’s even better.

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