FAQs started — decades ago — as a vehicle to help discussion forums clean out the clutter. New forum users often showed up with the same questions that long-time users had asked before, and it got repetitive to answer the same questions over and over again, so many forums set up a list of questions that were frequently asked, along with the definitive answers.

I remember very clearly when I first used an FAQ page on a regular website. It was the mid-to-late 1990s, and we were so cutting edge. It was a real inside baseball joke — we had to explain to our client what an FAQ even was, and they still couldn’t figure out why we needed one.

It turns out, we were both right. We were right — FAQs slowly started popping up everywhere over the next few years, until you wouldn’t even think of building a website without one — and our client was right, because FAQs just don’t make sense on a text-based website with a content management system and programming scheme that have any level of sophistication.

Why FAQs are a bad idea for your website:

• FAQs are rarely well written. It takes a lot of talent and time to write well from the contorted perspective of an FAQ. Are you asking the questions in your customer’s voice? Are you answering them in yours? Or both in your voice? At what point do you give up and just start throwing pronouns around willy-nilly? If you’re like most FAQ writers we’ve seen, that happens pretty early in the process and the results show it.
• FAQs don’t actually help customers. The construct of an FAQ — couch your help copy in the kinds of questions a customer might ask, if you let them call you — actually makes it more difficult for your customer to get an answer. When people are seeking information online, they’re skimming for keywords that describe their issue. You’ve surrounded their keywords [change password] with a bunch of extraneous copy [How do I change my password?]. Stack that simple question up with 2-3 dozen more “helpful” questions, and people can’t find a thing.
• FAQs don’t live at the point of sale. Your customer needs help figuring out how to add a photo over on the profile page, not from an FAQ page that’s a link in the footer. FAQs aren’t in context, and your customers are more likely to give up and leave your site than they are to search around…and around…and around to find the answer.
• FAQs don’t fix your sucky website. When you use FAQs on a website, they become an ineffective panacea for every problem with the interface and the content. People abandoning their shopping carts? Slap a couple more FAQs up there. Landing page not working well? Must need more FAQs.

What to do instead of using FAQs:

• Fix your website. This is the hardest answer, but the best one. If something’s not working on your website, make it work.
• Use in-context help. This often will require development, but putting help in-context makes a big difference. Add a little question mark or the word “Help” linking to a pop-up window with the tip right on the page where the problem happens. [Bonus: A good use of a pop-up window!]
• If all else fails, create a topical help directory. If you can’t do the development or don’t have a system that supports in-context help, at the very least, throw out your FAQ and rewrite the information as a topical help directory that customers can easily scan and navigate. You eliminate perspective issues and your information is much clearer to your customer. Similarly, if your customers come to you with a wide variety of expertise, you may have to hit the largest group in terms of usability — and some people will need more help. Make it easy for them to get it.

Finally, if you’re running a discussion forum — by all means, use an FAQ. Everyone hates seeing that same question asked by new users every week.

Hahahahahahaha.

Bless my heart. [If you're not Southern, you may not know that "Bless your heart" is frequently a veiled insult. It's hard to distinguish between a genuine and a facetious usage of that phrase, if you're not schooled in the shades of meaning there.]

So once I enrolled online, I was nonplussed to learn that I couldn’t actually USE the system until they mailed me a whole bunch of stuff, in the mail, and until I took some sort of test to show I understood the system. I promptly gave up and continued with my paper recordkeeping. [Most larger businesses HAVE to use the online system now, I believe. I don't know what the threshold is, but it's higher than 3.]

At any rate, I got an email from them the other day, since I was in their system, telling me that it was time to confirm my contact information or some such. And so when I was cleaning out my email tonight, I ran across it again, and I figured, well maybe they’ve made it easier. I’ll just log in and do that real quickly.

Except.

The email includes no link to the E-Verify site.

It tells me to log in and update my info. But I guess I am supposed to just have that URL memorized.

Dear E-Verify,

If you need some help on that whole user experience thing, please contact me. [That "Contact Laura" link at the top of this page will let you do that now. Or just call me: 615.500.4131.] I know lots of people who’d be glad to help.

Best,

Laura
A small-business owner who’d really like to like you

And so I have disrupted more than one meeting with some — shall we say — unpopular assertions about the role of research in marketing and product development. I’m almost always polite*, yet I can’t let pass the opportunity to share my view that research results do not constitute a message from Your Favorite Higher Being Here.

After New Coke, I’m not sure why anyone has to explain this again. There are emotional and group-think elements to human response, and these are difficult to measure with standard business research techniques.

I won’t go on: I’ll just direct you to Ben McAllister‘s great piece in The Atlantic on the dangers of using research to make creative decisions. He agrees there’s an appropriate role for research, but argues that it’s dangerous to assign scientific weight to information that should be viewed as an indicator only.

Thanks to Randall Snare and Jonathan Kahn for linking to this piece and thereby bringing it to my attention.

*About this topic, anyway. No comment about my embarrassing reactions to poor retail customer service.

From Melissa:

I really appreciate you letting me know about this blog. I wasn’t able to get on Twitter all day (computer meltdown), but I was told that the quote was taken out of context. What I actually said, is pretty much what you say in the second-to-last paragraph of the blog (I agree wholeheartedly). I also agree [with] you that [it] is part of our job to make sure the organization knows what the user wants (that was in a different part of the presentation.)

My definition of content strategy is something along the lines of “helping organizations use content to achieve their business goals.”  And, it’s true, I intentionally leave “users” out of that statement. But, I do that for several reasons:

1. (most importantly) — serving the user should be one of the business goals we are trying to achieve. If the organization isn’t committed to an overall relationship with the user, the content will not be supported and have a difficult time being successful. (It’s a battle we can’t win).

2. A really great content strategy is the combination of three things: user perspectives, business perspectives, and content “best practices.” However, during strategy work, if you say the business perspective and the user perspective have exactly the same weight — in my experience, you get businesses creating types and quantities of content they can not maintain, which is not good for the user or the business. So, we need to say “here’s what the user wants” and temper that with “this is what we can handle right now.”

3. Some organizations get really limited by the user research — they can’t innovate beyond what the users specifically asked for. As, the old saying goes, if you asked people in 1900 about transportation needs, they would have said “faster horses” not “automobiles” — because they didn’t know those things were possible. So, as a strategist, we need to help companies have room to innovate in order to improve the overall user experience even more than users could imagine.

So, actually, I think we’re pretty aligned — and I would appreciate it if you would amend the post to say so.

P.s. There are actually examples of enormously successful (but of somewhat unethical) content strategies that actually do exactly the opposite of the what is in the users’ best interest. Not something I would advocate, but interesting to read about. The IBM FUD example is an interesting one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt

I’m going to leave the original since Melissa refers to it, and because I DO see people using the business-only perspective.

Original: It’s been a long time since my mouth fell open at something I heard at a conference, but it happened to me today. I want to say that the unfortunate part is, it happened at a session I wasn’t in. So from the outset, perhaps I’ll get corrected or someone can clarify that the tweet I read was completely out of content….but I asked about that and got more context, and my mouth was still open.

Earlier this year, Erin Kissane wrote a broad post on the Brain Traffic blog talking about where content strategy fits in the web strategy landscape. I largely agree with her post. [Following is the part that no longer applies:], but I can’t agree with a comment from her colleague Melissa Rach that was tweeted today. [But this part still does!] I’ll say first, I momentarily met Rach Sunday night and she seems lovely, and by all accounts, her presentation on strategy today was one of the highlights of Confab. I’m sorry I missed it.

Here are the two tweets that rearranged my face [See context above!]:

@CSApplied2012 As a strategist I’m here to help the business achieve their goals – user isn’t in my definition @melissarach #confab

@CSApplied2012 Content strategists serve the business and through the business we serve the user @Melissarach #confab

It may just be that I approach my work from a different perspective. But to me, in my work, the user experience is primary. If the business goal isn’t aligned with user goals, you aren’t going to succeed. And the business perspective is fine, as long as the business actually understands its users. But I find that many, many organizations do not even bother to ask their current customers what they need. They just assume they know.

So I think the first job of any successful content strategist has to remain helping a business figure out what its customer actually needs. We have to be user-focused first, or we can’t help the business in the end.

So important: Web analytics tell you WHAT is happening. They do not tell you WHY.

Perfetti is showing really horrifying and totally believable tests….

• People who got all the way through reserving a room at Disneyland…who wanted a room at Disneyworld.
• People who were thrilled with the hotel reservation form for another hotel…until they got to the end and discovered it didn’t work the way it appeared, and they didn’t have a reservation set up after all.

Both these examples just make my stomach hurt.

Perfetti’s recommendations on usability testing

Oh, love this: Perfetti just has observes in the room. She says, People know there is someone behind your one-way mirror. Better just to have them in the room and don’t be sneaky. Intros people by first name only, not title. Prefers that observers use paper and pen so as not to have distraction of typing.

Perfetti’s recommended books on usability testing

• Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests
• A Practical Guide to Usability Testing
• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

What you should look for in a test

• Users going to the FAQ: People aren’t getting what they want
• Users clicking on Help
• Users going to a sitemap
• Users clicking the back button: They’re not seeing what they want
• Pogosticking: Going back and forth on a list of links, looking for something they never find
• Going straight to search: People don’t want to search. They haven’t seen their trigger words, so they type them in.

So now we’re going into advanced techniques specifically for content.

5-Second Test: Bring up a page for literally 5 seconds, see if people can figure out how to solve a problem you give them. We’re doing one here about uploading photos…does it seem it will be quick and easy to do? Perfetti shows a page full of text from Photobucket…the room laughs. Is anyone confident they can upload photos? No one.

Now we see 5 seconds of Picasa. This was also text heavy, but also had a big blue button that said, Get Started. Now we’ve seen a Flickr page. It showed a visual representation of the process. Most people agree this is the one that makes it look quick and easy to upload photos.

fivesecondtest.com will let you test pages on their site. Perfetti warns: 5-second tests work “very, very poorly” for home pages — these pages have many priority. Use these on content pages or other single-purpose pages.

Great point: People want to spend all their time testing their home page. This is not usually a good use of time. They want to find the page that is useful to them. Test whether your home page directs people to the content they want, but test the effectiveness of your other pages.

First-click test: Give users a specific task, and see where they click first. Are they headed down the wrong path?

Love this: Users don’t like to choose their role. Perfetti shows the WebEx site where users were befuddled when forced to categorize themselves as individual, small, medium, large enterprise. They redesigned the site with a single “Products” link, and users found that much easier to navigate.

Comprehension test: Use to determine if people understand your complex content. Sometimes Perfetti will use a questionnaire, or sometimes will just ask questions. She shows the content, asks them to read through it, and asks the questions while they can still see the content. These are generally information, but will clearly show if users understand the complex content.

Inherent value test: Helps you figure out if you’re conveying the product value to prospects. In phase 1, bring in your most loyal customers. You ask them to give you a tour of the site and talk through the value of the product or service. Have them share what they find most valuable. You can also ask them to complete tasks, but that’s not the main goal. In phase 2, bring in people unfamiliar with the product. Then, ask the prospects to complete the tasks that the loyal customers do all the time. You will find out if they see the same value.

Catalog-based task testing: Find out what’s important to users. Take any printed catalogs or brochures [or print out same info from your site] and ask users to highlight important content. Then ask them to find the same content on the website.

Some other software and resources that were mentioned:

• Silverback
• Morae
• Usertesting.com

A much more recent post by Erin Kissane tackles the same topic from a different angle, making content strategy more of the umbrella.

I’d draw a bigger picture though. I’d put the business strategy umbrella over the top of the project as a whole. It’s got to define your work, no matter your discipline. To my mind, then, systems, development, UX, IA and content strategy all need a seat at the table to get from strategy through to executed product. There are a number of ways to make the process work — even how to define your business strategy. And depending on which process you use, one discipline or another may take a more prominent role.

In the end, I think the argument is largely academic. The critical thing is that the disciplines of content strategy, IA and UX all seem to get more respect now. When I started working on the web, there was design. And HTML. And then content, but in the “words-go-here” variety. Things have improved a lot since then — consumers have gotten much more sophisticated in what we demand from our web applications, and those of us in the web industry have responded to that. There are still people trying to execute web projects and applications without content strategy or IA or UX, of course. But if you want your work done effectively and well, you need all three.

Learn where to put the peanut butter [and how to handle other thorny questions of website structure] today in my post over on the Digital Nashville site.

You hear web project managers, designers, programmers and others complain about this — the marketing director who likes the color green, so the site must be green, or the CFO who doesn’t use Google, so he won’t approve an expenditure for any site search technology….the list goes on.

Unfortunately, I’ve also run across this attitude in other web professionals. It’s an easy bias to have: We know how we search/browse/like images/don’t like images/expect to find content/like our forms to look, so it’s all too easy to say, “The way you want to do it is [list your personal favorite way].”

So when you’re hiring web professionals to work on a project, you don’t want to know their favorite way. We’ve all got our own biases. Just because I can use your site search engine for 10 minutes and find any document on command doesn’t mean your customers can or will. Hire the person who can tell you how most people like to do it, or even better, who can figure out how your site users like to do it.

And whatever you do, make sure you’ve got a better reason for your site design….or your navigation philosophy….or your content categorization, than, “makes sense to me.”

P.S.: This is the first post I’ve written in an editing swap with Matthew Grocki. Thanks for the cleanup, Matthew!

I’m clicking from page to page in the search results, using the numbered buttons shown here.

I noticed that I was just clicking over and over as I paged through the results, without moving my hand on my trackpad. That’s because Flickr moves the numberline each time I click. So now that I’m on page 14, page 15 is under my cursor. When I click that button, Flickr moves the line so that 16 is under my cursor.

I love this.