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A FAQ – frequently asked questions – should be an important part of your website or service. They speed up the help for your users by not waiting for a response from support, and thus save time by not having to repeatedly answer the same questions. Unfortunately, many websites and services have FAQs that are well, to be frank, unusable. They’re either too long, don’t actually feature real questions and are in no way helpful or useful.

Not to worry though – just because many FAQs suck doesn’t mean yours has to. If you’re looking for some simple tips – rather than something ultra-specific and niche – here are 7 best help & FAQ usability tips.

7 Best Help & FAQ Usability Tips

1. Include actual frequently-asked questions

If you’re going to include a FAQ, make sure it’s actual frequently-asked questions – otherwise your FAQ is a FAQ’ing failure. None of these patronizing fake questions that no real user would ask. It’s called Frequently Asked Questions, not Fictitiously Asked Questions.

If you notice repeated questions asked of you via email/social networks/etc, add that to the FAQ along with your answer. Keep track, collect, and add your users’ questions to your FAQ on a constant basis. It really is that simple.

2. Speed up getting those questions by asking

So you want a FAQ sooner than later, but you’re fairly new and not many questions have been asked yet. What’s a website/service owner to do? Again, avoid the temptation to add fake questions. Instead, ask your users directly.

Send a message out to your mailing list. Write a post on your blog. Ask on social media. Ask users and users that have already emailed you. Or however else. Point is, just ask.

How? Be upfront. Say you’re trying to make a helpful FAQ and could the user give a few questions he/she had and weren’t able to find the answer to on your website?

3. Keep it simple

No one likes a long page filled with jumbled paragraphs. It’s really annoying searching through stuff like that to find an answer. Rather than stuffing as many questions and answers as possible onto a single page, consider simplifying. In other wards, make it skim-able so users can quickly find a solution rather than getting frustrated or emailing you.

It could just be breaking up your FAQ into categories. This is so a user can choose the topic and then see possible solutions only pertaining to the issue at hand. Or it can be an ol’ fashioned editing session to reduce the word count and redundancies, so the entire FAQ is more readable. Whatever it takes, keep your FAQ simple. Your users will be thankful they quickly skim and find a solution rather than getting frustrated, or worse – emailing you with a question you already answered in your FAQ (gasp).

4. Organize your FAQ in what makes most sense

Not all FAQs are created equal. What kind of questions are you answering? If it’s all related to one general topic, then you don’t need categories making the organization more complex than it needs to be. If you have various topics – such as account creation, tech support, content submitter vs. consumer actions – then it’d make sense to categorize the questions and answers first. A person looking how to submit content isn’t currently interested in solutions for the consumer side of your website/service. Tech support doesn’t belong in the same place as how to share content with friends. And so forth.

Also, consider not only categorizing but how to present the categories. If you have a lot of categories and sub-categories, then perhaps a sidebar with dropdowns makes most sense. So that a user can quickly find the right topic, click on it, and the questions and answers pertaining to it appear in the main area. Or if you have a lot of questions that pertain to more or less the same topic, you could have the top 10 most frequently asked questions appear along with a search bar to find and access more answers.

That’s just two examples. Point is, consider not only the categories but how to present them layout and user interface-wise.

5. Consider calling your FAQ something else

Depending on your website’s audience, consider renaming your FAQ to something else. The term FAQ is sometimes associated with bewildering messes of questions and answers that’s hard to figure out and find a solution in. This is obviously your call, since you’d know your audience best. Some considerations are “Help”, “Support”, and “Solutions”.

6. Reassure users their questions aren’t stupid

No one enjoys feeling like an idiot. That’s why some people don’t speak up with their questions – for fear the room will laugh at the “stupid question”. Reassure your users that their questions aren’t stupid and are perfectly normal.

You don’t necessarily need to do anything out-of-the-ordinary. Just include questions in your FAQ which you might think are obvious but someone has asked. Then when another user has that question and starts questioning if they can’t figure something out, seeing that question in the FAQ will reassure them their question isn’t stupid. They’ll feel happier and more confident using your website/service, and a happy user/customer is the best PR and marketing for you.

7. Place your FAQ where it’s easy to access

Make the help your user is seeking easy to get to. None of this “inserting into the footer in a tiny font” nonsense. Where are your main navigation items? Probably at the top of your website or interface. Throw a Help/FAQ/etc. link/button there as well.

Think about it: as a user, the longer it takes for you to find a solution the more likely you’ll get frustrated and just find another website/service. Don’t make users hunt for your FAQ, make it as easy to access as any other main navigation item like About, Contact or whatnot.

Tool for Simple Help & FAQ Creation

FaqMe is a cheekily-titled web-based tool for quickly creating a usable help & FAQ page for your website. Granted, if you have a more complex Amazon-like FAQ to create, FaqMe won’t cut it. But for simpler FAQ page creation, FaqMe can save you time so you can focus on categorizing and inserting the right questions rather than figuring out the layout or design.

(And no, this isn’t some paid shoutout, as sometimes seems so when only one app or service is featured rather than a roundup of services. I simply recently stumbled on FaqMe and while writing this list of FAQ tips, it made sense to feature some tool that can help in FAQ creation and make this article hopefully even more actionable and useful.)

Your Favorite Help & FAQ Usability Tips

Your turn: what’s missing from these help and FAQ usability tips? What are some other tools for simple help and FAQ creation? Feel free to share your favorite tips and tools in the comments section below.

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This week’s questions

Hi Chris, I started a website and I was wondering if you have any tips on how to increase traffic to the website?

Hey Chris, I have created a design website for myself and I was wondering if there was any way of getting more traffic to it to gain more clients?

Interesting design links

How to create amazing colorful text effect in Photoshop

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Have a question in mind? Fire it over to me on my Formspring account and I’ll drop in my text based answer. Every couple of weeks I’ll pull out a hand full of questions to expand on or talk about in more detail in video format.

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Justin Maller was the first designer/digital artist we had the chance to interview on Abduzeedo, it was back in 2007. After these 4 years are even more fans of his work and everything he has done also running Depthcore. That’s why everytime he updates his portfolio we feature some of his new artworks.

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Post images to your blog or send links to share with friends and family.

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This week’s questions

Hi Chris, I started a website and I was wondering if you have any tips on how to increase traffic to the website?

Hey Chris, I have created a design website for myself and I was wondering if there was any way of getting more traffic to it to gain more clients?

Interesting design links

How to create amazing colorful text effect in Photoshop

SEO Beyond Your Site

40 Awesome Illustrator Tutorials

Ask a question

Have a question in mind? Fire it over to me on my Formspring account and I’ll drop in my text based answer. Every couple of weeks I’ll pull out a hand full of questions to expand on or talk about in more detail in video format.

Ask a question for the next episode

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Oh So Beautiful Paper, a blog about the many things you can do with paper.

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There are questions to consider before jumping into blogging. While there are downsides, the benefits of blogging can be huge – benefits that range from social to SEO. Let’s explore them in a bit more detail.

Active Online Presence

Sticking to a frequent posting schedule, which I’d suggest, will automatically give you a more active online presence. Your clients will see that you’re thinking and working on sharing your (useful & effective) articles; you will (hopefully) use social media to share your articles, and if they’re good, other people will share your articles too. All of a sudden, you’re more active on the web – and the more active you are, the easier it is for people (and potential clients) to find you and your business.

Establish Yourself as an Expert

Writing well-written and researched articles that are read by your clients and peers can go a long way in establishing your expertise in your field. When buying goods or services, clients like to know that the business they’re buying from is well-versed and knowledgable – this is easily helped along by writing blog posts that are helpful and related to what your business offers. As well, freely giving away information establishes the author as someone who is confident and approachable – two characteristics that are appealing to potential clients. So do your research, write your articles, and be confident and approachable in your tone!

Helps You Stay Relevant & Aware in Your Field

Realistically, you cannot post frequently or have an active online presence without staying relevant and aware within your field. If you’ve set yourself a blogging schedule of one article per week, you will be constantly looking for sources of inspiration for your next article. What’s cutting edge in your field that your clients/readers will want to know about? What shifts and changes are going down in your industry? You will be on top of these things – it’s almost a given, if you commit yourself to frequent, focused blogging.

SEO Benefits

Blogs can provide huge SEO benefits when approached properly. It starts with writing quality content that others want to share: stick to your niche; write articles that solve problems in your field; encourage others to share them. If you take these steps and promote your writing, people will be inclined to share your articles. This generates links back to your site – not only are these additional avenues for potential clients to find your business, but these links are important to Google as well. Part of Google’s PageRank algorithm uses these backlinks: the links are viewed as “votes” for the validity of your site. The more votes, the more valid, the higher up your site is shown for specific keyword phrases. Finally, as you stick to your posting schedule and write a variety of articles focused on your clients & your field of business, you will garner a large amount of content with keywords related to your field. Google also takes this – keyword phrases, amount of content, etc – into account when determining your PageRank. All this additional content has a positive impact on your SEO rankings.

As you can see, blogging provides direct SEO benefits along with the more direct, social benefits we’ve previously mentioned.

Downsides to Consider

The benefits of blogging are great, but there are downsides to blogging to be aware of as well. A few quick examples: poor writing can cast you in an unprofessional light and have a negative impact on your business. Quality, effective blogging requires some sort of schedule – this can be demanding and draining (not to mention tough to do when client project deadlines are bearing down on you). Ideally, your blog will be self-hosted within your website (not an on outside, free service) in order to gain all the previously mentioned SEO benefits – there is usually a higher cost that comes along with using WordPress as a CMS, or another related CMS with blogging capabilities. As well, some clients have difficulty writing to their audience and fall into the trap of just writing about their business, which is a surefire way to lose readers fast. With regards to this last point: I use the Party Analogy to clarify this. Say you’re at a party and you sit down next to a guy you’ve never met before and introduce yourself. Said guy proceeds to talk your ear off all night… only talking about themselves. If you use your blog to only write about your business, you’re that guy. Don’t be that guy.

It’s important to think specifically about your clients, your business, and whether or not the pros of blogging outweigh the cons mentioned above. As I mentioned, there is no blanket answer – but I do know blogging has benefitted Paper Leaf greatly for the time we’ve put into it. What are your thoughts & experiences?

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Just to let you know about a brand new concept in guest blogging – Web Traffic Control. Your readers should be interested as they can grow and monetize their blog – quickly and easily. Plus it’s free for the first 1000 users to join.

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