Standard or best practice for Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page?

Standards Ask the community about the standards
1

Is there a good standard for FAQs page? Ideally, I think a good FAQs page will have the below:

  • Search box (predictive text search)
  • Accordion pattern component to expand or collapse each question on the page

What do you think?

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There is considerable user research and argument to suggest FAQs be avoided at all costs. If content is ‘frequently asked’, shouldn’t it be surfaced and made more findable?
The common risk (and failing) of many FAQs is that content without a logical place in the IA or narrative, often ends up being amassed into this bucket, where navigation and task completion become even more challenging.

An oldie but still a goodie:

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I must say I am personally am both for and against FAQ’s,

I have over the time heard many arguments against holding Gov.uk as the benchmark, but I have also observed that FAQ’s are creeping in across gov.uk even now as I write this post.

As many people are very anti FAQ’s I’ll argue my case for them

Reasons for:

It’s a very established pattern and I have observed in several experiments in my time numerous participants look for FAQ’s in content especially when presented with information for the very first time, including;

  • Customers
  • Frontline Staff (both face to face and call center, have observed FAQ’s is standard practice for design and deliver of frontline training material)
  • CALD Users (in particular when english is a second language)
  • less digital savvy" participants
  • Those with an identified cognitive impairment impacting concentration or comprehension.

For tactical/ urgent work it can be a good compromise for important information (especially if responsive to feedback and analytics across all channels of your org)

For bigger pieces of work seeing how FAQ’s are being used and interacted with on a page can give you a really great foundation for bigger pieces of content transformation.

Best Practice?

  • when I have implemented FAQs in the past , I use practices of chunking content, clear scannable titles for content and packaged in relation to the customer journey/ task.

  • I think the guys at NN cover both sides of the argument really well: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/faqs-deliver-value

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