A recent discussion in our office dealing with the use of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) pages. I posed the question to our group "What are your thoughts on FAQs pages." I got an immediate response of I don't like them which was something I was excited to hear. I am not at all a fan of FAQ pages in fact I have grown to despise them as they are overused, overstuffed, and generally not helpful in the majority of cases.

Questions and answer FAQs are typically a way for developers or content providers to place content that they don't feel fits elsewhere into some sort of bucket. This bucket becomes increasingly larger or you have more and more FAQ pages on larger sites and this is common practice, the question is why.

Let's break it down a little bit. What is FAQs really saying? Frequently asked questions right? So why is the user or consumer asking this question? Typically it's because we as developers and designers failed to integrate this information into the content where it will be found. If the question has to be asked, then it could be assumed that the content is lacking that information, or it was not presented in a way that made the information easily readable, or readily available.

From a user standpoint should we expect the user to find information that we as developers poorly placed or could not place? Is FAQs a logical place to find content? Sometimes it definitly is a logical page or area to create on a site, however many times it simply not necessary and with a little more work on the part of the developer can be eliminated by folding the information into other areas of the site.

Let's take a look at an example of a FAQs page at www.biodiesel.org. Biodiesel is something that more then likely most of the population is not intimately familiar with. So a FAQs page here makes a lot of sense and has a lot of great logical questions for someone looking for more information on Biodiesel. The question still exists though, could the information have been more logically organized on other pages or new pages to provide the information without the use of a FAQs page? Probably, however this is a scenario it could make sense, but it's not really necesary. It could have been more logically broken up into a series of smaller pages that describe Biodiesel.

Here's another example of a lazy and sloppy implementation of a FAQs page that reads more like a guide then a questions and answers page. Car and Deep Cycle Batteries page uses a FAQs page to try to organize nearly all of their information. Plain or poor design aside this site could have been better thought out and would have made the site itself much more user friendly, the information much easier to find, and would have cleaned up the page as well.

Sadly enough many FAQs pages are more like the second example. Dump buckets for content that is not placed logically, but instead dropped in a catch all page called FAQs. Developers should avoid these pages whenever possible. Only in some instances are they a logical and good thing. Here is a great example of what a FAQs page if used at all should look like if it needs to be used at all.