FAQs and why we hate them

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We often get asked why we do not want FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) on the University’s websites.

There are lots of reasons: all to do with making our websites work well for the people who use them.

But, why do we reserve such hatred for such a simple page? Read on and I’ll explain.

Old school

Back in the day, you would always see FAQs on websites. They were used as a catch-all section for content that didn’t quite fit elsewhere.

Now websites have evolved, so has our understanding of how people use them.

The good, the bad and the ugly

Good websites base their structures, sections and content on their audience’s needs. They focus on what we call top tasks.

Content should be in the most logical section. It should be labelled clearly so people can find it and complete their task with ease.

FAQ pages are bad.  They dump a jumble of content together in one page. They are often a long list of questions in a random order. Worse, they may not even answer the question that your reader has in mind.

Another nail in the coffin for FAQs, is the very nature of them. Being a question they have useless, repetitive intros like “How do I?” or “Where can I?”

This is ugly, lazy content! Hard to read, understand and scan.

Why ask your audience questions, when they are visiting your website for answers?

They cause duplication

We’ve had examples of sites that had perfectly good sections reflecting their top tasks.

Instead of just adding content to these existing sections, a new FAQ page appears. It duplicates content in other sections.

They are patronising

FAQs talk to you in a really irritating way.

My personal favourite is the “How do I contact you?” FAQ when there is already a contact us section.

They create more work (and mistakes)

When the contact us section is updated, will the Web Editor remember to track down and update the FAQ too? Often not.

They cause confusion

Out of the two contact us sections, which one is correct? The phone number is different…

Messing with Google

Duplicated content problems show up in Google search results.

FAQ content will fight your other content for attention. Google doesn’t know which contact us content is the right one. It might show both, it might show the out of date FAQ, either way, your user isn’t going to be happy.

We’re not alone…

I hope you can start to see why we are not so keen on FAQs. And it’s not just us…

Gov.uk is stripping away all the FAQs it comes across for the same reasons I’ve just highlighted.

One of our favourite authors about all things web, Gerry McGovern writes about FAQs and really makes you question their worth.

How to avoid using FAQs

If people are repeatedly asking you the same questions:

  • make sure your web content is up to date and signposted well
  • add new content if you are missing information
  • review your top tasks, you may need a new one

Take a look

Next time you see a FAQ page on a website – take a real hard look, with my points in mind. Bet you start to cringe now too…

Team Update: 15 – 29 April

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Here we are again – read on to find out what we’ve been working on for the last two weeks.

Go Mobile programme

We’ve been updating our plan and confirming task are on (or ahead of!) schedule. We’re starting to look beyond the end of the first cycle and to sketch out plans for the rest of our sites.

Emma C has been reviewing our style guides and content standards to make sure we’ve covered all the new content types. And we’re building a demo site to showcase the new design and best practices.

Technical and design developments

We met to finalise the layout/design options for central sites in Go Mobile. Andy is creating visual mockups for various page types in the new template.

We’ve been testing and refining the migration process further. Catherine is looking at the requirements for staff web profiles in the MyImpact system.

Training and support

The editorial team trialled their new training programme on the rest of the team. The feedback was positive and they’ve given some suggestions for additions and improvements.

Anne has been busy as always, in the last two weeks she:

  • delivered a quick access T4 CMS training session to some of the Postgraduate editors
  • has been developing more in-depth CMS training for editors involved in the migration of sites into T4
  • trained 7 web editors in the use of Contribute to manage their websites

Emma C has been investigating free, browser based image editing tools. Keep an eye out for her recommendations in an upcoming post.

We’ve received 39 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 18 of them.

Campaigns and web developments

Alongside Go Mobile we’re continuing with business as usual.

We’ve updated our website (University login required) to provide information on service developments, including:

  • Siteimprove for checking broken links and misspellings
  • ways to check and improve the readability of your content
  • a standard dashboard in Google Analytics to report on the performance of your site

Steve and Lisa have launched the new NEXUS facility website.

We’ve written blog posts to help with structuring content and fixing broken links and misspellings. Emma C has reviewed the analytics for our first two months. The figures show that we’re getting lots of return visitors who are reading multiple posts at each visit.

Clearing 2015 planning is underway. There’s some content design and tech set up needed to support colleagues in Marketing and Student Recruitment.

Plans for the next few weeks

We’re getting out of the office for a day to take stock of how far we’ve come through Go Mobile and plan for the next few months.

Our monthly blog roundup is ready to go out to our community of web editors tomorrow.

The first training sessions on Planning and Writing Web Content and T4 take place on the 7 and 8 May.

That’s all for now. See you for our next update in a couple of weeks.

How Micro Content Can Immediately Improve Your Website

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Micro content isn’t teeny tiny type on a page – it’s actually the words we put on websites for things like buttons, tabs, menus, even page titles.

Recently we looked at the micro content we used on the 404 error page for the Postgraduate (PG) website.

Our analytics showed some people who followed a broken link (a deleted page) arrived at this error page and then immediately left the website.

Okay, so those people didn’t find the page they were looking for, but we follow best practice on our error page. We very politely give helpful links to the search, homepage and sitemap so people can still try to find what they are looking for.

So why did they leave immediately?

Review micro content

A quick review of the error page micro content revealed it was perhaps a bit negative:

Our old, negative, 404 error pageOur loud and proud micro content at the beginning of the page, didn’t encourage people to read further and use the links we had so helpfully provided.

The page was also a tad long to scan read so we changed it to:

Our new, confident and friendly, 404 error pageBy changing the micro content, we also made the error page follow the confident but friendly PG tone of voice the rest of the website uses.

Testing 1 2 3

We had several versions of the new error page, and ran these past a few people. The feedback resulted in a mashup of the different versions. Overall it’s a page that everyone felt works better.

Outstanding results

We added Google Analytics to the error page so we could tell if/when people started using the links instead and staying on the website… we had a brilliant results.

People stayed on the PG website – and six actually went on to start the application process!

So potentially, six new postgraduate students gained by changing micro content – that’s powerful stuff.

Take a look at the micro content on your website – is it saying what it needs to in the most effective way?

Have a go! What improvements can you make to your micro content?

Read more

This short but effective article, The first rule of web design by Seth Godin is worth a look. Its about making sure you use the right micro content for actions on your webpages – it certainly makes you think.

Do you need to worry about Google’s mobile update?

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On 21 April Google launched a new search algorithm that includes mobile friendliness as a ranking factor in search results. This week we’ve received a number of queries about the update and what affect it will have on how our sites perform in searches.

What we know about Google’s mobile update

  • It only impacts mobile search results
  • It’s likely to take a week to roll out (and for us to see what the impact is)
  • It’s a live algorithm, so if a page becomes mobile friendly after 21 April it won’t take long for this to be shown in the results, with the mobile-friendly tag
  • Mobile friendliness is just one element of a complex ranking algorithm

We (the team, industry experts, perhaps even Google) don’t yet know exactly what the impact of these changes is going to be. All the sensible, non-scaremongering experts out there are saying – don’t panic. And we’re inclined to agree with them.

“this is just one of over 200 signals we use to evaluate the best results. Non-mobile-friendly sites won’t disappear from mobile Search results—they may still rank high if they hold great content the user wants”

Cody Kwok on Google’s Inside Search blog

As this quote from one of Google’s principle software engineers makes clear – mobile friendliness is not the only thing you’ll be ranked on, sites that already perform well will continue to do so and the key is to provide the content that meets your users’ needs.

Making our site mobile

The good news is a number of key areas of our website are already mobile friendly, eg Clearing, Open Day, Postgraduate and Research Impact. By tracking usage of these we’ve learnt valuable lessons about what works for our users and for Google.

We’ve also prioritised transforming the parts of our site that receive high traffic and are most visible to Google (including the University homepage, Undergraduate and About). These sites are all in the first 20 to go through our Go Mobile programme.

We’ll be monitoring mobile search results for a sample of our site over the next few weeks and will respond to any changes we observe.

Fix Broken Links and Misspellings with Siteimprove

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Broken links and misspellings in content harm the credibility of your website. They have an impact on – search rankings, user experience, and visitor traffic.

So, it’s important that you check and update your content on a regular basis.

We’re using Siteimprove quality assurance software to help web editors do this. It’s reporting on our external Academic Unit and Support Services websites – 60,500 pages !

How it works

Siteimprove crawls your website each week, highlights issues and sends you a report that:

  • checks every page and PDF on your site for broken links
  • checks for spelling errors and potential misspellings on every page
  • highlights elements on the page for you so you see errors in context

There’s also an inventory of all media files, documents, email addresses, and phone numbers. This makes it easy to audit your website and keep things up-do-date.

Siteimprove won’t fix broken links and misspellings errors on your website but it does make it easy to find them.

Improve the quality of your web content – get rid of those broken links and misspellings  and start using your Siteimprove report!

Access to Siteimprove

You can request access to Siteimprove (University Login required).