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How To Build And Maintain A Good FAQ
comforteagle writes "FAQs have been around since the beginning of the web & most of them still suck. Most of us who build FAQs rely on handcrafting them, but this really isn't necessary anymore. Sean Kerner has written The FAQs on FAQs as an introduction to getting up to speed fast with a FAQ, letting opensource software do the majority of the work, and allowing the author to concentrate on providing good answers. He shortly reviews a few apps, but settles on phpMyFAQ."
Base the FAQ on actual questions that have been asked, don't make it a propaganda document that leaves more questions than it answers.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
One thing which should be obvious: do not change the URL of your FAQ over the years, or if really you must do so at least put a redirect.
People love to bookmark stuff and it is no good when one finds out that his few-year-old bookmarks are dead or 404.
The FAQ should be written by your tech support people, not the marketing people. In fact the marketing guys shouldn't be allowed to look at it. There's nothing worse than having some problem with a product and going to the FAQ and seeing stuff like:
Q: Is this product fully buzzword compliant?
A: Yes! We have integrated full buzzward compliance into this product.
Q: How fast is this product?
A: The product is the fastest in the industry!
GRR! All I want is some help trying to figure out how to set some option with your horrible interface.
Many times you can search the web and find a _real_ FAQ, written by users, that gives you actual information. Unfortunatly, those FAQs are the ones that get taken down by the same corporate douchebags that wrote the useless FAQ.
I read the internet for the articles.
The best FAQs predate the "web" and originated on usenet. They were extremely useful documents probably because they were not designed to be useful, they were designed to prevent the asking of stupid (I mean frequently asked) questions.
This means the best FAQs are not made up of questions that someone thinks will be useful, they are made up of questions that are actually frequently asked. Also, the best answers are not the answers that some marketer or geek would like to give, they are the answers that will make the question go away.
Put another way, good FAQs are not just another way to organize informations, the honestly are Frequently Asked Questions...plus answers that frequently satisfy those questioners.
How to maintain them? They same way one compiles them--by surveying the questions that get asked.
All too often FAQs (and for that matter User Manuals) are simply reminders to those who already know how to use a particular product, rather than aiming for the beginning user.
... though it could have been handled in about two paragraphs (including file names and likely URLs). It does nothing toward encouraging writing useful reference material, nor toward steering manual updates to include information requested in the FAQs. If the material is "already in the manual", perhaps it's lost in the noise.
/. the ONLY folks on the web getting things right for a change ... that'll fix 'em).
... code is cool, code is sexy; documentation on the other hand is for those beneath the coder's horizion. I know ... transfer ALL the tech support calls directly to the programmer.
... much to the embarassment of the programmer).
By their very nature, FAQs (and manuals) are written by the programmer (only in your dreams!) or by someone who already has hands on experience with the product.
The very best FAQs (and manuals) come when people comfortable communicating with others write the manual WITH THE ASSISTANCE of someone technical (to get the details straight). Sadly, these times are few and far between.
Adding to this problem is the problem of (almost) nobody reading the manual (for which the acronym RTFM has entered the lexicon). Who wants to put all that effort into a reference document that will (for the most part) be ignored?
The article was a nice breeze-thru review of tools to help generate FAQs
A more useful article would be on what makes a great FAQ, with examples (yes,
Alas
*****
And yes, I HAVE done my tour on the help desk, I have beta tested software releases (including following the release notice instructions
It's an initialism. It signifies the first letters of the words that form it. It makes much more sense to say those letters (since most initialisms don't form actual words) than it does to try to say them as their own word. You don't say "cuh-pooh" when you're referring to your CPU, do you?
If FAQ is 'frequently asked questions', is FAQs
1. frequently asked questionsses (like bus/busses)
2. frequentlies asked questions (like mother-in-law/mothers-in-law)
3. frequently asked questions (like sheep/sheep)
Wrong on 2 counts. FAQs have been around twice as long as the web. They have been around at least since the early days of Usenet.
The ones that are actually what they claim to be - a list of the most-frequently asked questions, with answers - are very useful. The purpose of a FAQ is not to answer every possible question, it is not to be an introductory guide, it is not to replace "Howto" documents... it is to collect the most frequently-asked questions about the subject, with answers that are useful to the people likely to ask those questions.
A majority of FAQs, and nearly all the ones that originated in Usenet newsgroups, still do that. And are useful.
Is it just my imagination, or are /. editors selecting more and more trollish/flamebait articles for publication, and rejecting more and more interesting/timely ones?
The FAQ is a literary form, like the sonnet or the mathematics textbook. Every literary form has rules: a sonnet has a rhyme scheme; a mathematics textbook has problem sets and the phrase "left as an exercise for the reader". A sonnet is a particular form of poetry, and a person who writes one is a poet. An FAQ is a particular form of technical writing, and a person who writes one is a technical writer.
FAQs differ from other styles of technical writing in many respects. Foremost, however, is that they are written as a dialogue between novice and expert. The novice, or a collection of (imaginary or real) novices pose questions, and an expert (or aggregate of experts) responds.
Some FAQs are just that -- simple catenations of question and answer on a subject, with no particular connection between one and the next. Others group questions into broad categories, or have one question lead into another, sometimes in a long chain of increasing detail.
One difference among FAQs is how much background understanding they try to convey. Some writers presume that readers merely want shallow, rote answers to their problems: the question "I'm getting a 0x0F00 error" gets the answer "Run the reset_foo command" without further insight. Others use the FAQ form to present deeper facts about the system being documented -- using the question-and-answer format to lead the novice into deeper understanding.
One of the common misunderstandings of FAQs is to treat them as if they should be only a collection of actual questions which have been frequently asked: that the author should not "waste" the reader's time on questions which should be asked (because their answers provide insight) but are not asked (because people do not seek insight as much as they should).
This misunderstanding is an outgrowth of the peculiar form of ideological hatred which many people hold towards those who know more. Consider the computer user who proudly claims to be "computer illiterate", who believes that learning about the system he must use is beneath him. What he wants from documentation -- on the rare occasion that he deigns to read it! -- is only a rote answer to his precise question. Anything else is "wasting his time".
Why does he resent it so when anyone tries to teach him the principles upon which his system operates, so that he can solve his next problem himself? Because for the expert (or FAQ writer) to teach him principles is to tell him that the expert will not be at his beck and call to answer his next trivial question. (If you teach a man to fish, you thereby tell him that you will not hand him a fish every day.)
Teaching the underlying principles is ultimately egalitarian. It says that I, who today am the expert, will not be your servant and will not be your master. I will instead place you on the same level as myself; I will teach you what I know so that you can solve your problem as I would solve it if it were my own. This is why it is unacceptable to people who believe knowledge to be beneath them.
And this is why it is a benefit -- not a problem -- when FAQs include unasked (but worthy) questions as well as those that have been actually posed. It is a benefit, that is, to those who are actually interested in learning; and it hurts and offends those who are interested instead in the degradation of knowledge. That is a good thing.
While the endless stream of worthless gameFAQs is certainly a detractor, I think the site has a few very valuable lessons that can be learned from it.
First of all, the site is thorough and popular. While this sounds simple, and not really all that important in the context of a FAQ, it provides a mindset that is lacking in just about any other form of online documentation (please, PHP.net users, do not consume me...it was just a generalization). How often do you have a problem and "go to the FAQ" absolutely confident that your issues will be addressed there? Not very often, I'm willing to bet. With gameFAQs, however, you can be pretty sure that SOMEONE has address your concern SOMEWHERE along the way (for most games, that is). The inordinate amount of detail that users commit to their FAQs is far more in depth than anything you will find in any other form of FAQ. This is probably because the author was, at one time, just another frustrated user who wanted answers. When he(she) finally got them, it was a point of honor to make sure it didn't happen to anyone else.
This brings us to the next important gameFAQs lesson: user contributions. Why relegate user submissions and experiences to the backwoods of a forum? Crawling has never been so dirty when you are up at 3 A.M. browsing obscure topics in hopes if finding gold. The submission sytem in place with gameFAQs (though not perfect, by any means) puts the power of documentation in the hands of those who will, inevitably, do a much better job. Sure, you'll have the UHAUL full of crap along with the cream, but even a basic ratings system can take care of that.
Of course, there are plenty of other concepts that would be interesting when applied to commercial product FAQs. How about a bounty system for those questions that someone REALLY wants to know...but the developers just won't seem to answer? It would be fun to watch, at the least.