rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic
24,Kill It With Fire! What To Do With Those Dreaded FAQs,"In the mid-1640s, a man named Matthew Hopkins attempted to rid England of the devil’s influence, primarily by demanding payment for the service of tying women to chairs and tossing them into lakes.

Unsurprisingly, his methods garnered criticism. Hopkins defended himself in The Discovery of Witches in 1647, subtitled “Certaine Queries answered, which have been and are likely to be objected against MATTHEW HOPKINS, in his way of finding out Witches.”

Each “querie” was written in the voice of an imagined detractor, and answered in the voice of an imagined defender (always referring to himself as “the discoverer,” or “him”):


	Quer. 14.

	All that the witch-finder doth is to fleece the country of their money, and therefore rides and goes to townes to have imployment, and promiseth them faire promises, and it may be doth nothing for it, and possesseth many men that they have so many wizzards and so many witches in their towne, and so hartens them on to entertaine him.

	Ans.

	You doe him a great deale of wrong in every of these particulars.


Hopkins’ self-defense was an early modern English FAQ.

Digital beginnings

Question and answer formatting certainly isn’t new, and stretches back much further than witch-hunt days. But its most modern, most notorious, most reviled incarnation is the internet’s frequently asked questions page.

FAQs began showing up on pre-internet mailing lists as a way for list members to answer and pre-empt newcomers’ repetitive questions:


	The presumption was that new users would download archived past messages through ftp. In practice, this rarely happened and the users tended to post questions to the mailing list instead of searching its archives. Repeating the “right” answers becomes tedious…


When all the users of a system can hear all the other users, FAQs make a lot of sense: the conversation needs to be managed and manageable. FAQs were a stopgap for the technological limitations of the time.

But the internet moved past mailing lists. Online information can be stored, searched, filtered, and muted; we choose and control our conversations. New users no longer rely on the established community to answer their questions for them.

And yet, FAQs are still around. They’re a content anti-pattern, replicated from site to site to solve a problem we no longer have.

What we hate when we hate FAQs

As someone who creates and structures online content – always with the goal of making that content as useful as possible to people – FAQs drive me absolutely batty. Almost universally, FAQs represent the opposite of useful. A brief list of their sins:


Double trouble
Duplicated content is practically a given with FAQs. They’re written as though they’ll be accessed in a vacuum – but search results, navigation patterns, and curiosity ensure that users will seek answers throughout the site. Is our goal to split their focus? To make them uncertain of where to look? To divert them to an isolated microcosm of the website? Duplicated content means user confusion (to say nothing of the duplicated workload for maintaining content).
Leaving the job unfinished
Many FAQs fail before they’re even out of the gate, presenting a list of questions that’s incomplete (too short and careless to be helpful) or irrelevant (avoiding users’ real concerns in favor of soundbites). Alternately, if the right questions are there, the answers may be convoluted, jargon-heavy, or otherwise difficult to understand.
Long lists of not-my-question
Getting a single answer often means sifting through a haystack of questions. For each potential question, the user must read, comprehend, assess, move on, rinse, repeat. That’s a lot of legwork for little reward – and a lot of opportunity for mistakes. Users may miss their question, or they may fail to recognize a differently worded version of their question, or they may not notice when their sought-after answer appears somewhere they didn’t expect.
The ventriloquist act
FAQs shift the point of view. While websites speak on behalf of the organization (“our products,” “our services,” “you can call us for assistance,” etc.), FAQs speak as the user – “I can’t find my password” or “How do I sign up?” Both voices are written from the first-person perspective, but speak for different entities, which is disorienting: it breaks the tone and messaging across the website. It’s also presumptuous: why do you get to speak for the user?


These all underscore FAQs’ fatal flaw: they are content without context, delivered without regard for the larger experience of the website. You can hear the absurdity in the name itself: if users are asking the same questions so frequently, then there is an obvious gulf between their needs and the site content. (And if not, then we have a labeling problem.)

Instead of sending users to a jumble of maybe-it’s-here-maybe-it’s-not questions, the answers to FAQs should be found naturally throughout a website. They are not separated, not isolated, not other. They are the content.

To present it otherwise is to create a runaround, and users know it. Jay Martel’s parody, “F.A.Q.s about F.A.Q.s” captures the silliness and frustration of such a system:


	Q: Why are you so rude?

	A: For that answer, you would have to consult an F.A.Q.s about F.A.Q.s about F.A.Q.s. But your time might be better served by simply abandoning your search for a magic answer and taking responsibility for your own profound ignorance.


FAQs aren’t magic answers. They don’t resolve a content dilemma or even help users. Yet they keep cropping up, defiant, weedy, impossible to eradicate.

Where are they all coming from?

Blame it on this: writing is hard. When generating content, most of us do whatever it takes to get some words on the screen. And the format of question and answer makes it easy: a reactionary first stab at content development.

After all, the point of website content is to answer users’ questions. So this – to give everyone credit – is a really good move. Content creators who think in terms of questions and answers are actually thinking of their users, particularly first-time users, trying to anticipate their needs and write towards them.

It’s a good start. But it’s scaffolding: writing that helps you get to the writing you’re supposed to be doing. It supports you while you write your way to the heart of your content. And once you get there, you have to look back and take the scaffolding down.

Leaving content in the Q&A format that helped you develop it is missing the point. You’re not there to build scaffolding. You have to see your content in its naked purpose and determine the best method for communicating that purpose – and it usually won’t be what got you there.

The goal (to borrow a lesson from content management systems) is to separate the content from its presentation, to let the meaning of the content inform its display.

This is, of course, a nice theory.

An occasionally necessary evil

I have a lot of clients who adore FAQs. They’ve developed their content over a long period of time. They’ve listened to the questions their users are asking. And they’ve answered them all on a page that I simply cannot get them to part with.

Which means I’ve had to consider that there may be occasions where an FAQ page is appropriate.

As an example: one of my clients is a financial office in a large institution. Because this office manages several third-party systems that serve a range of niche audiences, they had developed FAQs that addressed hyper-specific instances of dysfunction within systems for different users – à la “I’m a financial director and my employee submitted an expense report in such-and-such system and it returned such-and-such error. What do I do?”

Yes, this content could be removed from the question format and rewritten. But I’m not sure it would be an improvement. It won’t necessarily resolve concerns about length and searchability, and the different audiences may complicate the delivery. And since the work of rewriting it didn’t fit into the client workflow (small team, no writers, pressed for time), I didn’t recommend the change.

I’ve had to make peace with not being to torch all the FAQs on the internet. Some content, like troubleshooting information or complex procedures, may be better in that format. It may be the smartest way for a particular client to handle that particular information.

Of course, this has to be determined on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the amount of content, the subject matter, the skill levels of the content creators, the publishing workflow, and the search habits of the users.

If you determine that an FAQ page is the only way to go, ask yourself:


	Is there a better label or more specific term for the page (support, troubleshooting, product concerns, etc.)?
	Is there way to structure the page, categorize the questions, or otherwise make it easier for users to navigate quickly to the answer they need?
	Is a question and answer format absolutely the best way to communicate this information?


Form follows function

Just as a question and answer format isn’t necessarily required to deliver the content, neither is it an inappropriate method in and of itself. Content professionals have developed a knee-jerk reaction: It’s an FAQ page! Quick, burn it! Buuuuurn it!

But there’s no inherent evil in questions and answers. Framing content in an interrogatory construct is no more a deal with the devil than subheads and paragraphs, or narrative arcs, or bullet points.

Yes, FAQs are riddled with communication snafus. They deserve, more often than not, to be tied to a chair and thrown into a lake. But that wouldn’t fix our content problems. FAQs are a shiny and obvious target for our frustration, but they’re not unique in their flaws. In any format, in any display, in any kind of page, weak content can rear its ugly, poorly written head.

It’s not the Q&A that’s to blame, it’s bad content. Content without context will always fail users. That’s the real witch in our midst.",2013,Lisa Maria Martin,lisamariamartin,2013-12-08T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/what-to-do-with-faqs/,content
251,"The System, the Search, and the Food Bank","Imagine a warehouse, half the length of a football field, with a looped conveyer belt down the center. 
On the belt are plastic bins filled with assortments of shelf-stable food—one may have two bags of potato chips, seventeen pudding cups, and a box of tissues; the next, a dozen cans of beets. The conveyer belt is ringed with large, empty cardboard boxes, each labeled with categories like “Bottled Water” or “Cereal” or “Candy.” 
Such was the scene at my local food bank a few Saturdays ago, when some friends and I volunteered for a shift sorting donated food items. Our job was to fill the labeled cardboard boxes with the correct items nabbed from the swiftly moving, randomly stocked plastic bins.
I could scarcely believe my good fortune of assignments. You want me to sort things? Into categories? For several hours? And you say there’s an element of time pressure? Listen, is there some sort of permanent position I could be conscripted into.
Look, I can’t quite explain it: I just know that I love sorting, organizing, and classifying things—groceries at a food bank, but also my bookshelves, my kitchen cabinets, my craft supplies, my dishwasher arrangement, yes I am a delight to live with, why do you ask?
The opportunity to create meaning from nothing is at the core of my excitement, which is why I’ve tried to build a career out of organizing digital content, and why I brought a frankly frightening level of enthusiasm to the food bank. “I can’t believe they’re letting me do this,” I whispered in awe to my conveyer belt neighbor as I snapped up a bag of popcorn for the Snacks box with the kind of ferocity usually associated with birds of prey.
The jumble of donated items coming into the center need to be sorted in order for the food bank to be able to quantify, package, and distribute the food to those who need it (I sense a metaphor coming on). It’s not just a nice-to-have that we spent our morning separating cookies from carrots—it’s a crucial step in the process. Organization makes the difference between chaos and sense, between randomness and usefulness, whether we’re talking about donated groceries or—there it is—web content.
This happens through the magic of criteria matching. In order for us to sort the food bank donations correctly, we needed to know not only the categories we were sorting into, but also the criteria for each category. Does canned ravioli count as Canned Soup? Does enchilada sauce count as Tomatoes? Do protein bars count as Snacks? (Answers: yes, yes, and only if they are under 10 grams of protein or will expire within three months.) 
Is X a Y? was the question at the heart of our food sorting—but it’s also at the heart of any information-seeking behavior. When we are organizing, or looking for, any kind of information, we are asking ourselves:

What is the criteria that defines Y?
Does X meet that criteria?

We don’t usually articulate it so concretely because it’s a background process, only leaping to consciousness when we encounter a stumbling block. If cans of broth flew by on the conveyer belt, it didn’t require much thought to place them in the Canned Soup box. Boxed broth, on the other hand, wasn’t allowed, causing a small cognitive hiccup—this X is NOT a Y—that sometimes meant having to re-sort our boxes.
On the web, we’re interested—I would hope—in reducing cognitive hiccups for our users. We are interested in making our apps easy to use, our websites easy to navigate, our information easy to access. After all, most of the time, the process of using the internet is one of uniting a question with an answer—Is this article from a trustworthy source? Is this clothing the style I want? Is this company paying their workers a living wage? Is this website one that can answer my question? Is X a Y?
We have a responsibility, therefore, to make information easy for our users to find, understand, and act on. This means—well, this means a lot of things, and I’ve got limited space here, so let’s focus on these three lessons from the food bank:


Use plain, familiar language. This advice seems to be given constantly, but that’s because it’s solid and it’s not followed enough. Your menu labels, page names, and headings need to reflect the word choice of your users. Think how much harder it would have been to sort food if the boxes were labeled according to nutritional content, grocery store aisle number, or Latin name. How much would it slow sorting down if the Tomatoes box were labeled Nightshades? It sounds silly, but it’s not that different from sites that use industry jargon, company lingo, acronyms (oh, yes, I’ve seen it), or other internally focused language when trying to provide wayfinding for users. Choose words that your audience knows—not only will they be more likely to spot what they’re looking for on your site or app, but you’ll turn up more often in search results.


Create consistency in all things. Missteps in consistency look like my earlier chicken broth example—changing up how something looks, sounds, or functions creates a moment of cognitive dissonance, and those moments add up. The names of products, the names of brands, the names of files and forms and pages, the names of processes and procedures and concepts—these all need to be consistently spelled, punctuated, linked, and referenced, no matter what section or level the user is in. If submenus are visible in one section, they should be visible in all. If calls-to-action are a graphic button in one section, they are the same graphic button in all. Every affordance, every module, every design choice sets up user expectations; consistency keeps those expectations afloat, making for a smoother experience overall.

Make the system transparent. By this, I do not mean that every piece of content should be elevated at all times. The horror. But I do mean that we should make an effort to communicate the boundaries of the digital space from any given corner within. Navigation structures operate just as much as a table of contents as they do a method of moving from one place to another. Page hierarchies help explain content relationships, communicating conceptual relevancy and relative importance. Submenus illustrate which related concepts may be found within a given site section. Take care to show information that conveys the depth and breadth of the system, rather than obscuring it.

This idea of transparency was perhaps the biggest challenge we experienced in food sorting. Imagine us volunteers as users, each looking for a specific piece of information in the larger system. Like any new visitor to a website, we came into the system not knowing the full picture. We didn’t know every category label around the conveyer belt, nor what criteria each category warranted. 
The system wasn’t transparent for us, so we had to make it transparent as we went. We had to stop what we were doing and ask questions. We’d ask staff members. We’d ask more seasoned volunteers. We’d ask each other. We’d make guesses, and guess wrongly, and mess up the boxes, and correct our mistakes, and learn.
The more we learned, the easier the sorting became. That is, we were able to sort more quickly, more efficiently, more accurately.  The better we understood the system, the better we were at interacting with it.
The same is true of our users: the better they understand digital spaces, the more effective they are at using them. But visitors to our apps and websites do not have the luxury of learning the whole system. The fumbling trial-and-error method that I used at the food bank can, on a website, drive users away—or, worse, misinform or hurt them. 
This is why we must make choices that prioritize transparency, consistency, and familiarity. Our users want to know if X is a Y—well-sorted content can give them the answer.",2018,Lisa Maria Martin,lisamariamartin,2018-12-16T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2018/the-system-the-search-and-the-food-bank/,content
291,Information Literacy Is a Design Problem,"Information literacy, wrote Dr. Carol Kulthau in her 1987 paper “Information Skills for an Information Society,” is “the ability to read and to use information essential for everyday life”—that is, to effectively navigate a world built on “complex masses of information generated by computers and mass media.”
Nearly thirty years later, those “complex masses of information” have only grown wilder, thornier, and more constant. We call the internet a firehose, yet we’re loathe to turn it off (or even down). The amount of information we consume daily is staggering—and yet our ability to fully understand it all remains frustratingly insufficient. 
This should hit a very particular chord for those of us working on the web. We may be developers, designers, or strategists—we may not always be responsible for the words themselves—but we all know that communication is much more than just words. From fonts to form fields, every design decision that we make changes the way information is perceived—for better or for worse.
What’s more, the design decisions that we make feed into larger patterns. They don’t just affect the perception of a single piece of information on a single site; they start to shape reader expectations of information anywhere. Users develop cumulative mental models of how websites should be: where to find a search bar, where to look at contact information, how to filter a product list. 
And yet: our models fail us. Fundamentally, we’re not good at parsing information, and that’s troubling. Our experience of an “information society” may have evolved, but the skills Dr. Kuhlthau spoke of are even more critical now: our lives depend on information literacy.
Patterns from words
Let’s start at the beginning: with the words. Our choice of words can drastically alter a message, from its emotional resonance to its context to its literal meaning. Sometimes we can use word choice for good, to reinvigorate old, forgotten, or unfairly besmirched ideas.
One time at a wedding bbq we labeled the coleslaw BRASSICA MIXTA so people wouldn’t skip it based on false hatred.— Eileen Webb (@webmeadow) November 27, 2016

We can also use clever word choice to build euphemisms, to name sensitive or intimate concepts without conjuring their full details. This trick gifts us with language like “the beast with two backs” (thanks, Shakespeare!) and “surfing the crimson wave” (thanks, Cher Horowitz!).
But when we grapple with more serious concepts—war, death, human rights—this habit of declawing our language gets dangerous. Using more discrete wording serves to nullify the concepts themselves, euphemizing them out of sight and out of mind.
The result? Politicians never lie, they just “misspeak.” Nobody’s racist, but plenty of people are “economically anxious.” Nazis have rebranded as “alt-right.” 
I’m not an asshole, I’m just alt-nice.— Andi Zeisler (@andizeisler) November 22, 2016

The problem with euphemisms like these is that they quickly infect everyday language. We use the words we hear around us. The more often we see “alt-right” instead of “Nazi,” the more likely we are to use that phrase ourselves—normalizing the term as well as the terrible ideas behind it.
Patterns from sentences
That process of normalization gets a boost from the media, our main vector of information about the world outside ourselves. Headlines control how we interpret the news that follows—even if the story contradicts it in the end. We hear the framing more clearly than the content itself, coloring our interpretation of the news over time.
Even worse, headlines are often written to encourage clicks, not to convey critical information. When headline-writing is driven by sensationalism, it’s much, much easier to build a pattern of misinformation. Take this CBS News headline: “Donald Trump: ‘Millions’ voted illegally for Hillary Clinton.” The headline makes no indication that this an objectively false statement; instead, this word choice subtly suggestions that millions did, in fact, illegally vote for Hillary Clinton.
Headlines like this are what make lying a worthwhile political strategy. https://t.co/DRjGeYVKmW— Binyamin Appelbaum (@BCAppelbaum) November 27, 2016

This is a deeply dangerous choice of words when headlines are the primary way that news is conveyed—especially on social media, where it’s much faster to share than to actually read the article. In fact, according to a study from the Media Insight Project, “roughly six in 10 people acknowledge that they have done nothing more than read news headlines in the past week.” 
If a powerful person asserts X there are 2 responsible ways to cover:1. “X is true”2. “Person incorrectly thinks X”Never “Person says X”— Helen Rosner (@hels) November 27, 2016

Even if we do, in fact, read the whole article, there’s no guarantee that we’re thinking critically about it. A study conducted by Stanford found that “82 percent of students could not distinguish between a sponsored post and an actual news article on the same website. Nearly 70 percent of middle schoolers thought they had no reason to distrust a sponsored finance article written by the CEO of a bank, and many students evaluate the trustworthiness of tweets based on their level of detail and the size of attached photos.” 
Friends: our information literacy is not very good. Luckily, we—workers of the web—are in a position to improve it.
Sentences into design
Consider the presentation of those all-important headlines in social media cards, as on Facebook. The display is a combination of both the card’s design and the article’s source code, and looks something like this:

A large image, a large headline; perhaps a brief description; and, at the bottom, in pale gray, a source and an author’s name. 
Those choices convey certain values: specifically, they suggest that the headline and the picture are the entire point. The source is so deemphasized that it’s easy to see how fake news gains a foothold: daily exposure to this kind of hierarchy has taught us that sources aren’t important. 
And that’s the message from the best-case scenario. Not every article shows every piece of data. Take this headline from the BBC: “Wisconsin receives request for vote recount.” 

With no image, no description, and no author, there’s little opportunity to signal trust or provide nuance. There’s also no date—ever—which presents potentially misleading complications, especially in the context of “breaking news.” 
And lest you think dates don’t matter in the light-speed era of social media, take the headline, “Maryland sidesteps electoral college.” Shared into my feed two days after the US presidential election, that’s some serious news with major historical implications. But since there’s no date on this card, there’s no way for readers to know that the “Tuesday” it refers to was in 2007. Again, a design choice has made misinformation far too contagious.

More recently, I posted my personal reaction to the death of Fidel Castro via a series of twenty tweets. Wanting to share my thoughts with friends and family who don’t use Twitter, I then posted the first tweet to Facebook. The card it generated was less than ideal:

The information hierarchy created by this approach prioritizes the name of the Twitter user (not even the handle), along with the avatar. Not only does that create an awkward “headline” (at least when you include a full stop in your name), but it also minimizes the content of the tweet itself—which was the whole point. 
The arbitrary elevation of some pieces of content over others—like huge headlines juxtaposed with minimized sources—teaches readers that these values are inherent to the content itself: that the headline is the news, that the source is irrelevant. We train readers to stop looking for the information we don’t put in front of them. 
These aren’t life-or-death scenarios; they are just cases where design decisions noticeably dictate the perception of information. Not every design decision makes so obvious an impact, but the impact is there. Every single action adds to the pattern.
Design with intention
We can’t necessarily teach people to read critically or vet their sources or stop believing conspiracy theories (or start believing facts). Our reach is limited to our roles: we make websites and products for companies and colleges and startups.
But we have more reach there than we might realize. Every decision we make influences how information is presented in the world. Every presentation adds to the pattern. No matter how innocuous our organization, how lowly our title, how small our user base—every single one of us contributes, a little bit, to the way information is perceived.
Are we changing it for the better?
While it’s always been crucial to act ethically in the building of the web, our cultural climate now requires dedicated, individual conscientiousness. It’s not enough to think ourselves neutral, to dismiss our work as meaningless or apolitical. Everything is political. Every action, and every inaction, has an impact.
As Chappell Ellison put it much more eloquently than I can:
Every single action and decision a designer commits is a political act. The question is, are you a conscious actor?— Chappell Ellison🤔 (@ChappellTracker) November 28, 2016

As shapers of information, we have a responsibility: to create clarity, to further understanding, to advance truth. Every single one of us must choose to treat information—and the society it builds—with integrity.",2016,Lisa Maria Martin,lisamariamartin,2016-12-14T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2016/information-literacy-is-a-design-problem/,content