How to Create an Effective FAQ Page
In web design, you should strive for simplicity and you should constantly eliminate things that simply aren’t needed. The FAQ page supports the rest of the website’s content; if it doesn’t enhance what’s already there, it shouldn’t be a priority.
Customers aren't on your FAQ page to be entertained. It's typically best to stick to a basic format and simple design that can be quickly accessed and easily read.
An effective FAQ page seeks to:
Reflect and respond to your audience’s needs wholly and thoroughly.
Cover a broad range of intent (transactional, informational, locational, etc.).
Stay updated based on new insights from your data, the industry, and broader best practices.
Land new users to the website by solving problems and supporting return visits with regular additions and valuable expertise sharing.
Drive internal pageviews to other important pages and support key conversion paths.
Fuel blog (and deeper content) creation logically and intuitively ties together semantically relevant content.
Shine a light on expertise, trust, and authority within your niche, giving your brand and key staff a platform to educate, inform, and support your community.
Readability
FAQ pages are recommended to be text-based, so readability is important. Readability can be achieved in different ways: text decoration (always minding the contrast between text and background), as well as line- and letter-spacing.
Gather the Right Questions
The questions on the FAQ page must be real. For a new website, choose a timeframe (say, one month), and then survey and categorize the questions that users ask during that time via direct calls or email.
If patterns emerge, it probably indicates a topic that should be addressed on the FAQ page. In this way, you can update the FAQ page regularly. This method is effective because users are actually participating in the page’s creation.
Categorization of Questions
Users who are looking for an FAQ page probably got confused somewhere else on the website. Don’t make it worse with tangled topics.
Basic categories increase readability — a major building block of efficiency. Name the categories intuitively to avoid further confusion.
Tips For Structuring an FAQ Page
If you have only a few questions and answers, put them together rather than on separate pages. Of course, page length must be considered. Endless scrolling will tire users and cause them to leave before finding answers to their questions.
Keep the page as short as possible. Make sure each question and answer pair is valuable.
For the sake of readability, distinguish questions from answers, whether by colour, size, typeface or decoration. Questions and answers are organized by topic, and the topics are collapsed by default, thus saving space and reducing overwhelm.
