FAQs are not the answer
Everybody loves to hate Frequently Asked Questions, or FAQs. More often than not, technical writers pale and stagger at the sight of hefty, unsorted FAQs, as if they were beholding a writhing mass of primal chaos. Others value their pragmatic qualities: FAQs, they say, lower the bar to contribution and are good fuel for LLMs and search engines. My opinion is that FAQs pose a problem only when there’s no strategy around their usage.
I wouldn’t call FAQs an anti-pattern or a dark-pattern because both terms entail some degree of consciousness. No, FAQs rarely are a deliberate tactical choice; most of the time, they arise from the urgent, irresistible need of dumping pressing questions and their answers somewhere visible, which doesn’t necessarily mean accessible. FAQs in websites are the little death of content strategy: amorphous blobs of content left to wander in the backrooms of the web.
Why is that a problem, you wonder? After all, those are useful answers to important questions. Let them be! Well, that’d be a considerate thought were it not for the poor UX that mindlessly FAQing around can cause. As Tom Johnson states in The Problem with FAQs, FAQs are messy, don’t scale well, and they often originate from concerns that don’t come from users. Hard as they are to maintain, FAQs end up reading like hastily composed laundry lists.
