My Wife's Shopping List - FAQ Content
My wife's great at preparing for a supermarket run. She sees what we need, she checks the account, and then she makes a list. We usually come back from the store only with what we need.
The problem is that if anyone else were to shop with that list, they'd probably eat up more than a little time trying to correlate the items on it with those in the store.
For instance, you've probably had the experience of being in the dairy section and noticing the next list item is radishes. Back to the other side of the market you go.
If you were to make a list that anyone could utilize, it might look like this:
Produce
Tomatoes
Peppers
Carrots
Radishes
Frozen Foods
Pizza
Veggie Burgers
Dairy
Milk
Cottage Cheese
Yogurt
Just the simple act of organizing the list items under headers makes that list, and the store, easier to navigate.
So why not apply a similar formatting style to FAQ help content?
Ah...
By now it's pretty common knowledge that folks scan and skim on the web, so it's good to load the front of your phrases and sentences with important keywords.
However, most sites' FAQs are in Question / Answer format, which makes it difficult to scan through the lists and find your radishes.
That format was okay when FAQ literally meant Frequently Asked Question (meaning a short list of stuff people often ask about).
But now it appears that organizations use that space as a dumping ground for a lot of extraneous content that could be helpful: if only it were allowed to stretch out in the aisles.
And so back to the example of my wife's shopping list.
Logical Groupings
The first thing to do is organize the information into logical groupings that can be progressively disclosed. For instance, a financial services site's primary grouping might look like this:
Banking
Auto Financing
Commercial Financing
Company Info
Careers
Security & Privacy
Technology
A secondary grouping under "Banking" might contain:
CDs
Debit Card / ATMs
Interest Checking
Money market
Online Savings
Online Banking
Opening an Account
A tertiary grouping under CDs:
Fees
Laddering
Making additional deposits to a CD
Maturity of a CD
Minimum deposit
Opening a CD
Note too that the lists have been alphabetized to make them even more easy to scan and comb through with Ctrl F searches.
Exit
This type of structure seems to me more intuitive and logical.
Although it may take users a few more clicks to drill down to the info they're looking for, it can keep them from turning in circles trying to figure out which part of the store they need to be in.
Like I do when I use my wife's shopping list at the supermarket!
The problem is that if anyone else were to shop with that list, they'd probably eat up more than a little time trying to correlate the items on it with those in the store.
For instance, you've probably had the experience of being in the dairy section and noticing the next list item is radishes. Back to the other side of the market you go.
If you were to make a list that anyone could utilize, it might look like this:
Produce
Tomatoes
Peppers
Carrots
Radishes
Frozen Foods
Pizza
Veggie Burgers
Dairy
Milk
Cottage Cheese
Yogurt
Just the simple act of organizing the list items under headers makes that list, and the store, easier to navigate.
So why not apply a similar formatting style to FAQ help content?
Ah...
By now it's pretty common knowledge that folks scan and skim on the web, so it's good to load the front of your phrases and sentences with important keywords.
However, most sites' FAQs are in Question / Answer format, which makes it difficult to scan through the lists and find your radishes.
That format was okay when FAQ literally meant Frequently Asked Question (meaning a short list of stuff people often ask about).
But now it appears that organizations use that space as a dumping ground for a lot of extraneous content that could be helpful: if only it were allowed to stretch out in the aisles.
And so back to the example of my wife's shopping list.
Logical Groupings
The first thing to do is organize the information into logical groupings that can be progressively disclosed. For instance, a financial services site's primary grouping might look like this:
Banking
Auto Financing
Commercial Financing
Company Info
Careers
Security & Privacy
Technology
A secondary grouping under "Banking" might contain:
CDs
Debit Card / ATMs
Interest Checking
Money market
Online Savings
Online Banking
Opening an Account
A tertiary grouping under CDs:
Fees
Laddering
Making additional deposits to a CD
Maturity of a CD
Minimum deposit
Opening a CD
Note too that the lists have been alphabetized to make them even more easy to scan and comb through with Ctrl F searches.
Exit
This type of structure seems to me more intuitive and logical.
Although it may take users a few more clicks to drill down to the info they're looking for, it can keep them from turning in circles trying to figure out which part of the store they need to be in.
Like I do when I use my wife's shopping list at the supermarket!
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