[Sigia-l] Use of FAQ

[Katherine Lumb]

This very issue just came up in a testing session our Research department conducted on visual comps of a proposed home page for a site redesign. The seven test subjects were considered "internet savvy" and "accessed the Internet (other than for e-mail) frequently or occasionally - on a weekly basis," according to the psychographic. Everyone working on the project was stunned to discover that hardly a single participant could correctly define the meaning of the acronym "FAQ" and all were unsure what content might be found under that navigation label. Responses included: "Don't know what it stands for,""Sounds legal," and "I have seen before, but I don't know what it means."

These findings were a real wake up call. Based on these results, we changed "FAQs" to "Frequently Asked Questions" throughout our nav. The experience vividly reinforced the need for user testing, and reminded us all of the danger of making assumptions about the familiarity our target users have with acronyms and conventions that we designers consider painfully obvious.

K

> Katherine K. Lumb   Content Designer
> p 646.336.3418   f 646.336.3433   klumb at semaphorepartners.com
> .......................................................................
> 
> Semaphore Partners     www.semaphorepartners.com
> 
> "Top 15 Interactive Agencies"  2002 Advertising Age
> "Top 20 Interactive Agencies"  2001 Adweek 
> "Top 25 Professional Services Firms"  2001 IDC Ranking 
> "100 Most Technically Innovative Companies in the World"  2001 InfoWorld 


-----Original Message-----
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2002 09:55:57 -0500
From: "Adam Doerr" <Adam.Doerr at stamats.com>
To: <sigia-l at asis.org>
Subject: [Sigia-l] Use of "FAQ'

This is similar to the "logo as home" question - a convention that
everyone may not know.

If you're providing a Frequently Asked Questions page for a non-expert
audience, do they understand the FAQ abbreviation? Would it be better to
present it as "FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions" or just FAQ by itself?
Has anyone observed this during testing?