[Sigia-l] Sigia-l Digest, Vol 26, Issue 2

[Andrew Boyd]

On 11/3/06, David Talley <dtalley at awwa.org> wrote:

> Users come to the site with those questions. Why not give them the
> answers, rather than repeating the questions at them? Seems like a set
> of relevant, concise category labels would take the user beyond where
> they start out, where confronting them with the questions amounts to
> sitting down with them and puzzling for a bit. I could give up the
> brevity if it truly did contribute to clarity.

Hi David,

I would say that "give answers, not questions" works well where you
have a captive audience, i.e. they need the information and will go
the extra distance to find it.

Where the audience is free range, the questions entice them into
discovering the answer. The project I'm on at the moment (watch
http://pbs.gov.au over the next month!) is using questions to entice
site users into learning more about what they are reading - this is a
deliberate and specific education agenda.

Cheers, Andrew