FAQ page

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Fri, 2006-07-28 at 03:21 +1200, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> I think FAQs made sense where they were invented, in mailing lists and 
> Usenet groups before the Web existed, because new subscribers had no 
> other reference to look at.
> 
> I think FAQs do not make any sense at all on a Web site, for several 
> reasons.

I don't disagree with any of your statements. However, I would like to
say that something that works better than theorizing is doing a little
research. Let me use your suggestions for reorganizing the FAQ to spring
board into a concern I have.

I would say that Ubuntu (and therefore the Ubuntu website) is big enough
to start considering doing user testing in this regard. Sometimes giving
users a simple task and then watching (and keeping your mouth shut) as
they try to achieve it reveals unexpected things. For example, things we
think are broken may work fine, and things we like may be
non-functional.

I have done a fair amount of usability testing and can say that three 20
min user sessions can produce more relevant results than hours of
meetings and discussion.

Have we yet done any website usability testing? We're planning a face
lift shortly (not decided how major this will be) and I wonder if we
should consider doing this as part of the process.

I have also made arrangements to get access to the website server logs
so that I can start analyzing the success rate of searches, so maybe we
could also look at that data to find how users click through the sites.
That too can be phenomenally revealing.

Again, I'm not in any way disagreeing with you, but before deciding on
these kinds of changes I like to learn how our users see our site. That
way, instead of guessing (and fixing, and guessing, and fixing...) we
can measure performance and success rate, make changes and then see via
scientific, before and after numbers, if the changes were successful.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode