7 Tips to build great FAQ sections in Confluence
I feel bad for FAQ pages!
Although they are great in helping everyone (inside and outside of Confluence) find answers to their frequently asked questions, they are often… poorly managed and a bit confusing.
And the reason? Ain’t nobody got time for that!
For many, FAQ pages are simply thought of as lists of questions and answers. They are in a way, but they are more than just that. If done right, FAQ pages help you centralize knowledge and make life easier for your teams, clients, and partners.
In this article, we will share a couple of tips and best practices on how to create and manage effective Confluence FAQ pages.
Tip #1: Be selective with your questions
We often fall into the trap of creating FAQ hubs filled with questions nobody asked for. This is particularly true in public FAQs, where businesses tend to show how great they are and all.
Don’t do that! Instead, try to focus on the real issues and questions your teams and clients have. For this, you need to study the multitude of channels where you can find feedback including your apps, Confluence, JSM, and others. This way your FAQ hub is easier to navigate and questions are easier to locate and find.
Tip #2 Structure and organize your FAQ hub
FAQ hubs are all about structure and organization. You don’t want to list all your questions and answers on the same Confluence page. That is the old fashioned way.
What you can do instead is leverage the notions of parent and child pages to group similar themes. And then navigate through using page trees. But that is too much work, right? Surely there is an app for that. And there is!
FAQ for Confluence comes with a pre-defined structure and the views that go with it. You can create FAQ pages in which you can add categories and then questions & answers. So basically the structure goes something like this: FAQ hub > FAQ page > categories > answers.
For example, within your corporate FAQ, you might create an onboarding FAQ page. There, you can create multiple categories under which you can list questions.
The structure is simple yet intuitive and helps users easily navigate your FAQ hub.
Tip #3: Categorize and classify FAQs
Questions need to be easily located, and what better way to achieve this than to use categories and labels. The first step here is to establish a list of clearly defined categories like remote working, processes, troubleshooting, etc. Each category needs to address a specific use case and target audience.
Within our FAQ app, we made it mandatory to categorize questions. That wasn’t the case in previous releases and found out that a lot of questions were left uncategorized, which affected the overall experience.
Upon creating questions, your teams need to associate them with one or multiple categories. This makes looking for questions a breeze thanks to the categories view.
Tip #4: Make it search friendly
Categories facilitate navigation inside your FAQ hub and allow your teams to access a host of similar questions. But if we have one question, it is always more convenient to just hit that search bar. Whether your FAQ content is for internal or external use, it needs to be optimized for search engines and contain those magic keywords.
Try to use focus keywords and phrases that your target audience might use to access your FAQ hub. But how can I identify them? In Confluence, there are some cool apps that help you study your audience behavior and search patterns such as Viewtracker - Analytics for Confluence, and others.
FAQ for Confluence comes with a built-in search functionality allowing you to find questions by simply typing some relevant keywords. Additionally, Confluence Advanced search contains a variety of search types related to the FAQ including: FAQ, category and question. This way you can simply hit your search query and fine tune results based on these types.
Tip #5: Make it easily accessible
In addition to making your FAQ search-friendly, you need to also put it out there. For example, if you are creating an FAQ section within your onboarding space, it is important to embed it within the homepage, the space sidebar, and other relevant pages.
The same applies to public FAQ sections, they need to be linked to from various locations within your website.
Tip #6: Make it collaborative
“By the people for the people” is the essence of a great FAQ hub. The key here is to involve your teams and grant the right edit permissions to your top knowledge contributors (the ones with the answers).But don't forget the ones with the questions. Make sure to facilitate the process of asking questions and providing feedback on your entire FAQ hub experience.
Tip #7: Continuously monitor and update
There is nothing more frustrating than an outdated piece of content. You are happy that you have found your answer, only to find out it has been last updated in 2015. This is not a good look. Another big issue as well is duplicated questions. This always happens to me in the Atlassian Community!
To avoid this, make sure to continuously update your FAQ content according to specific criteria. For example, following a new release, you need to update all questions related to that specific app and create questions for new features.
Another criteria might be declining viewership for specific categories which might indicate that the content is not relevant, not important or not easy to find using Confluence search.
And finally, you can never properly update your FAQ hub without including your users. Put in place a feedback loop that will facilitate reporting outdated content and duplicated questions.
Tell us what you think?
And there you have it! FAQ hubs are crucial to keep your stakeholders informed, and more importantly engaged, at all times. In your opinion what makes a great FAQ hub? Tell us what you think in the comments below. And if you liked some of the screenshots, then you can give FAQ for Confluence a try here.