FAQ vs Q&A

[Cari3]

Looking for best practice recommendations.  I just joined a company that has their HR knowledge base set up with multiple articles each with one question and answer.  My recommendation was to consolidate based on topic area and create FAQ articles with the questions and answers all in one article.  Curious what others think or practice?  One school of thought is KCS - simple, quick answers to a user's search, but another school of thought is providing more answers in one article to keep the user from going in and out of articles if they have multiple questions on the topic.

Thoughts?

[GLewis5]

I  think ServiceNow's KB design would favor shorter articles, with each article addressing a single question. The design of ServiceNow's knowledge base assumes that Search will be the dominant access method.

[David Kay]

We recommend the KCS Q&A-about-one-thing model over the FAQ model for a few reasons:

• Search works better when the article being indexed covers a single topic, rather than many
• Once the user opens the article, they don't have a second step to find their particular question within an FAQ article
• If you attach articles to cases / incidents, you know what the actual question was, not just a vague topic area.  This holds true for self-service page views as well
• It's easier to maintain / update short single-topic articles

Of course, the downside is that you get a lot of articles this way, but it's a worthwhile trade-off in our experience.

[CelesteTroxell]

I'm curious as to how you decided to handle this situation. I'm looking for a similar fix.....

[Leri Andrews]

As David has already said, you have to make a judgement of admin volume vs findability. It will depend on a number of questions you have to ask yourself:

1. Am I going to be implementing a unified taxonomy and a mega-menu with topic pages.  How will 32 individual articles on 'Maternity Leave' work in this format?
2. Am I surfacing these articles as answers in a virtual agent? Directing someone to article 4 specifically on 'returning to work' will work better than sending them to a single article where they will have to perform a visual search or cntrl+F to find what they need
3. Do I use Zing or AI search? 
4. Do I want to link other articles to a specific FAQ - I can use bookmarks to do this.
5. Am I translating into 12 other languages?

My ideal solution would be to have knowledge blocks to allow the virtual agent to take people to an individual answer and then to consolidate into a single article for the purposes of people navigating or searching in portal. Sadly instead I have a knowledge base of individual FAQs that the VA accesses and a duplicate article on the portal (we don't use knowledge blocks because we have templates).