Enhance Your Site's Utility
Better Ways Of Answering User Questions

Very often, web site visitors find it difficult to locate answers to their questions. Either the web site provides these answers in a page not easily viewable or the question is overlooked altogether. Finding ways to offer improved service is imperative in today's context. These questions may actually provide valuable clues to user preferences and requirements.

Broad Daylight Inc., a company in California has devised a method to provide better and easy to find answers to user's questions. Three questions need to be answered- what is it that people want to know? How easily should it be made available? How intelligibly can these answers be worded?

The proposed tool cannot function without human involvement. As a first step, it requires sample e-mails to be collected. This is then analysed to determine the nature of questions that people tend to ask. In many cases sites do provide answers but they lie buried in hard-to-locate pages. So steps ought to be taken to ensure that answers are given on easily traceable pages.

Unable to find answers, visitors often rush in email queries. These could be made the core of a FAQ which are a ubiquitous feature of all web sites. The FAQ should include answers to two kinds of queries- common topics and popularly asked questions. Confronted with new questions the staff involved could give clear solutions. Moreover a web site manager should always look upon user questions as a means to comprehend what interests them. Providing for a FAQ preempts a score of similar worded questions and relieves the staff of a huge burden of answering the same questions repetitively. The site owners ought to give good answers. Intelligible, user friendly, jargon free answers need to be put up. The effort that goes in giving good looks to a site should be extended to enhance its utility too. People who frequent web sites are more often than not in search of information of some kind.

A web site is of a dynamic nature constantly evolving itself; it is in many ways a conversation between the site and the visitor. Insights regarding user's interests may be valuable information for the site owners. They may throw light on how users actually use the company's products as well as what exactly they want to know about the company.