Short version: New user documents, particularly FAQs, need to be reviewed (and updated if necessary) at least monthly. At least if you’re serious about keeping your new users.
Here’s why …
FAQs are about frequently asked questions and what is being frequently asked changes over time.
We’ll use Second Life as an example.
While every new user is an individual, with an individual’s interests, what they’re interested in knowing trends towards the same things. Those trends change over roughly a 6-week period. Sometimes shorter, sometimes longer.
A lot depends on why they’re signing up in the first place. Something, somewhere pushed them over the line to actually signing up. It might be a blog post, or a newspaper article, or whatever, but you get swathes of users all with some commonality about their reasons for signing up.
At one point, almost all new users were asking about the economy. Some about making money, surely, but most of them were interested in how the Second Life economy compared to other, more traditional economies. Where money goes, where it comes from, how exchange-prices work, how Linden Lab determines how much new currency is required each day. All of that.
That went on for some weeks, before giving way to a new wave of people who wanted to learn how to create things. Builders, then texturers then scripters then socializers over the next several months. One month you’re hip-deep in pocket economists, and a few months later, every fresh-faced newbie wants to script. Then, a few weeks later, the wave of scripters gives way to a different trend.
If your FAQs aren’t responding to the changing trends in the interests and questions of new users then you’re just not doing the work needed to satisfy new users, and they’re certainly not FAQs, in the sense that they actually provide answers to what is being frequently asked.
If you are paying attention, though, and reviewing your FAQs for relevancy monthly, the good news is that you’ll keep more new users, and you’ll wind up with a selection of awesome FAQs. You don’t have to necessarily change them every month, the trends and tides tend to change slower than that, but they need to be reviewed, and you need to make sure that they’re getting into the hands of your new users.
Living environments demand living documents.
I thought FAQs were more like “How do I get your stupid software to run on my computer?” Silly me.
(And if Jacek says the answer is “Dump your dumb Vista laptop and buy a MacBook” I’m gonna hit her. Or something. *giggle*)
Second Life has no knowledge. It has lore.
It affects everything, from technical documentation to policy – and is especially damning when it’s about policy.