Flexibility and Efficiency Use

Flexibility and efficiency of use heuristic principle is about giving your users ways to speed up their work with more efficiency and flexibility.

It’s the seventh heuristics guideline of Nielsen’s Heuristics. Put in Nielsen’s words,

Accelerators — unseen by the novice user — may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.
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Examples of Flexibility and efficiency of use

Almost every software like Adobe Photoshop, Sketch provides shortcut commands to its users. While few shortcuts command like those for copy, cut, redo undo are almost universal in nature, there are few which are subjective to the software. Yet with repeated use, users get the hang of these.

Mac OS gives the users the freedom to create their custom keyboard and shortcut commands.

Another way through which you can enhance efficiency for users is to give them easy access to functionality that they need the most.

So on a Banking app, if someone wants to transfer money – giving them the list of their most common and recent transaction saves both time and mental effort. In this image, the author shows how the banking app gives user the list of the recent beneficiaries. This way they do not need to remember the account details everytime they have to transfer money. Which shows flexibility and efficiency of use.