Usability Standard 7:
Make the Site Flexible

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.15

Personalization is a powerful tool for frequent users. Witness the proliferation of "my" services such as My Yahoo that allow users to pull their favorite items -- links, interactive tools, search parameters, preferences for particular types of news and content -- out of a huge mass of information and store them in a single place for easy access.

In the drive for more personalization, sites should not neglect the mother of all personalization features: the bookmark. Make it easy for users to bookmark a destination: don't hide the desired URL in a welter of frames, don't generate temporary URLs that disappear without a trace, and give the page a concise and descriptive name that will stand out in the user's bookmark list.