Hick’s law, also known as Hick-Hyman Law, is named after William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman, who are psychologists from Britain and America. Hick’s Law predicts that the time and the effort it takes to make a decision, increases with the number of options. This means that the more choices that you give a person the longer it will take for them to make a decision.

RT = a + b log2 (n)

This is the formula for Hick’s law

By using Hick’s law whilst designing interfaces you reduce the likelihood of the end user being overwhelmed with information. The less options you give the end user the less likely it will be that they will get frustrated and give up. You can break options down into smaller sections to make options less overwhelming and help the end user to select options in a more logical manner.

Hicks Law Diagram

Hick’s law was tested within a busy supermarket with a variety of Jam. Two different stalls were used for this experiment, one with 24 options and another with only 6. 60% of people passing the stall with 24 options stopped and only 3% purchased a jam. The stall with 6 jams 40% of people stopped, although 30% purchased. The reason for this was that they were not overwhelmed with options. They could easily remember the jam that they liked, rather than people who tasted the 24 jams had too many options to remember, therefore found it difficult to select one jam.

Typekit has a vast amount of options that can be overwhelming for the end user. There are so many fonts available and we need to find a way to break them down into smaller pieces of information to enable us to make a choice. By reducing the options we can make a choice easier. Typekit also gives you a notification that there are a lot of options and why not reduce them using their menu.

This is how Typekit narrow down the options for the end user

Spotify are also good with trying to break down content into smaller more manageable pieces of information. The reason for this means that users are not overwhelmed and can break down content to find what they are looking for with easy. Personally this is one of the reasons that I like Spotify, a lot of songs are broken down into smaller sections to make it easier to find the music that you want.

This shows the different genres that Spotify break their songs down into

Resources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hick%27s_law

• https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/hick-s-law-making-the-choice-easier-for-users

• https://uxplanet.org/design-principles-hicks-law-quick-decision-making-3dcc1b1a0632

• https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/applying-hicks-law-to-web-design-free-example-wireframes/

• https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/02/redefining-hicks-law/