Hick’s Law

Hick’s Law

The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.

More choices result in longer to think about these choices and make a decision.  Simplify choices for the user to ensure by breaking complex tasks into smaller steps. Avoid overwhelming users by highlighting recommended options. Understanding Hick’s law means you can design so that more users will visit and stay on your website.

Delivering a good user experience requires that first you find out the functionalities that will answer their needs; second, you need to guide them to the specific functions they need most. If users end up stuck in the decision-making process of “what next?”, they may become confused, frustrated, or leave your website.

Hick’s Law is a simple idea that says that the more choices you present your users with, the longer it will take them to reach a decision. It’s common sense, but often neglected in the rush to cram too much functionality into a site or application. As a designer, you will use Hick’s Law to examine how many functions you should offer at any part of your website and how this will affect your users’ overall approach to decision making.

You can find applications of Hick’s Law everywhere, not just in web and app design. Hick’s Law determined the number of controls on your microwave or your washing machine. A design principle known as “K.I.S.S.” (“Keep It Short and Simple”) became recognized in the 1960s for its effectiveness in this regard. Echoing Hick’s Law, K.I.S.S. states that simplicity is the key for a system to work in the best way.

Hick’s Law surrounds us. When you go to a high-end restaurant, often whoever has written the menu has used Hick’s Law to give you the “right” number of choices. By not getting bogged down in a decision-making process, you’re more likely to savour you meal out with the important company joining you.

We often have to make compromises with Hick’s Law, too – sometimes there is no avoiding complexity. This is why a DSLR camera has many more controls and options than a camera on a smartphone. The objective of Hick’s Law is to try and simplify the decision-making process, not eliminate that process entirely.

The landing page is the first glimpse your user will have of your site. That’s a make-it-or-break-it chance to create an impression using Hick’s Law. So, it’s particularly important to minimize choices here. Are you promoting a product or a service? If you’re selling aquariums, what’s your best-selling model? Introduce your company and highlight the model on the landing page, organizing text carefully. Most importantly, draw the user’s eye with a well-placed image (remember those sweet spots). They’ll see that before they start reading. Make the option you most want them to select stand out.

Separating the essential material from the secondary, less-likely-to-be-selected options is vital. However, because we have more familiarity with such functions and choices, we run the risk of forgetting that our users won’t have this. They’re arriving at the website or examining the product with a fresh perspective. So, understanding this difference, we must stand back and see what we will offer the users to get them to decide their next move. Good designers try to employ Hick’s Law to respect their users’ time and to ensure a high-quality user experience.

To employ Hick’s Law effectively in the design of interactive products, you can consider the following:

Categorizing Choice - You can see Hick’s Law in action in the navigation of almost any website. If your menus offered direct access to every link within your site, you could quickly overwhelm the visitor. If Amazon’s menus did that, it could take several hours to scroll through a menu! Suddenly, searching for a last-minute birthday present or replacing a printer cartridge becomes a “stressfest”! Happily, designers group menu items into high-level categories instead. These slowly expand as the users select options; the new categories then take users where they want to go. 

The card-sorting method is great to find out about the categories that make more sense to your users. You can use card-sorting to define the groupings of the functionalities and also the labels for these categories. You should do this early on in your project, before starting any sketching or wireframe.

As you move on in the design process, you can use eye-tracking to have a heat map of your site. This can help you work out where future design changes might benefit from further applying Hick’s Law. Heat maps display areas of a site that users look at most, showing problem areas quickly, too.

Obscuring Complexity - If you have a complex process, you can use Hick’s Law to rationalize only presenting specific parts of that process at any one time on the screen. Instead of throwing the entirety of your payment process up in a long, complex form, you can break it down into prompting users to register their e-mail and create a password. Then, you can give them another screen with shopping cart details, then another which collects delivery information and so on.

By reducing the number of options on screen, the payment process becomes more user friendly, and it’s more likely that the user will reach the end of the process than abandon the cart.

Hints from analytics

Once your app or website is launched, it is also important to keep an eye on how Hick’s law might be affecting your users’ experience. Here are some variables that you can use to analyse it:

Time on Site - There is a sweet spot for most websites when it comes to time spent on site. Too little time and the user has likely left without purchasing or registering. Too much time and they may get caught up in information consumption and again fail to make a purchase or register. Just enough time and the majority of users who will make a purchase and register will do so.

Page Views - Hick’s Law can also affect the number of page views that each user carries out. If the navigation menu is too complex, the number of page views is likely to be lower than if users were offered a navigation menu that better met their needs.

When to use Hick’s law?

Use Hick’s Law when response times are critical. It applies to any simple decision making with multiple options. This is especially important in control system environments.

If the nuclear reactor is overheating you wouldn’t want the user to search for the manual.

When things go wrong and alarms are triggered users need to be able to make quick decisions. When users enter the stress zone they get tunnel vision. If you combine that with the input from all the body senses, you can get a pretty nasty situation.

Having one choice acts as light in the tunnel when users are stressed or confused. When response time is critical keep the choices to a minimum. It will speed up the decision making.

When not to use Hick’s law?

It’s equally important to know when not to use it. Hick’s Law does not apply to complex decision making. If decisions are requiring extensive reading, researching, or extended deliberation. Hick’s 

Law won’t be able to predict the time to make a decision.

For example, choosing a dinner at a fancy restaurant or picking an AirBnB place to stay for your vacation next week.

These type of choices are complex. Users need to consider and weight many options before making the final decision. In these cases, Hick’s Law prediction will fail. It only applies to simple quick decisions in appropriate context.

References:

• Gross, J. (2012). ”Redefining Hick’s Law”. Smashing Magazine. Retrieved from:http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/02/redefining-hicks-law/
• Abowd, G., Foley, J. et al. (2014). ”Simple Models of Human Performance – Predictive Evaluation with Hick’s Law, Fitt’s Law, Power Law of Practice.” UI Design –Georgia Tech. Retrieved from: https://6750hcidesigngeorgiatech.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/human-perf-models-no-kslm.pdf
• Hochheim, W.H. (2008). ”Hick’s Law? Reaction Time in Combat? No!”. Practical Self-Defense / The Stay Alive Program. Retrieved from: http://practicalsd.blogspot.com/2008/12/hicks-law-...
• McGough, O. (2014). ”Juggling Jam – Applying Hick’s Law to Web Design”. (Private Blog). Retrieved from: https://6750hcidesigngeorgiatech.files.wordpress.c...
• 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