Hick’s Law: The Psychology of Decision Making
Choices, choices, choices, which one should you make?
Have you ever wondered why a single card menu or the specials board in front of an café, seems more appealing than a 7 page long, intricately designed menu? Most brands and designers fall into the wrong notion that- more attracts more. But this approach could annihilate your designs and render bad user experience. This is where Hick’s law come into play- to strike a perfect balance between minimalism and purpose.
In this article, we’ll go over Hick’s Law in detail and analyze its application to UX design. We are looking at Day 1 of our series “30 day of UX principle and laws”.
In this article, we’ll look into the following topics:
Breaking down Hick’s Law
British psychologist William Edmund Hick, proposed the Hick’s law in 1952 thereby, establishing a scientific connection between stimuli and reaction time. And how he did it is a fascinating story.
“We live in a world of complex and abundant choices, but research suggests that the more choices we have, the less likely we are to make a decision at all.” — Sheena Iyengar, author of The Art of Choosing
In his first experiment, he put 10 lamps around the subject in a circle. Each of his 10 fingers had 10 Morse keys that went with one of these lamps. Every 5 seconds, a pre-punched tape randomly turns on one of the lamps. There were four electric pens that wrote down what lamp was turned on using a 4-digit code. The person had to press the right key for the pens to record their answer. He wanted to know how long it took for the person to choose between the 10 choices after a lamp turned on. His design could show up to 15 positions, but he only needed it to record the time accurately
Hick repeated the experiment with the same task and 10 options to choose from. In the first two trials, participants were asked to do the task with the goal of being accurate. In the last trial, participants were told to complete the task as quickly as possible. The results showed that when people are presented with too many options, they tend to perform poorly, regardless of whether they are trying to be accurate or fast.
Hick’s Law was formulated on the assumption that the brain has a finite capacity for information processing. When the brain is confronted with too many options, it becomes overloaded, which can result in decision fatigue, indecision, and a poor user experience. As a result, designers who understand Hick’s Law aim to simplify options and display information in an understandable manner.
To break down in simpler words, too many choices create confusion, leading to a bad user experience.
Many areas of digital design, including website navigation, menu design, and form layout, show how Hick’s Law applies to UX design. A website with too many navigation options can make it difficult for customers to find what they are looking for.
Hick’s Law and UX Design
Let’s say you are designing for a new website, to record all the best dishes and recipes from around the world. And for this project, you have collected 1000+ recipes from all 195 countries. But how will you design your navigation bar for a seamless user experience?
Having 195 options for the users to browse through is completely insane. One way to approach this is to categorize your data into smaller sets and gradually introduce each set as the user progresses along. To draw from the same example: An Ideal solution will be to divide all the countries into their subsidiary continents, then create another subset, which divides on the basis of countries.
And this is exactly what Hick’s law portrays, to offer minimal options so as to not overwhelm the user. Some might mistake this for withholding contexts and experiences from the users, but the law emphasizes gently introducing options to the users in a step process, rather than overwhelming them with innumerable options.
Here are some Examples
To further understand Hick’s law let's look at some brands that successfully practice Hick's law and some brands that failed to do so.
Let’s start with some good applications of Hick’s law :
Amazon’s Checkout Page
The checkout process on Amazon’s website portrays the application of Hick’s Law amazingly. Rather than overloading users with several alternatives at once, Amazon divides the checkout process into steps, each with a single unambiguous call to action.
Airbnb’s Easy Navigation
The navigation menu on Airbnb’s mobile app is another good tribute to the law. The menu has a straightforward and obvious hierarchy, which reduces the number of options available to consumers at any given time.
Now, it's time to learn what not to do. Here are some bad uses of Hick’s law.
Windows 8 OS Fail
Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system features a tile-based interface with a large number of options. The intention of the design was to make the interface modern and flexible. However, the interface overwhelmed and confused a lot of users leading to a poor adoption rate.
The Cheesecake Factory Menu
The Cheesecake factory has one of the most intimidating and lengthy menus ever. The menu, consisting of over 21 pages and over 200+ options has made it difficult for people to choose what they want. This strategy might have helped The Cheesecake Factory to stand out and seem unique, but at the end of the day yields to bad user experience.
Difficulties and Limitations
Hick’s law may seem very simple while you are reading this, but the complexity increases 10 folds when you have to implement it. Let’s list down all the ways one might go wrong while implementing the law.
- Designers may remove critical functionality or limit the flexibility of the user interface by lowering the number of options provided to users.
- Focusing too much on Hick's Law may lead to a lack of design creativity and innovation.
- Balancing Hick's Law with other UX design ideas and factors is hard and challenging.
Conclusion
Understanding Hick’s Law helps UX designers create interfaces that are efficient, effective, and fun for users. These concepts can help designers construct user-centered interfaces that meet their target audiences’ needs.
This is Day 1 of the series “30 Days of UX Principles and Laws”
Check out Day 2: Fitt’s Law.
Here’s Day 3: Law of Proximity
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