Essentials of UI Design XXXXIII: Simplifying Design Using Hick’s Law
Psychology is important in product design, especially when users must make decisions, it must be an easy process for them. That’s where Hick’s Law (or the Hick-Hyman Law) comes in. This article is a fast-paced introduction to the UX application of this psychology principle.
What is Hick’s Law?
The essence of Hick’s Law is that the more choices you offer a person, the longer it takes them to reach a decision. In the context of user experience design, the law is applied to avoid overwhelming users with too many choices.
To illustrate, imagine an alarm application that a user can set to wake them up early for work. To turn off this alarm, there are 4 buttons: Snooze, Stop, Home, Power. That means four options the user must choose from. If there were 8 buttons instead just to turn off the alarm, there would be a corresponding time increase to decide on which button to choose. The time to respond grows logarithmically with the number of buttons.
Presenting people with too many options in digital products tends to cause indecisiveness. Thankfully, Hick’s Law can help you design better experience for your pop-up form, mobile app, or website.
Using Hick’s Law to Simplify Design
Curating the screens and user flows on UILand has involved the painstaking selection of apps that observe Hick’s Law. These are some simple steps you can take to make it easier for users to make decisions in your digital product.
Reduce options for time-bound tasks
You can speed up user response time by providing only the most essential options in navigation menus, forms, pricing pages, and even homepage.
Simplify complex processes into intuitive steps
This is useful in processes like checkout. Users can view and edit their cart on one page, for instance, before providing shipping info and payment information on subsequent pages. This is known as progressive disclosure.
Highlight recommended options
Try reducing the time it takes a user to decide by highlighting or prioritizing a recommended option in your design. On webpages, you may choose to offer these options: Accept cookies, Decline, and Tweak Settings. More users are likely to choose a highlighted option (often Accept cookies).
Users have plenty to worry about already. You can help them by selecting Hick’s Law-respecting user flows from UILand. Increasing user engagement is essential to growth hacking.
