What is Hick's law in UX?

Where the law comes from

The psychologist William Edmund Hick studied reaction times in the early 1950s. He found that the time people needed to choose grew with the number of options, but not in a straight line. Each added option cost a bit less time than the one before it, because people tend to narrow things down in groups rather than checking every item one by one. Ray Hyman worked on the same idea around the same time, which is why you also see it called the Hick-Hyman law.

The original experiments were about lights and buttons, not websites. Designers borrowed the idea, and it works as a guideline more than as a precise formula for screens.

What it means for interface design

Every extra option adds a little thinking. Add enough of them and the screen starts to feel heavy, even if no single choice is hard. People hesitate, skim, pick the first thing, or leave.

That does not mean you should strip everything to a bare minimum. It means you should be deliberate about what is in front of someone at the moment they need to decide, and about how that choice is presented.

Practical ways to apply it

• Highlight one primary action per screen and let secondary actions look quieter.
• Group related options under clear headings, so people choose a group first and an item second.
• Use progressive disclosure: show the common settings now and tuck advanced ones behind a link.
• Break long forms into steps, so each step asks for a small decision.
• Offer sensible defaults and a recommended option when choices are complex, such as pricing plans.
• Cut anything nobody uses. Analytics and interviews will show you which menu items collect dust.

Where it gets misused

The most common error is treating it as an instruction to hide everything. A burger menu that conceals the main navigation reduces visible options, but it also makes people hunt, and that usually costs more than it saves. Fewer choices on screen is not the same as less effort.

Also, experts behave differently. A power user in a professional tool may want a dense interface with every command at hand, and a stripped-down version would slow them down. Know whom you are designing for.

When to ignore it

When the decision is the point, more options can be a feature. Someone buying a camera lens, choosing a font or browsing a recipe collection often wants a wide selection and a good way to filter it. In those cases, the answer is not fewer items but better organization: filters, sorting, search and clear labels. Use Hick's law to structure the choices, not to delete them.