Laws of UX
Hick's Law
The more choices you show, the longer people take to decide — and the likelier they pick nothing.
Where it comes from
It traces back to a pair of psychology experiments in the early 1950s, where William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman measured how a person's reaction time lengthens as the number of choices in front of them grows. Decades later it became one of the most-cited principles in interface design.
Why it matters for your website
Too much choice is the enemy of action. Hick's Law shows decision time rises with the number of options. Every extra choice slows your visitor down and raises the chance they leave without deciding at all.
On a website, that extra decision time rarely looks like someone pausing to think. It looks like a bounce. Faced with a navigation bar of twenty links, or a pricing page of six near-identical plans, visitors don't patiently weigh each option — they feel the effort, and leave for somewhere that makes the next step obvious.
The cost lands hardest at exactly the moments that matter most: the hero, the pricing table, the checkout. These are your highest-intent screens, and an overloaded set of choices there quietly bleeds away conversions you've already paid to win.
Wrong vs right
A primary navigation bar with 14 top-level links, each opening a mega-menu of 20+ items — the visitor scans, stalls, and gives up before finding anything.
Five clear top-level sections that group the same destinations. The choice at each step is small, so the path forward is obvious.
A pricing page showing six plans side by side with near-identical feature lists, asking the visitor to compare everything at once.
Three plans with one visibly recommended, and a short 'best for…' line on each. The decision is pre-framed, so it's faster to make.
A sign-up form with eighteen fields on one screen, optional and required mixed together, no sense of how long it'll take.
The three fields you actually need now, with the rest deferred. Each screen asks for little, so momentum carries the visitor through.
Understanding Hick's Law
Hick's Law describes a simple relationship: the more options someone has to choose between, the longer the choice takes — and the increase is steep at first, then levels off. The practical takeaway isn't a precise number; it's that every option you add carries a real, cumulative cost in attention, and that cost is paid by every visitor, every time.
Crucially, the law is about the effort of deciding, not the raw count of things on screen. Ten options sorted into three clear groups can be faster to navigate than five ungrouped ones, because grouping lets the eye eliminate whole branches at a glance. Defaults, a recommended option, sensible ordering and clear visual hierarchy all shrink the effective number of choices without removing any functionality.
So the goal is rarely 'have fewer features'. It's to make the next decision small and obvious wherever a choice gates progress — and to lean on grouping and emphasis, not deletion, to get there.
How Kweri checks it
Kweri's UX lens flags screens where the number of competing choices is likely to stall a decision — crowded navigation, multiple equally-weighted calls to action, long undifferentiated option lists. This is a judgement call, not a hard count: a deliberate, well-grouped set of options is fine, and Kweri weighs the grouping and hierarchy, not just the raw number. It can't measure your actual decision times — only an A/B test on your traffic can do that — so it points to where Hick's Law is probably costing you and suggests what to test.
FAQ
What is Hick's Law?
Hick's Law (or the Hick–Hyman Law) states that the time it takes someone to make a decision grows as the number of choices increases. In design, it's used to argue for simpler, better-organised sets of options.
What is the formula for Hick's Law?
The classic form is RT = a + b·log₂(n + 1), where RT is reaction time, n is the number of equally-likely choices, and a and b are constants. The log term is the important part: decision time rises with the number of options, but with diminishing increases.
Does Hick's Law mean fewer options is always better?
No. It means each decision should be as simple as possible — often achieved by grouping or sequencing options rather than deleting them. Ten choices organised into three clear groups can be faster than five ungrouped ones.
How is Hick's Law different from Fitts's Law?
Hick's Law is about how long it takes to decide between options. Fitts's Law is about how long it takes to physically reach a target once you've decided. They often apply to the same screen — fewer, larger, well-placed choices help on both fronts.
Is the '7±2' rule the same as Hick's Law?
No — that's Miller's Law, about working-memory capacity, and it's frequently overstated. Hick's Law is specifically about how decision time grows with the number of choices. They're related but distinct.
Where does Hick's Law matter most on a website?
Anywhere a choice gates progress: primary navigation, pricing tables, form fields, and the set of calls to action on a landing page. These are the highest-intent moments, so friction there is the most expensive.
Related principles
Too many options causes paralysis — people often choose nothing when faced with abundance.
The brain has a limited processing budget — demand too much and performance collapses.
The time to hit a target depends on its size and distance — small, far targets are hard to reach.
Working memory holds only a handful of items — chunk information to ease the load.
Attribution & sources
Identified by William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman (1952). Catalogued from Laws of UX (Jon Yablonski).
Established experimentally by Hick (1952) and Hyman (1953); popularised for designers by Jon Yablonski's Laws of UX.
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