Hick's law

Hick's law, or the Hick–Hyman law is named after British and American psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman. It describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices.

Increasing the number of choices increases the decision time logarithmically. The amount of time taken to process a certain amount of bits in the Hick–Hyman law is known as the rate of gain of information.

Hick's law may support some computing menu design decisions. For example, to find a given word (e.g. the name of a command) in a randomly ordered word list (e.g. a menu). If the list is alphabetical, and the user knows the name of the command, he or she may be able to use a subdividing strategy that works in logarithmic time.^[1]

References[change | change source]

↑ Landauer, T.K.; Nachbar, D.W. (1985). "Selection from alphabetic and numeric menu trees using a touch screen". Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '85. p. 73. doi:10.1145/317456.317470. ISBN 978-0-89791-149-8. S2CID 17669570.

[1] Landauer, T.K.; Nachbar, D.W. (1985). "Selection from alphabetic and numeric menu trees using a touch screen". Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '85. p. 73. doi:10.1145/317456.317470. ISBN 978-0-89791-149-8. S2CID 17669570.

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