UX Glossary · H
Hick's Law
Also: Hick-Hyman Law
Decision time grows with the number of choices, logarithmically rather than linearly.
Hick’s Law states that the time to make a decision increases with the number of options, following a logarithmic relationship. William Edmund Hick published the work in 1952 and Ray Hyman extended it in 1953, which is why it is properly the Hick-Hyman Law.
Logarithmic matters: going from 2 options to 4 costs more than going from 20 to 22.
What it does and does not license
It is regularly cited as “fewer options is always better”, which overstates it. The original experiments involved simple, equally probable stimuli requiring immediate response, which is not what choosing from a well-organised menu is like.
Grouping changes the arithmetic. Thirty items in a flat list is a hard decision. The same thirty in six labelled groups is two easy decisions, because the user picks a group and then an item, and the law applies to each step separately.
Where it genuinely bites
Undifferentiated choices with no structure: a settings screen of forty toggles in no order, a navigation with fourteen equally weighted top-level items, a pricing page with nine plans.
It also argues for defaults. A sensible default converts a decision into an optional confirmation.
In practice
The useful move is usually not deletion but structure: group, order by likelihood, set a default, and use progressive disclosure for the rest.