UX designLesson 1 of 1 in the course Usability principles

Hick’s Law: Choice Time, Information, and Interface Design

5 flashcards · 5 quiz questions · 5 match pairs · 5 fill-in sentences · English

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Summary

Hick’s law describes how the number and likelihood of available choices affect the time it takes to decide. It is useful for understanding decision-making and for designing interfaces that make choices easier to navigate.

Hick’s law, also called the Hick–Hyman law, relates the time required to make a choice to the number of available alternatives. In general, increasing the number of choices increases decision time, but the increase is logarithmic—not directly proportional to the number of choices.

All flashcards

Hick’s law
A model in which choice reaction time generally increases logarithmically with the number and probabilities of available alternatives.
Logarithmic choice-time growth
Adding alternatives generally increases decision time, but not in direct proportion to the number of alternatives.
Stimulus–response compatibility
The degree to which a response naturally corresponds to the stimulus that prompts it.
Shannon entropy of choice alternatives
A measure of uncertainty calculated as H=∑i=1npilog⁡2(1/pi)H=\sum_{i=1}^{n}p_i\log_2(1/p_i).
Interface design and Hick’s law
Choice count matters, but organization and users’ search strategies affect whether decision time follows a logarithmic pattern.

Quiz questions

  1. What did J. Merkel report about response time and stimulus-set size in 1885?Answer: Response time was longer when a stimulus came from a larger set.
  2. What does stimulus–response compatibility describe?Answer: How naturally a response corresponds to the stimulus that prompts it.
  3. Why may searching an alphabetized command list take less time than scanning a random list?Answer: A user who knows the command name can narrow the search by subdividing the list.
  4. Which finding about saccadic responses is described as a possible departure from Hick’s law?Answer: Saccadic time may show no relationship to element count or may decrease as it rises.
  5. What relationship did E. Roth report between IQ and information-processing speed?Answer: IQ was correlated with information-processing speed.

Based on the Wikipedia article Hick's law, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Adapted into a summary, flashcards and quizzes.

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