Concept
Hick's Law
choice-architecture decision-making UX
The more choices or options presented at once, the longer it takes a person to decide — and the longer that decision takes, the more likely they are to abandon the task entirely, rather than eventually deciding well. Ramli John distinguishes Hick's Law (about the number of options increasing decision time) from Choice Overload (Paradox of Choice) (about the number of options reducing decision satisfaction and follow-through) as closely related but separately-named effects.
Super Mario Bros. applies it in its opening seconds: rather than offering a choice of character, outfit, or starting world, the first level presents exactly one enemy and one set of coin blocks — no decision required at all beyond moving forward.
A real-world website redesign. Fitness-tracking site Daily Burn reduced its homepage from 25 clickable options down to 5, raising conversions by 20% (cited via Philip Graves's Consumerology) (see Daily Burn Hicks-Law Homepage Study). Design tool Canva avoids showing its full library of thousands of templates at once, instead asking new users a single categorizing question (teacher, small business, big brand, student) and showing only a filtered, relevant subset in response (see Canva Hicks-Law Onboarding Case).
Choice doesn't always feel as good as people predict it will. Google tested tripling the number of search results shown per page from 10 to 30, reasoning users would prefer more results — but traffic actually declined once the change was made, since the rational-sounding preference for "more" didn't match how people actually behaved when given it (see Google Search-Results Hicks-Law Case).
Discussed in
- Episode 248 — 248-three-tricks-super-mario-uses-to-keep-gamers-hooked