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Design principle: Hick’s Law — quick decision making

Anton Nikolov
UX Planet
Published in
6 min readMar 4, 2017

This week’s design principle is focusing on Hick’s Law, which is related to the KISS principle. Let’s first say a few words to introduce Hick’s Law.

Do you remember the old video games from 20 years ago and how much fun it was to play them? The controls were so simple you could learn to play in seconds. For example, Super Mario with just left, right, and jump controls.

The good old times :)

In comparison, today’s input controls of modern gaming consoles and PC games are offering so many choices and combinations. All these controls, multiply the options user can choose in any certain situation.

Modern MMORPG (much more difficult to learn and play)

Having so many options makes learning the game and enjoying it much harder and time consuming. One of the reasons is explained by Hick’s Law.

Hick’s Law predicts that the time and the effort it takes to make a decision, increases with the number of options.

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Published in UX Planet

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Written by Anton Nikolov

Searching for pragmatic balance in life. Writing about UX Design, Health and Family-development with the aim to learn and inspire. Parent of 1 lovely girl.

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