Limitations of Hick-Hyman Law





"Hick-Hyman" law, which describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices he or she has; That is, increasing the number of choices will increase the decision time logarithmically.

For example, to find a given word (e.g. the name of a command) in a randomly ordered word list (e.g. a menu), scanning of each word in the list is required, consuming linear time, so Hick's law does not apply. However, 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.

Hicks law refer to stimuli recognition rather than searching. Recognition processes work at cognitive level, so people are right saying about cognitive decision time. This processes rather simple, as it is pointed in the papers. In complex situations decision involves not only cognitive processes but takes long-term memory, reasoning etc. This is out of Hicks law.

Hick's law works only for simple decision making situations as oppose to difficult ones such as solving a multiple choice question in an exam. Actually my four examples are all rather simple ones that require small cognitive load.

The key aspect of Hicks law is that the decisions be significantly non-obvious.
For example, if I'm at the grocery store and have to choose from 10 brands of peanut butter, that's going to take time for a lot of people as there is no obvious one choice. They need to study labels, prices, sizes, etc.




References :

http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/42323/confusions-about-applying-hick-hyman-law-in-user-interface-design

http://www.slideshare.net/lrizoli/fitts-law-basics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hick's_law

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