Designing Your Site: Hick's Law
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Principle 4:
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Hick’s law states that ‘every additional choice increases the time required to take a decision.‘ This law does not only hold true for web design but also in a number of other situations and settings. For example, if you visit a restaurant and are provided with too many food items to pick from, you will take a longer time to take a decision. As far as web designing is concerned, the more options you offer to your visitors, the more difficult will the website become to use and browse through. This means that we need to reduce the number of choices in order to provide a better user experience.
On the other hand, if your site is complex and is robust in content, too few choices means that you are requiring your audience to "drill down" through several categories of content with clicks to arrive at their destination. If you can keep the number of clicks required to arrive at desired content to three clicks, then you are striking a fine balance between few choices and too many clicks. What about your site: Does your site have enough choices to make for ease of finding information but not so few choices that the audience has to click several times to find what they want. 1 = Too many choices or too many clicks. (Thanks, Peter.) 10 = Perfect balance of choices and click requirements. How might you improve your site's usability in terms of the number of choices or clicks? Add this to your ePortfolio "to do" list. |
Examples
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Far too many choices and too many decisions to make: YES https://www.squarespace.com/ A few choices https://www.uber.com/en-CA/ Why would you go to Uber. To either ride or offer rides. Two striking elements on the main page make this very accessible. http://www.emilianobarri.com/ Few choices http://ezorzi.com/ |
Adapted from an article by Martin Luenendonk for Entrepreneurial Insights (June 3, 2015) with permission from the author. (http://www.entrepreneurial-insights.com/web-design-principles-successful-websites/).
