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hicks-law

Use this skill whenever a design has many options the user must choose among — menus, navigation, pickers, plan tiers, settings panels, action toolbars, lists of templates, anything that asks "which one?" Trigger when the user is laying out a navigation menu, designing a settings page, picking the structure of a wizard, building a country/timezone/currency picker, designing a pricing table, or reviewing a UI where users hesitate over which control to use. Trigger when there's debate about "should we add another option?" — Hick's Law is the principle that costs the option a price. Routes to sub-aspect skills for menus, defaults, and pricing.

plugins/HDeibler/universal-design-principles/plugins/cognition-and-learnability-principles/skills/hicks-law/SKILL.md

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# Hick's Law

Hick's Law (more precisely, the Hick-Hyman Law) is the empirical observation that the time required to make a decision among a set of options grows with the logarithm of the number of options. Stated as a formula:

```
T = b · log₂(n + 1)
```

Where T is decision time, n is the number of equally likely choices, and b is a constant determined by the cognitive context. The +1 accounts for the time to begin processing the choice set at all. The logarithmic growth is the design-relevant insight: doubling the number of options does not double decision time, but it does add a roughly constant increment each time.

## Definition (in our own words)

When a user must select one option from a set, the time and cognitive effort required to make that selection rise as the set grows — but not linearly. The user can scan and pick from a small set quickly; they need progressively more time as the set grows; and beyond a certain size (typically around 7–10 options for a flat list) they switch from scanning to searching, which is a different and slower mode.