How Can Hick Law Enhance The Usability Of A Design

How can Hick’s law enhance the usability of a design (bullet points)?

Making the choice easier for users.

Hick’s law states that the time it takes for a person to make a decision increases as the amount of possible choices increase. So essentially Hick’s law illustrates one’s ability to make decisions with different amount of uncertainty.

To fully understand this there are few terms you need to be familiar with:

Reaction time (refers to)
The time between the onset of a stimulus and the start of the response.

Movement time
The time it takes to complete the onset of a movement.

Response time
The time it takes to process information and then to make a response.

Reaction time + movement time = response time

T = movement time + processing

There are several factors that affect reaction time:
Age - Age can play a role in how fast or slow they react as a person gets older their reaction time becomes slower.

Gender - On average males have a faster reaction time than females do however reaction time reduced less with females age than they do with males.

Hight - Taller people have slower reaction time because of the greater distance that the information has to travel from the person’s brain to their active muscle. Shorter people tend to win shorter races.

Stimulus intensity - increasing the stimulus intensity will also improve one’s reaction time. E.g. A louder sound will increase our reaction time more than a normal or soft sound.

Level of alertness - being more alert can actually improve reaction time.

A design principle known as “K.I.S.S.” (“Keep It Short and Simple”)
You can find applications of Hick’s Law everywhere, not just in web and app design.
Hick’s Law determined the number of controls on your microwave or your washing machine.

All tasks consist of four basic steps：
Identity a problem or goal.
Assess the available options to solve the problem or achieve the

Examples:

Menus:
The time for a person to elect an item from a simple software menu increases with the number of items.

Test options:
But Hick’s Law does not apply to tasks involving significant levels of reading and problem solving, as in taking an exam.

Mall touch-screen directory:
You can easily get lost in a shopping mall. If you want to eat, then you have to decide which type of food you want, What’s the average price? Do you have to wait？Which floor is it? Where it is? A mall touch-screen directory can solve all the problems, short and simple.

Games:
Some game controls were so simple you could learn to play in seconds. For example, Super Mario with just left, right, jump controls and Flappy bird with just a tap.
In comparison, some PC games are offering too many choices and combinations.

Keep Hick's Law in mind when designing systems that involve decisions based on a set of options.

When designing for time-critical tasks, minimise the number of options involved in a decision to reduce response times and minimise