What is Hick's law?
'''Hick's law''', or the '''Hick–Hyman law''' is named after British and American psychologists [[W. E. Hick|William Edmund Hick]] and [[Ray Hyman]]. It describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices. Increasing the number of choices increases the decision time [[logarithm]]ically. The amount of time taken to process a certain amount of [[information|bit]]s in the Hick–Hyman law is known as the ''rate of gain of information''. Hick's law may support some computing menu design decisions. For example, to find a given word (e.g. the name of a command) in a randomly ordered word list (e.g. a menu). 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.<ref>{{cite book| last1 = Landauer| first1 = T.K.| last2 = Nachbar| first2 = D.W.| title = Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '85| year = 1985| isbn = 978-0-89791-149-8| doi = 10.1145/317456.317470| page = 73| chapter = Selection from alphabetic and numeric menu trees using a touch screen | s2cid = 17669570}}</ref> == References == {{reflist}} [[Category:Problem solving]]