A menu book whose pages turn by the hundred thousand, until the waiter suggests a single dish.
Ever leafed through an endless menu at a restaurant? Pages and pages of dishes, until your head spins. And in the end, you ask the waiter to suggest something.
The same reflex in front of a cart
That is exactly what makes a user abandon their cart: you give them lots of options, all at once.
In an app, there is no waiter
The problem with an app is that there is no waiter to help you choose. You are on your own, facing an overloaded interface.
A principle: Hick’s Law
This is where one of the best-known rules of UX design comes in: Hick’s Law.
What the rule says
Based on the work of psychologist William Edmund Hick (1952), then Ray Hyman (1953), it fits in one sentence: “The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.”
Choice paralysis
When you load a screen with twenty buttons and an endless menu, you create what is called choice paralysis: the user hesitates, jumps from one option to the next, and decides nothing.
Every option has a cost
The more options you offer, the higher their cognitive load. Hick’s curve is logarithmic: each extra option costs a little less than the one before, but the total keeps climbing.
And it describes the best case, options the user already knows. If they have to read each one to understand it, the wait grows longer still.
A user who hesitates is a user who leaves
In UX, a user who takes too long to choose does not end up choosing: they close the app and open another one.
Cut the options
In short: cut the options. And when you really need many, two techniques help.
01 · Progressive disclosure
Show the essentials first, and tuck the secondary options into submenus: they stay within reach without weighing on the first decision.
02 · Smart defaults
Pre-select the most used option. Most users only have to confirm, and the others keep the choice.
Think for them
The best UX designer is the one who thinks on the user’s behalf, not the one who leaves the thinking to the user.
Guide them step by step
And guide them one step at a time, so their head never spins.
This article covers episode N° 02 of our series on the UX laws. Next episode: Fitts’s Law.