Hick-Hyman Law

The Hick-Hyman Law predicts that human decision time increases logarithmically with the number of equally likely choices. Independently formulated by William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman in the early 1950s, this law describes how long it takes a person to make a choice among alternatives. In human-computer interaction, the law is widely applied to menu design, navigation hierarchies, and command selection, showing that users take longer to select from larger sets of options, but the relationship is logarithmic, not linear.