For example, there are usually dozens of dishes on a restaurant\u2019s menu, so choosing one takes forever. However, if there were only 2, you could make the decision in no time.<\/p>\n
How’s that relevant for UX designers<\/a>?<\/p>\n Including too many links on your landing page or too many icons in the UI <\/a>will have the same effect on users.<\/p>\n How so?<\/p>\n The cognitive overload on users presented with too many options can lead to decision fatigue, which slows users down and can even make them abandon a task altogether.<\/p>\n UX designers leverage Hicks Law to make their products more intuitive <\/a>to navigate and reduce the time to value.<\/a><\/p>\n By prioritizing <\/a>the most important features and presenting users with fewer choices, UX designers can avoid overwhelming them and reduce their reaction time.<\/p>\n Let’s have a look at a few practical ways product teams can use Hicks Law to make better design decisions and create frictionless <\/a>user experiences.<\/p>\n The sign-up page<\/a> is the first step in the customer journey.<\/a> That’s where your user decides to give your product a go.<\/p>\n A user\u2019s time, patience, and motivation have limits, so the sooner they make the decision, the lower the risk that you lose them. Also, signing up quickly means they can start using the product and experiencing its value immediately.<\/p>\n To achieve this, keep the process simple. Include a strong headline, a registration form, and a powerful CTA. Don’t ask for an email confirmation and if possible, enable Single Sign-On to reduce friction.<\/p>\n Also requesting payment details slows down the process, so consider offering a no credit card trial.<\/a><\/p>\n Whether they’re a part of sign-up or the onboarding flow, keep your initial surveys <\/a>simple.<\/p>\n Ask only for information that is absolutely necessary to personalize user experience. In most cases, this is a question about the user’s role in the company, the jobs to be done<\/a>, and what they want to achieve with the product.<\/p>\n If there’s one thing that will help users complete their tasks quickly and easily while enjoying the experience, it’s clutter-free UI.<\/p>\n You can do it by following some good design principles<\/a>:<\/p>\n So you’ve managed to segment your users effectively based on their JTBDs and match up the features they need – excellent!<\/p>\n Don’t try to introduce all of them at once as it’s another easy way to lose your users.<\/p>\n Instead, use progressive onboarding. <\/a>Break the process into stages and begin by giving only the guidance <\/a>that’s essential to start using the product.<\/p>\n Use tooltips <\/a>and checklists <\/a>to showcase the key functionality and reduce the time to value.<\/p>\n Only once users master the key features and start experiencing value<\/a>, you can start secondary onboarding and introduce more complex functionality.<\/p>\n Even though your product has a lot of features, the odds are that a particular user will need only a selection of them. If so, why flood them with information about them all?<\/p>\n Doing so could be extremely overwhelming and may make the users wonder if the product is suitable for them after all.<\/p>\n To avoid this, use the information about users you collect during the sign-up process to segment them and customize the onboarding experience for each segment. Focus only on the relevant features and provide the guidance that they need to master them.<\/p>\n Following the design principles can take you only so far. To fine-tune the UX experience, you need empirical data about user in-app behavior.<\/a><\/p>\n Tracking product usage helps identify the key features that users use the most. Once you know that, you can redesign your UI to include only the relevant functionality.<\/p>\n The features that users don’t use are really telling as well. If a feature is relevant to their use case but users don’t engage with it, it means the UI is not intuitive <\/a>enough for them to find the feature.<\/p>\n The same applies to page views. If the page view numbers or conversion rates <\/a>are low, it may mean that the menu is too complex, and users can’t find what they need.<\/p>\n Heatmaps <\/a>are another great way of tracking what happens on the page and where users find friction<\/a>.<\/p>\n If you can see that users don’t engage with certain parts of the page, you can make sure not to put any crucial pieces of information over there. Or find a way to attract user attention, for example with a hotspot or a tooltip<\/a>.<\/p>\n The only reliable way to decide which UI design is the least complex is through experimentation<\/a>.<\/p>\n A\/B testing<\/a> enables you to determine which of two possible designs drives the best results.<\/p>\n The principle is simple. Start by creating two different versions of the user interface. Next, make them available for half of your users and track their engagement. Finally, compare the figures to pick the best one.<\/p>\n In practice, conducting A\/B tests to achieve valid results can be tricky.<\/p>\n For starters, you need to have enough website traffic or product users for your results to be statistically significant.<\/p>\n What’s more, you can only test one variable at a time, so the process could be quite time-consuming. If there are lots of variables you want to test, a multivariate test would be a better alternative<\/a>.<\/p>\n Now that we know how Hick’s Law works and how to embed it in the UX design, let’s look at a few examples of its application in market-leading products.<\/p>\n Userpilot <\/a>is a product growth platform that enables product teams to analyze product usage<\/a>, collect user feedback<\/a>, and design onboarding experiences.<\/p>\n The Userpilot interface is free of clutter and distractions.<\/p>\n You can customize and launch in-app surveys of different types with Userpilot<\/span><\/a>\u00a0to gain insights into the mobile app experience<\/a>.<\/p>\n The main part of the UI has buttons and tabs for the key features, like creating events or accessing the resource center.<\/p>\n The rest of the features are neatly organized in a collapsing menu. To navigate it, simply click on the hamburger menu and out it pops. Click again and it’s gone.<\/p>\n Miro is a cloud-based collaborative online whiteboard platform. It enables distributed teams to work together in real-time on a virtual whiteboard.<\/p>\n Miro designers appreciate the importance of a frictionless sign-up<\/a> for product activation and adoption<\/a>. And they know well how frustrating it is to have to complete similar sign-up forms again and again.<\/p>\n That’s why they provide the Single Sign-On option to their users. They have the option to sign up with their existing Google, Slack, Microsoft, Apple, or Facebook account.<\/p>\n This reduces the time they need to get inside the product and play with Miro’s cool features.<\/p>\n Notion is a powerful workspace productivity platform. It offers users the ability to create documents, take notes, manage tasks and projects, and store information in an organized and intuitive way.<\/p>\n Starting to use the product is super easy because the welcome survey<\/a> is very minimalistic and requires little time and effort.<\/p>\n Once you complete the questionnaire, you’re taken to a welcome page with an onboarding checklist <\/a>that is personalized based on your answers.<\/p>\n Kommunicate is a customer support platform that provides tools to help organizations manage customer conversations. It enables companies to communicate with their customers in real-time, automate customer support tasks, and personalize customer service experiences.<\/p>\n To onboard <\/a>its new users, Kommunicate uses interactive walkthroughs<\/a>. This breaks down complex processes into simple steps and gives users a chance to tackle each of them at their own pace.<\/p>\n Tolstoy is a video commerce platform. It allows you to create interactive and shoppable videos <\/a>to engage users and boost sales.<\/p>\n The Tolstoy team uses its own tool to create onboarding videos<\/a> introducing its main features. Their selection is personalized to the needs <\/a>of the users to deliver a bespoke onboarding <\/a>experience.<\/p>\n In this way, they avoid overwhelming the users with unnecessary information and increase the chances they adopt the product.<\/p>\n Hick’s Law contradicts the misconception that the more options we have, the better off we are. Most of the time, having too many choices results in sensory overload, and instead of enjoying the experience, we get tired.<\/p>\n In product, exhausted users are the last thing you want. To avoid it,<\/p>\n If you want to see how Userpilot can help you analyze your users’ needs, track their product usage, and eliminate distractions from their experience, book the demo!<\/a><\/p>\nThe importance of Hick’s Law for UX designers<\/h2>\n
How to avoid information overload by applying Hick’s Law?<\/h2>\n
Simplify the sign-up process<\/h3>\n
Keep welcome surveys short and simple<\/h3>\n
![\"Hicks](\"https:\/\/images.storychief.com\/account_6827\/backlinkmanager-hicks-law_d933ae635c66cdb5e8332d405e71aab0_800.jpg)
<\/picture>Create a clutter-free UI for a better user experience<\/h3>\n
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Use progressive onboarding to shorten TTV<\/h3>\n
![\"Hicks](\"https:\/\/images.storychief.com\/account_6827\/tooltips-hicks-law_550510cef14543b8a1fba158a6372959_800.jpg)
<\/picture>Don’t overload users with too much information<\/h3>\n
Analyze user behavior to identify where complexity arises<\/h3>\n
Track product usage analytics<\/h4>\n
![\"Hicks](\"https:\/\/images.storychief.com\/account_6827\/page-views-hicks-law_ab1aa0fc3c67c8d188ca7033c582475d_800.png)
<\/picture>Observe heatmaps to spot friction<\/h4>\n
![\"Hicks](\"https:\/\/images.storychief.com\/account_6827\/hotjar-scroll-map-heat-map-hicks-law_aaa29cd41b614f0517b24369396d53cc_800.jpg)
<\/picture>Conduct A\/B testing to eliminate complexity<\/h3>\n
Real-life examples of Hicks’s Law from SaaS companies<\/h2>\n
Userpilot creates an uncluttered UI with a collapsing navigation menu<\/h3>\n
![\"Userpilot\u2019s](\"https:\/\/images.storychief.com\/account_6827\/userpilot-menu-hicks-law_b77413fce2bf4877f36760d5245412f2_800.jpg)
<\/picture>Miro creates an easy sign-in through SSO options<\/h3>\n
![\"Miro](\"https:\/\/images.storychief.com\/account_6827\/miro-signup-saas-hicks-law_05a1243f81a28fb58fcdaa2fc78cb8fe_800.jpg)
<\/picture>Notion collects user information via a simple welcome survey<\/h3>\n
![\"notion-survey-hicks-law\"](\"https:\/\/images.storychief.com\/account_6827\/notion-survey-hicks-law_07a5579b8a39b8baf6950572439a9db9_800.png)
<\/picture>Kommunicate simplifies new users onboarding with interactive walkthroughs<\/h3>\n
![\"Kommunicate\u2019s](\"https:\/\/d37oebn0w9ir6a.cloudfront.net\/account_6827\/interactive-walkthorugh-hicks-law_11ffd94c58d3f3127e6a7143391dca79.gif)
<\/picture>Tolstoy shows users recommended videos<\/h3>\n
![\"Tolstoy\u2019s](\"https:\/\/images.storychief.com\/account_6827\/tolstoy-best-hicks-law_9ec2199c56af319776f4eb7ed6e424ba_800.jpg)
<\/picture>Conclusion<\/h2>\n
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