Textbook of Usability

1912 to 1974, United Kingdom · Cambridge psychologist; pioneer of information theory in human performance

Also known as: W. E. Hick, W. Edmund Hick

William Edmund Hick worked at the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge under Frederic Bartlett alongside Donald Broadbent and other figures who built post-war British experimental psychology. His 1952 paper On the rate of gain of information applied Shannon's then-new information theory to human choice tasks, showing that reaction time grows logarithmically with the number of equally probable alternatives. The relationship is now known as Hick's Law (or Hick-Hyman, after Ray Hyman's parallel 1953 work).

The law underpins every interface designer's intuition that fewer, better-organised options are faster to navigate than long flat lists. It also makes precise predictions about menu design, error rates under time pressure and the cost of adding choices, and the result has been replicated across keyboards, hand controls and increasingly across touchscreens and voice interfaces.

Hick's career was cut short by ill health and he published relatively little, but the 1952 paper alone secured his place in the small group of researchers who built the quantitative foundations of human performance.