Modern UX Designers Apply Hick’s Law to Get Recognition Over Recall

For example, you can ask:

• Who invented airplanes or
• Did the Wright brothers invent the airplanes?

Out of these two questions, which one do you think will be easier for the user to answer? It is obviously the second one. This is because the second question itself gives a lot of cues to reach to the final answer.

It is similar to the fact that multiple choice questions are far easier to answer in comparison to the open ended questions.This is the same principle used by the modern UX designers in their designing process and this is what a user wants exactly from a web design.

This is the primary reason that the modern UX designers keep in mind while designing that they present the users with several cues. This eventually helps in picking the information simply that matches with the memories of the users.

Therefore, the primary factors to consider during UX design are recall and recognition, both of which are significantly important and are different as well.

Recall and Recognition

Recognition seems to be the most significant goal in web design because that helps in several unique ways such as:

• It helps to breed familiarity
• It helps to grow awareness
• It helps in increasing the click-through rate and
• It ups the chances of conversion.

Application of Hick's Law

The modern UX designers get deeper into the science in UX designing and implement Hick’s Law to it. According to this law, the response time of people increases in a linear fashion when there are different options made available to them.

This means, when the users are provided with more choices it will make things every hard for them to arrive at a final conclusion. In order to help them to reach to a final decision it is important to ensure a few things by the UX designers such as:

• Limiting the amount of elements and the quantity of features in the navigation bar and
• Using better and more effective hyper links in the web pages.

This is the simplest method and the most effective way of applying Hick's Law to UX design.

This does not mean that the UX designer jobs are limited or restricted in any ways. They can extend the other elements of the website or the mobile app to make it more useful. This they can do in several ways such as:

• Breaking the entire user journey down into several useful phases.
• Making sure that in each of these phases the number of options offered to the users are limited to a bare minimum.

In order to achieve this, the UX designers have to keep in mind that:

• They showcase the biggest and most Unique Selling Point or USP when a particular user logs on to the website and eliminate the rest.
• As for the returning users the designers must show a dissimilar version of the homepage which they can easily do by exploiting personalization.

The final effect of such an approach is that they will be able to create a version that will easily and effectively help the browsing habits of the users to be taken into account. This will further help the users to see the most relevant and significant information.

Today, for any type of e-commerce portal, this is the best way to show the users the best deals and offers available on the products that a user or a specific set of users are most interested in and are looking for.

There are a few good ways in which you can provide a better and smoother user experience and promote recognition over recall and make the design more interactive.

• First, you can show the users their history of browsing in the past which will eventually help them to search for answers to their issues or find exactly the thing they want to.
• The case of tutorials can also be another example of difference between recall and recognition. You will come across a lot of UX design especially for the mobile apps that include a lot of tutorials. These tutorials educate the users regarding the app and what are the ways in which they can put it to the best use and meet their purposes.
• However, the modern UX designers have found a far better way to educate the users. This is the process of providing the users with a few ongoing cues specifically based on the particular page they are currently visiting.

The UX designers however have to consider a few other things so as to decide which process they wish to follow.

• In the first case, it is required by the users to remember the recall it as and when they use the app. For that matter they can of course go back and refer to the tutorial which is no doubt a cumbersome job to do.
• In the second case, the users are provided with far better and constant cues that help them out. This eventually provides then with a better user experience making things simpler and smoother.

These facts sum up to one thing: providing worthy user experience depends on the design which is all about recall and recognition.

Follow the Rules

All this is not easy because all of these go hand in hand with a specific set of rules. One of the most important rules to follow is to make sure that the browsing experience of the users is as comfortable as it can be. For example, in a mobile app design it is required to consider the placement of the buttons so that it is easy to operate using the thumb.

However, at the end of the daygood UX design is all about figuring what works best with the audience.