Hick's Law

Decision time grows quickly — not in a straight line, but without an upper limit — as you add more options. Two choices feel easy. Six feel hard. Fifteen feel paralysing. And paralysis doesn't show up as an angry support ticket; it shows up silently in your funnel as drop-off.

This is why you should use progressive disclosure on forms (showing more fields only when needed), a single clear primary button on landing pages, and ruthless cuts to long menus. It especially matters on sign-up flows, where every extra field and every extra branch loses users in a way you can't quite prove until you remove them.

The trap is that internal stakeholders love adding options: 'can we also show the user...' Every 'also show' is a small tax on conversion. Your job is to make that tax visible — by putting a price on it before the meeting, not after the feature ships.

A SaaS sign-up page has six CTAs: Sign up, Try the demo, Request enterprise pricing, Download the iOS app, Learn more about features, Compare plans. Each one was added by a different stakeholder to solve a different problem. Conversion is 2.1%.

The PM runs an A/B test: same page, one primary CTA (Sign up), everything else demoted below the fold or tucked into a secondary menu. Conversion on the variant: 3.4%.

The enterprise, demo, and download teams all got the data they were worried about losing — their flows still work, they're just not competing for the first eye-movement. Nothing was removed; everything was sequenced. That's the Hick's Law fix in three words: fewer first choices.