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Hick's law explained

The relationship between choices and time required

Hick's law is a human-computer interaction concept that describes the time it takes for a user to reach a decision as a function of the possible choices she has. Of all choices, the average reaction time required to choose among possible outcomes is progressively slower the more choices that are available.

This is everything being equal. Note, however, that users divide the total set of choices into classes, eliminating about 50% of the remaining choices at each step, rather than considering each and every choice one-by-one, requiring linear time (In essence there's some chunking of data taking place in our short term memory).

Applicability in UI design

So with some reservations, the model is still good to pay attention to. It would suggest that we ought not overload menu structures in our graphical user interfaces. It would also suggest we should nest groupings of related choices within each other.

When it comes to the workflow in an application, all user tasks consists of at least 4 basic steps

Step 1: identify a problem or goal

Step 2: assess the available options to achieve the goal.

Step 3: decide on an option

Step 4: implement an option

The cognitive overhead of those alone is enough to call for 'reductionary' design considerations

Analogy

However abstract an interface might be, it is somewhat analogue to our physical environment. Take for instance road signs. It would not be wise to plant a dozen of them together in one spot. It would simply take longer for drivers to decode an overload of information that must be processed in split second to avoid fatal accidents.