hicks-law

hicks-law is a skill for Claude Code from Owl-Listener/designer-skills. It costs 45 tokens per session (529 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide based on Hick's Law, which explains that decisions take longer as the number and complexity of choices increases.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to simplify menus, navigation, forms, settings, and other places where choices can be grouped or revealed gradually.
Why use it?
It helps reduce hesitation and cognitive overload when a screen presents too many options at once.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the interaction-design plugin — 22 skills, 5 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it to simplify menus, navigation, forms, settings, and other places where choices can be grouped or revealed gradually.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/hicks-law
About the project

Owl-Listener/designer-skills is a collection of AI-agent skills, commands, and plugins for design work, covering research, design systems, interfaces, interaction, and delivery. Designers and developers use it inside coding assistants to guide design tasks, and the catalogue entries represent selected parts of that larger collection.

Owl-Listener/designer-skills · 2,619 stars · on GitHub

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add Owl-Listener/designer-skills --skill hicks-law
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Owl-Listener/designer-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install interaction-design, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 22 skills, 5 commands.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for hicks-law

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/hicks-law/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/hicks-law)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/hicks-law"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/hicks-law/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for hicks-law

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/hicks-law"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/hicks-law.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 45 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 529 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 6 May 2026
  • Snyk pass 6 May 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00045 $0.00529
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00264
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00106
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00053

Measured 8d ago against content hash d347504426ec, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hicks-law scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

interaction-design/skills/hicks-law/SKILL.md · 32 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 32 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Hick's Law

You are an expert in cognitive load and decision-making in interface design.

What You Do

You apply Hick's Law to reduce decision time and cognitive burden by controlling the number and complexity of choices presented at any moment.

The Principle

The time it takes to make a decision increases logarithmically with the number of choices. Doubling the number of options does not double decision time — but each added option still costs something. The practical design implication:

  • Presenting fewer options at once speeds up decision-making
  • Grouping and progressive disclosure reduce apparent complexity without hiding functionality
  • The quality and clarity of options matters as much as the count — ambiguous or overlapping options are harder to choose from than a larger set of distinct ones

The Formula (for context)

RT = a + b × log₂(n + 1) — where RT is reaction time, n is the number of choices, and a/b are empirically measured constants. The formula applies best to simple, equal-probability choices (keyboard shortcuts, menu items); it is less predictive for complex real-world decisions.

Where to Apply It

  • Navigation menus: limit top-level items; group secondary items
  • Toolbars and action bars: surface the most common actions; tuck the rest in overflow menus
  • Onboarding flows: present one decision per step rather than multiple questions on a single screen
  • Form fields: reduce optional fields; present required fields first
  • Pricing tables: three tiers is the conventional sweet spot; more creates analysis paralysis
  • Search results and feeds: pagination and progressive loading prevent the full count from overwhelming decision

Common Mistakes

  • Conflating "fewer options" with "less functionality" — the goal is reducing simultaneous choices, not removing features
  • Applying it to justify hiding important options users need frequently
  • Ignoring choice quality: five clear, distinct options can be easier to choose from than three vague ones

Read the full file on GitHub · 32 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 32 lines · 45 tokens per session scan A d347504426ec

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hicks-law is a skill published in the GitHub repository Owl-Listener/designer-skills (2,619 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 45 tokens to every session and 529 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

ui-review

Review UI code for StyleSeed design-system compliance, accessibility, mobile ergonomics, spacing discipline, and implementation quality.

LiHongwei-cn/lihongwei-cn · 26 tokens

design-system

Use this skill BEFORE writing or restyling ANY user-facing interface in WrongStack. It drives the Design Studio engine: commit to a kit, tune it (radius / density / font / motion), materialize the tokens into a real theme file, build against those tokens, then verify adherence. Trigger it whenever the user asks to…

WrongStack/WrongStack · 248 tokens

accessibility-a11y

Semantic HTML, keyboard navigation, focus states, ARIA labels, skip links, and WCAG contrast requirements. Use when ensuring accessibility compliance, implementing keyboard navigation, or adding screen reader support.

BlackBeltTechnology/pi-agent-dashboard · 44 tokens

tailwind-shadcn

Tailwind CSS utility patterns with shadcn/ui component usage, theming via CSS variables, and responsive design. Use when styling components, installing shadcn components, implementing dark mode, or creating consistent design systems.

BlackBeltTechnology/pi-agent-dashboard · 50 tokens

anti-slop-frontend

A mechanical, countable anti-slop checklist for AI-generated frontend. Catches the specific signatures an undirected model defaults to: AI-purple glows, Inter-everywhere, em-dashes, div-based fake screenshots, eyebrow-on-every-section, beige+brass "premium" palettes, generic Jane Doe / Acme data. Advisory layer that…

BlackBeltTechnology/pi-agent-dashboard · 147 tokens

frontend-mockup-loop-dashboard

Dashboard-specific adapter on the generic frontend-mockup-loop skill: binds the 7-step design loop to pi-agent-dashboard component sources, theme-system tokens, and isolated verification. Use when designing/redesigning any pi-agent-dashboard client surface. Triggers: "design a dashboard screen", "mockup a dashboard…

BlackBeltTechnology/pi-agent-dashboard · 83 tokens