HickStudy: Designing a User Interface for a Hick's Law-Based Information Processing Speed Test App

초록

Hick's law, a foundational principle in human-computer interaction (HCI), predicts that reaction time increases logarithmically with the number of equally likely choices. Although well-established, its application in modern HCI remains challenging. Nevertheless, it remains useful for estimating individual information processing speed (IPS), defined as the reciprocal of the regression slope. This study introduces HickStudy, an accessible mobile app designed to measure IPS accurately. The app minimizes confounding factors by standardizing stimulus type, button layout, and initial touch position. A pilot study with five participants showed strong conformity to Hick's law (all R-2 > 0.86), with IPS ranging from 5.69 to 11.34 bit/s. As various factors may still introduce noise, we outline future research directions to examine the effects of stimulus types, choice-set sizes, spatial layouts, and gamification on IPS accuracy. This work provides a lightweight, reproducible tool for IPS assessment and supports future studies on perceptual and cognitive influences in choice-based interaction.

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