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[Hock]

The original Hicks was run on a "computer device of its day." A computer-based experiment. And gets connected to computer talk.

When I did my survey years ago, the docs that responded that the 1950's "button pressing" technology ran slower and distorting the response times (and all the hubbub is talking about the wasted miliseconds like they are a big deal.) When some of the subsequent tests were conducting, college people used stop watches to record the button pressing. Think about it. The testee responds to the button and the tester responds by hitting the stop watch...adding even more response time!

The subsequent trainers just kept regurgitating the same 1950s story and adding their own expressions to the 1950 times lapses.... we'd read and hear in police journals and magazine writings and lectures...

"Takes a half second per tactic."
"Takes a second to..."
"Takes about a second or so..."  (or so)!

I just read in the last two months a WHOPPER of an interpretation of the time lapse in a police magazine. I have given up saving these quotes. Most of the time these people have (like Blaur) a dumb-down agenda and slobber all over Hicks law to sell their point.

In the end its about ambush and alertness and milliseconds. Results vary INSIDE the continuum.

And if I am not mistaken this dumb-down crusade is all Bruce Sidddle's of PPCT's fault, not Blaur's

Hock

[noload]

Thanks Hock. Well I guess 35mm film with holes punched in it, a recording device (pens on a scrolling piece of paper), some pea lamps and telegraph keys could be thought of as a computer back then, at least in the broad sense. But I'd be hard pressed to say it was a computer-based experiment. Oh well, in the long run it doesn't really matter.

So much lag in the experiment. The telegraph keys alone would introduce some very slight lag to the study. Hick, wasn't an engineer but a psychologist, which may be why engineers didn't like his study.

It's really funny, but I was introduced to Hick/Hyman, Fitts and a bunch of other "laws" in a computer science class, and that was mostly just in passing, and then again during the somewhat early days of user interface design, so I have to wonder how did Siddle and then Blauer and other RBSD even stumble across it?. Hick/Hyman is really some esoteric stuff and not even well known in the computer field, except by a few menu designers.

[noload]

If Hicks wasn't a computer based test, why is it covered in computer science classes?

One reason is that psychologists latched onto Information Theory. All that log stuff (Big O) is what we use to describe the speed of sorting algorithms, it also seemed to fit what some psychologists were doing at the time and they adopted it.

I was in a systems analysis course and the Prof that I first heard mention it was an semi-retired Efficiency Expert, which back in his day meant 90% people doing work, 10% computer doing work. He was the guy who sat in the back of the old style open floor plan office and watched what people did, how long it took them and even the route they'd take when going from point A to B. He started out when telephone operators and computer people were still putting plugs in holes, so there was a very physical/humans making choices side to working with tech back then and why these studies may have resonated.

I think it made a comeback when when a fellow at Apple made a big deal about Fitt's law, which always seemed to have Hicks tied to it.

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." Dijkstra