Hick’s Law: Why Google’s Homepage Is Basically Empty on Purpose

Part fourteen of a series on building software people don’t quietly hate. Last time: even “familiar” isn’t one fixed thing — it bends by device and region. This time: a jam study, a menu the size of a paperback, and why Google’s homepage has stayed almost embarrassingly empty for twenty-five years.

Six jars sold more jam than twenty-four. More choice isn’t the same as more appeal.

Last part, you caught me putting a shopping cart in the wrong corner and taught me a lesson about assuming my own defaults were universal. Today we’re doing a different kind of humbling this time courtesy of jam.

The jam study

In the early 2000s, two researchers set up a sample table in an upscale grocery store and did something deceptively simple: sometimes the table had 24 different jars of jam. Sometimes it had just 6.

More people stopped to browse the 24-jar table— obviously, more options, more novelty, more reasons to wander over. But here’s the twist that made the study famous: people were roughly ten times more likely to actually buy a jar when they’d been looking at the 6-jar table.