A B C, easy as 1 2 3

Apologies, Fans, this is not going to be about the 1970 number-one hit song by the Jackson 5.

It's not about restaurants either. The menu discussed below is a menu on a web site or in a software application.

It's about Hick's Law. From Wikipedia:

Hick's Law, named after British psychologist William Edmund Hick, or the Hick–Hyman Law (for Ray Hyman), describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices he or she has...Hick's Law is sometimes cited to justify menu design decisions...if the list is alphabetical and the user knows the name of the command, he or she may be able to use a subdividing strategy that works in logarithmic time.

What does this mean in English?

Because the human brain often seeks known patterns, putting the menu items on our new school web sites in alphabetical order intuitively made perfect sense to me even before I knew about Hick's Law. If a visitor to our web site is looking for a classroom teacher (s)he may intuit that there will be a staff list somewhere in the navigation menu. If the staff menu item joins the other menu items in alphabetical order , it will be easier for the visitor to locate the needed information.

Seeking patterns: classroom implications

Beyond the simplicity of putting menu items in alphabetical order, teachers can put more complex pattern seeking opportunities to work to support deeper learning for students as described in this article in ASCD's Classroom Leadership: Patterns, the Brain, and Learning.