Prioritizing for Impact: Using the RICE Framework

Imagine that you have several activities you’d love to get done before the day ends. You know you can’t do them all, so where should you start? You run a quick mental check: Which one will take the most time? Which one affects other people? Which one removes the most stress?

This kind of informal triage happens all the time. But those choices carry more weight in high-stakes environments like Unemployment Insurance (UI), especially when they affect program integrity.

That’s where the RICE framework comes in.

RICE stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. It’s a structured approach to deciding what work to tackle first and reducing overwhelm.

The framework asks:

• Reach: How many people will this affect?
• Impact: How much of a difference will it make for each person?
• Confidence: How confident are we in these estimates?
• Effort: How much effort will it take to implement?

From there, you get a score: (Reach × Impact × Confidence) ÷ Effort. RICE simplifies the mental load of weighing priorities. It reduces the ambiguity that causes teams to chase the loudest problem instead of the most impactful one.

The shift from intuition to structured evaluation is good behavioral design. RICE supports better prioritization because it counters behavioral challenges that show up in program design, like cognitive overload, present bias, decision paralysis, and framing effects. Used consistently, RICE turns reactive work into strategic action.

Protecting program integrity means more than tightening fraud controls. It also means designing systems that make it easier for claimants to get things right. However, Integrity teams often face long lists of potential fixes, and it’s not always obvious what to tackle first. That’s where RICE comes in. It focuses on the changes that can prevent the most errors, help the most people, and require a reasonable lift.

This is especially useful when balancing cross-functional work. For example, a team might be debating whether to prioritize simplifying the certification interface, redesigning the overpayment notice, or offering training on error-prone documentation. Each option has merit. RICE allows you to choose a solution based on value.

When the Hawaii Department of Labor and Industrial Relations needed to revise 350+ claimant-facing documents using plain language and behavioral insights, they didn’t try to fix everything at once. They used the RICE tool created by NASWA Behavioral Insights, customized for UI communications, to figure out which letters would reach the most people, create the most clarity, and be feasible to update quickly. To learn more about Hawaii’s efforts, read Simply Put: Communicating Clearly in Plain Language.

UI integrity isn’t just a matter of rules; it’s about how those rules are communicated, understood, and followed. Using the RICE framework helps state teams invest in the changes that make it easier to get things right the first time, improving program integrity and public perception.