My favorite frameworks

User psychology, decision making, and problem solving

Jacob Rushfinn

Mar 12, 2024

Hey there, it’s Jacob at Retention.Blog 👋

I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.

Every Tuesday I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.

This is a different type of post than normal.

I want to talk about my favorite frameworks I use in everyday work.

Some are for decision-making, some are user psychology, and some are for problem-solving.

We don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so if we come across tools that work, we should save and reuse them.

Let’s dive in.

I thought about saving the best for last, but screw that, here’s my favorite:

The Pysch’d Framework by Darius Contractor

And here is a video of him discussing it

The Psych’d framework is a tool for conversion rate optimization of landing pages or onboarding flows.

It serves to quantify the positive and negative UI elements that lead or don’t lead to a conversion.

How people feel when trying a new product for the first time isn’t usually easy to quantify, but if you break down each element, you can start to figure out the positive and negative sections to try to assign a score.

Add those scores up and you can start to understand the effectiveness of a landing page.

User psychology can get complicated, but it doesn’t need to be with Psych’d.

Psych’d can help us come up with ideas for what to change, how do we prioritize those ideas?

RICE Prioritization

Reach
Impact
Confidence
Effort

I’ll add all the ideas I brainstormed into a spreadsheet and then evaluate them using RICE. Do a first pass yourself, but get someone else to review and validate so you don’t miss anything.

Reach: How many people will see this new thing?

Is it a change in onboarding so all new users will see it?
Is it an update to feature only power users try, so very few people will see it?

Impact: Is it a big change or a small change? If it works, how much would it improve conversion?

Is it a one-word copy change?
Is it a large redesign of a user flow?
Is it an entirely new payment option?

Confidence: What’s the likelihood this thing will be successful?

Have you seen this work somewhere else in your product or a similar product?
Is it a proven tactic all of your competitors are using?
Do users complain about this in reviews or customer support?

Effort: What level of resources does it need? (time, money, people)

For product changes, it’s often asking your engineering team to provide an estimate
For marketing changes, it can be how long will the copy take? Do we need Design? Does it have an engineering component?

Image from Intercom

Still hungry and want some extra RICE? Check out Lenny’s DRICE - Detailed RICE framework($) from Alexey Komissarouk, and guess who, Darius Contractor.

What’s next?

Ever heard of Dwight D. Eisenhower? He’s most famous for his urgent vs important framework… I think he may have also been a president and led the Allied Forces to victory in WW2 or something.

Eisenhower Urgent vs Important Matrix

This one is a classic and pretty self-explanatory.

It was originally a time management tactic. But success in growth and product is based on correct prioritization, which is essentially time management. But instead of managing your own time, you’re managing the time of a larger team.

1 = Urgent and Important

2 = Important, but not urgent

3 = Urgent, but not important

4 = Not urgent and not important

You can easily evaluate your product priorities with this matrix as well. As a marketer or PM, there will be many requests of you, and there is no way for you to do all of them.

Image from Eisenhower.me

I don’t know if this next one is technically a framework, but I love it nonetheless.

Elena Verna’s Conversion Rate Decline Diagnostic

This was originally published as a Reforge Artifact, but I think this flowchart should be turned into a framework.

Ever had a conversion rate decline and you didn’t know where to start?

Now you have a plan!

Start with checking the data quality
Is it a significant trend?
Is it seasonality?
Did you have a big release recently?
Did something change with customer acquisition?
Did the channel mix change?
Is it limited to certain user segments?

Elena is a wealth of knowledge and with 100k followers on LinkedIn, that probably isn’t news to you :)

What are your favorite frameworks? I’d love to add more to my knowledge bank. Let me know.

📣 Want to help support and spread the word?

Go to my LinkedIn here and like, comment, or share my post.

Share this newsletter by clicking here.