Every Monday at our design review, someone opens Figma and scrolls. And scrolls. Twenty frames, six alternate flows, a stray Miro embed, three sticky notes with question marks. By frame nine, nobody remembers what the proposal is for.
We made a rule. Three frames. That is the budget.
Why three frames
Three frames force a story: state, action, result. You cannot fake that shape. If you cannot show the current state, the moment of change, and the outcome inside three frames, the idea is not ready. It might be interesting, but it is not buildable yet.
We use the rule for anything that lands in our Linear “Ready for eng” column. Before a ticket moves out of Design, the linked Figma file needs:
- Frame 1: the state the user is in when this matters
- Frame 2: the action or decision point
- Frame 3: what changes, what breaks, what they see next
Three frames is not a rule about fidelity. Lo-fi wireframes count. Screenshots with red boxes count. Three annotated hand drawings count. The constraint is narrative, not craft.
What the rule caught
The first month we tried this, our design lead pulled six proposals back to discovery. One of them was a payments refactor that had ninety-two frames and no clear before or after. When she asked the designer to pick three, he could not. The empty state was fine. The success state was fine. The middle was a fog of edge cases and dependency guesses. That fog was the real work, and it was invisible under all the surface polish.
Now, when a designer says they cannot get under three frames, we treat it as a signal, not a failure. It tends to mean one of these:
- The problem is two problems glued together, and we should split the ticket
- The team has not agreed on which user is being served
- We are drawing solutions before we have named the decision
When we break it
We break the rule for onboarding flows, migration paths, and anything with a compliance step that legal needs to review verbatim. Those are storyboards, not proposals. The distinction matters. A storyboard documents a sequence. A proposal argues for a change. Three frames is for the arguing.
We keep the frame counter in the corner of every design review agenda. Nobody enforces it. It sits there, and the room reads it.