How to approach creating design alternatives in a sustainable way
The rule of 3 in design isn’t feasible anymore, unless you do this
“Why not do something like this?” a PM said, showing his badly drawn sketch of an alternative design.
In that moment, I realized I hadn’t conveyed why I’d chosen my alternative designs in the first place. That’s one place where many designers struggle silently.
Many designers don’t present just one solution — they present multiple. Design agencies often follow the rule of three for exactly this reason. The idea of giving stakeholders a choice and embracing options sounds good.
But designers nowadays don’t have time to give equal thought to 3 design solutions.
So here’s what happens: designers might think strategically about their preferred option. They’ll ground it in research, connect it to user behavior, and articulate the business impact.
Then, they’ll come up with alternatives, which are afterthoughts created to give stakeholders “options” rather than genuine strategic approaches.
And in an age where AI can generate design options instantly, that’s becoming a critical vulnerability.
When Your Designs Look Like AI Outputs
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: if you present three design options as “different sketches of what we could do” without explaining the reasoning behind each one, stakeholders might treat them the same as AI-generated designs.
Think about it from their perspective:
“These are some designs AI came up with”
“These are some designs our designer came up with”
Without context, both sets appear identical—just different visual treatments.
The result? Businesses push designers to work faster and faster, constantly churning out work because they don’t understand the rationale or strategic thinking behind each choice.
That’s why it’s essential to ground all of your design options, not just your favored one, in strategic thinking.
“Articulate why you think it’s the right thing to do — or why it’s not. That’s the critical skill for designers navigating muddy waters.” — Head of Design, startup
Establishing common ground around the problem itself has never been more critical.
The Problem IS the Solution to Your Problems
One of the best ways design solutions can stand out is by making the problem immediately obvious and solvable.
Here’s a common scenario: You’re asked to redesign the checkout page. You create mockups, run some user testing, and present three options.
But you’ve skipped something crucial — why were you asked to redesign checkout in the first place?
Usually, there’s a concrete problem:
Users are abandoning checkout at high rates
The current system is too slow
It’s outdated and likely costing revenue
That, in turn, forms the anchor for your solutions.
Start with a Problem Statement Centered Around User Behavior
One of the challenges many designers face is determining which problems they can actually fix.
Think about the examples I listed above:
Is the current system too slow? That might be an Engineering problem, not a UX problem.
Is it outdated and costing revenue? This could be UX or Brand/Marketing.
But “Users are abandoning checkout at high rates?” That’s squarely within the purview of a UX solution.
Even if you don’t have perfect data, framing the problem explicitly establishes that there IS a problem to solve.
This is what design agencies do through design briefs: they capture the problem in as much detail as possible before working on a solution.
In your work, you’ve probably identified that “Users abandon checkout at high rates” because:
We don’t offer defaults for form fields
They accidentally click back to the home page because our logo looks like the next button
We ask way too much information from first-time users
The business may be aware of the abandonment rate, but not why users do what they do.
Starting with a statement like:
“Users are [abandoning checkout] because [we don’t offer defaults for form fields], which has a [strong impact on checkout abandonment rate]”
Builds your problem statement effectively. More importantly, it provides grounding not just for your preferred design option, but for all your potential design solutions.
Frame Each Design as a Different Approach to Behavior Change
At the heart of design work is behavior change. We hope that, with a design change, users will behave differently in the real world.
If we reduce checkout issues from four out of five users to just one user experiencing minor problems in testing, we expect that improvement to scale to our five million customers.
This is where your alternatives gain weight. Instead of presenting them as visual variations, frame them as different strategic approaches to changing problematic user behavior.
For example, imagine this problem:
Users must re-enter all information, including information they’ve already entered, because we don’t save any data. This causes people to give up because it’s taking too long.
Now your three solutions aren’t just “Accordions” vs. “Copy paste” vs. “Cutting fields.”
They are three different strategic approaches to reducing user friction and abandonment:
Option 1: Saves user information progressively as they complete each field (Accordion approach)
Option 2: Pre-fills previous information and allows one-click overrides (Copy-paste approach)
Option 3: Breaks the process into requiring fewer fields (Field-reduction approach)
Each option addresses the same problematic behavior but takes a different strategic approach.
This gives stakeholders meaningful choice while demonstrating that you’ve thought deeply about the problem and what’s in your wheelhouse to fix.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
“To get a product out, it takes a village. And designers aren’t the only people in that village. You need to articulate your design decisions effectively to non-designers — to leadership, engineering, sales, marketing, and product folks. You have to convince everyone across the board why your decision works the way it works.” — Design Consultant
With AI capable of generating infinite design variations, the differentiator isn’t your ability to create options. It’s your ability to:
Identify the real problem through research and data
Connect solutions to specific behavioral changes you want to see
Present alternatives as distinct strategic approaches, each with different tradeoffs
Prioritize options based on user needs and business constraints
When you’re not just offering visual variants, but actual alternatives anchored to a clear problem and desired behavior change, your design work carries weight that AI-generated options can’t match.
After all, you’re not creating art with your designs — you’re solving problems.
If your design options are treated as throwaway variations, ensure each one is tied back to a user behavior change and explains the strategic rationale.
Often, that’s exactly what businesses need to hear about design solutions.
Kai Wong is a Design Educator and author of the Data and Design Newsletter. He helps designers gain confidence in their portfolio and presentations by teaching the value of their work.