Perception-First Design
People decide in 50 milliseconds. Now your design process can too.
Everyone has an opinion about design. They use these products
daily, so the opinion feels earned. But opinions aren't
diagnosis. This is.
A 5-layer diagnostic framework grounded in cognitive
psychology. Tells you which perceptual layer is failing, in what
order to fix it, and why the fix works. Before anyone touches a
pixel.
~100 peer-reviewed citations. 15 years applied. Open framework.
Created by Stefan Kovalik / Aurochs
What Changes When You Have This
The stakeholder says make the logo bigger. The VP doesn't like
blue. The founder's wife thinks the hero needs a video.
The designer is either pushing pixels to someone else's vision
or burning half their time persuading stakeholders why a bad
instinct is bad. The person on the other end of the screen, how
they actually perceive and decide in 50 milliseconds, is nowhere
in the conversation.
PFD changes the conversation from opinions to diagnosis.
You look at a page and you see the layers. Not the colors, not
the layout, not the copy. The perceptual gates between a human
and a decision.
The hero is fine but L0 is broken: too many competing elements
burning working memory before visitors reach the headline. L2 is
leaking trust through inconsistent spacing the viewer's nervous
system notices before the designer does.
You stop guessing. You fix L0 first because Lavie (1995) proved
that lower-level processing demands eliminate higher-level
processing capacity. Then L1. Then L2.
Each fix compounds upward through the stack, toward the thing
every decision actually runs on: pre-verbal arousal. The
viewer's nervous system fires before their analytical mind
engages. They feel the outcome before they evaluate the offer.
Damasio (1994) showed the body generating emotional signals that
bias decisions before conscious deliberation. LeDoux (1996)
mapped the pathway: 12ms emotional response, 200-300ms conscious
evaluation. The feeling arrives first. Always.
Design becomes a lens of empathy to solve with, not a set of
business objects to align with the user. The stakeholder can
still disagree, but now they're disagreeing with cognitive
psychology instead of someone's taste.
The Ralph Loop
LLMs miss things. Not sometimes. Every time. A single pass
through any problem is probabilistically incomplete, the same
way a 3D renderer's first pass produces a noisy image. The
fix is the same too: run it again. Each pass catches what the
last one missed.
The Ralph Loop
applies this to PFD. Run a design, plan, pitch, or system
through the 5 layers. Loop until exit conditions fire and
completion signals hold up under evaluation. Brute force
repetition against your own instructions, compounding toward
an asymptote.
Round 1 catches the obvious layer violations. Round 2 catches
what only surfaces after the obvious ones are fixed. By round
3, the conversation isn't about opinions. It's about which
perceptual layer the remaining issues live on and what the
science says to do about them.
Match depth to stakes. Quick design decision: 1 pass. Feature
spec: 5. Landing page or pitch deck: 10. Systems architecture
or deep research: 50. I've run 100+ on things that needed it.
Each pass costs more and returns less, so you stop when
confidence stops climbing.
The Five Layers
Fix bottom-up. Upstream failures block everything downstream.
| Layer | Gate | What Breaks If It Fails |
|---|
| Cognitive Load (L0) | Working memory: 3-5 chunks | Visitor leaves before processing anything. Bandwidth consumed by noise. |
| First Impression (L1) | 50ms visual verdict | Attention never activates. Everything downstream multiplies by zero. |
| Processing Fluency (L2) | Easy to process = feels true | Trust erodes subconsciously. The visitor can't explain why they don't believe you. |
| Perception Bias (L3) | Users autopilot, rationalize after | You're designing for what users SAY instead of what they DO. The gap is where conversions die. |
| Decision Architecture (L4) | Structure shapes choice | The trail is broken. Interested visitors can't find the path to action. |
Full framework (700+ lines, ~100 citations):
framework/PERCEPTION-FIRST-DESIGN.md
Try It
For Practitioners
Clone the repo. Read the framework. The five layers are a
diagnostic instrument: walk any design, email, pitch, or
onboarding flow through them bottom-up. You'll see what's
broken and why, grounded in the same prediction error logic the
brain runs on.
git clone https://github.com/skovalik/perception-first-design.git
In Claude Code
