The decision asked comes first

Claim: a design document opens with the decision it asks of the reviewer, before the motivation.

• Grade: convention, untested (a hypothesis to test).
• Evidence: design-decisions baseline, the candidate variant; position.
• Check: design-docs (exact): the first labelled part after the title is the Decision asked.
• Reader styles: none particular to this genre yet; the reader-ergonomics styles hold.

What it asks

• Under the title, one sentence: what the reviewer must decide, and by when.
• Then the status, then a summary of a few lines, then the motivation.

Why

• A reviewer reads with a question; stating it first is the overview first principle applied to a proposal.
• The proposal templates compared share motivation, design and alternatives; none puts the decision asked first, which is why this is a hypothesis and not a finding.

Limits

• No experiment was found in which reviewers judged a proposal in two forms.
• Go proposals were declined most often for feasibility, use cases and principles, not for their form (Kondo 2025): the form may matter less than the content.