Why we are reinvesting in the NHS prototype kit

Prototyping is central to delivering good products, platforms, and services. The process enables teams to gain robust insight from users, iterate design work quickly, and reliably deliver value to users. Done well, a design and development process rooted in iterative prototyping saves time and money by reducing the risk that we deliver the wrong thing.

There are many tools available to design services, from paper prototypes to visual design drawing software like Figma, Sketch and Illustrator. Each has its benefits and drawbacks. Each can be useful in specific contexts. However, we are choosing to reinvest in the NHS prototype kit as the primary tool for the development of interactive prototypes that can be tested with users.

The prototype kit has some big advantages over visual layout tools:

• the prototypes will behave like the real thing, as they use the same components from the NHS design system as production services and will run in a regular web browser
• it can be tested with people that use assistive technology, including screen readers, voice control and screen magnification
• it’s free and open source with no licence fees to pay, and can be used with other free common tools like Git and GitHub for collaboration
• it allows designers to understand the medium of the web, and its benefits and constraints, in greater depth

For some designers, changing how they work from using visual tools like Figma to designing directly in code can be quite daunting.

To make this transition easier, over the past year we've been looking at ways to make the NHS prototype kit easier to learn and use.

We have refreshed and updated the website, with a new guide for installing the kit and a step by step tutorial for learning the basics. We’ve also added guidance on how to use the kit with GitHub Codespaces, which lets you run the kit in the cloud without the need to install any software.

We’ve improved the kit itself by fixing some longstanding bugs, adding a new ‘reset data’ feature, and updating the page templates.

To support our designers in learning how to use the NHS prototype kit, we are developing a new training course which will start in September 2025. If you work for the NHS and are interested, please get in touch.