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What are the principles of prototyping?

A poster titled 'A prototype' with the titles of the 9 principles described in this post. The background of the image is teal and the poster is GOV.UK blue with white text and teal accents to highlight significant words.

What are the principles of prototyping?

An evolving set of prototyping principles to help people use prototypes to learn and improve their products or services. These principles were contributed to by people across government during Services Week 2026.

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Start page discovery

Posted by: Guy Moorhouse, Posted on: 14 November 2013 - Categories: Experimental

Over the last couple of sprints on mainstream, Amy and I have been looking into transaction start pages to try to get a handle on the direction we need to take them in. We thought it’d be useful to share …

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Transaction status messages

Posted by: Guy Moorhouse, Posted on: 14 November 2013 - Categories: Experimental

Some exploration from a while back into how we might notify users of upcoming and current downtime for a given service.

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Exploring validation messages

Posted by: Amy Whitney, Posted on: 14 November 2013 - Categories: Likely to change

This is a recent pattern we’ve started using on GOV.UK Mainstream for error messages when the user hasn’t entered their details correctly, or at all. Errors are first grouped at the top of the page in a summary and then …

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We believe working in the open makes things better. This blog is for people designing all aspects of public services, from local to central government, to share their projects, ideas and concepts, or just to think out loud.

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