Welcome to Now Prototype It

Now Prototype It is a low-code, high fidelity prototype kit powered by your design system.

Key Features

• Open Source: The prototype kit is fully open source under an MIT License.
• Plugin Framework: Our plugin framework allows you to customise your designers' prototypes to your organisation's needs.
• Browser-Based: Once installed, users can create and manage prototypes without leaving their browser.
• Hosting Platform: We offer an affordable prototype hosting solution that deploys from a user's prototype, allowing designers to easily and securely share links for user research or team collaboration.

Technical Highlights

• Thread Management: The kit runs across multiple threads communicating over IPC.
• Environmentally Friendly: Prototypes hosted with us shut down after a short time of inactivity, they start up within 1.5 seconds for a smooth user experience.
• Plugin Framework: Add CSS, JS, Nunjucks components, and more through plugins.
• Self-Updating Webapp: Update the kit and plugins from within the browser.
• Open System: Anyone can create a plugin for, or variant of the kit to meet their needs.

Get started

We are working on offering a fully code-free process, but in at this early stage you can download the prototype kit in the Terminal.

You need Node 18+ to run Now Prototype It. If you don't have it installed, you can find instructions here: https://nodejs.org/en/learn/getting-started/how-to-install-nodejs

Once you've installed Node, you can create a new prototype with the following command, replacing "the-name-of-your-prototype" with whatever you want to name your prototype:

npx nowprototypeit create the-name-of-your-prototype

This will create a new prototype in a new folder with whatever name you provide. You can then run the prototype with:

npm run dev

Using a variant?

Variants are a great way of sharing an initial prototype setup, variants can provide files, configuration and install
plugins to get you off to a quick start. Anyone can create a variant, but here's one that we made for GOV.UK users (don't forget to replace "the-name-of-your-prototype" with the name you want your prototype to have):

npx nowprototypeit create --variant=@nowprototypeit/govuk-frontend-adaptor the-name-of-your-prototype

This will come pre-installed with various helpful plugins from GOV.UK and more to discover in the management pages.

Need help?

Feel free to reach out to us at support@nowprototype.it if you have any
questions, want to book a demo or need help getting started.